As our report More Fees Please? this week recommended, university fees need to rise if we are to protect the quality of the student experience in the future. Anyone who reads a newspaper will know that things are not looking good. Mandelson’s machete has sliced through the higher education budget – and there are rumours of worse cuts to come. Higher fees should never be used to let the Government off the hook on supporting a sector that delivers serious benefits for our economy and society, but graduates should contribute towards the education from which they will profit – and right now those contributions are not even touching the sides.
University heads warn that key subjects will face the axe, and while the Government may talk a good game about the importance of science, these departments are expensive to run and seriously underfunded. Science departments that haven’t scored highly in the all-important research rankings will be particularly vulnerable. That said, arts and humanities dons shouldn’t imagine they are safe. These subjects are clearly low priority for the Government, and some institutions feel that it is easier to ditch arts subjects without damaging your claim to be a serious player. There is little doubt that modern languages will be wedged in the firing line right across the country. Meanwhile, with vice chancellors urgently seeking redundancies, the ratio of staff to students will continue to fall. And of course if domestic fees don’t budge, international students whose fees aren’t capped will increasingly be seen as a lifeline – fundamentally changing the landscape of higher education in the UK.
Yet fees must only rise if students themselves will clearly benefit. For too long universities have focused on research, without thinking hard enough about the experience of their students. And for too long universities have refused to answer the questions that really matter to parents and students, expecting them to choose their course with no clear idea of whether it will lead to a job, what they might earn, how many hours teaching they will receive or how big their classes will be. The culture has to change. Graduates must invest more in their higher education – but so too universities must demonstrate that they are actively investing in students in return.
Anna Fazackerley is Head of Education at Policy Exchange.
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Very well put. Polytechnics and colleges which were doing an excellent job served nobody well by forcing staff into research roles so they could call themselves universities. Perhaps some could assume their former status?
Perhaps another answer to the education crisis would be to bring back leaving school at 14 as an option for kids who aren’t academically minded, and woould like to learn skills in a workplace setting – in the process earning money, at an age when they wouldn’t have families to support, mortgages to pay, etc.
University tuition fees are a regressive tax on middle-class under 35′s. They have been used to support a largely worthless expansion of higher education which has done little to make the UK a highly skilled nation and has saddled younger people with huge debts. Babyboomer politicians meanwhile continue to cash in on high house prices and final salary pensions, having already reaped the benefits of grammar schools and free university education.