I’m rarely idealistic but allow me for a second to impart unto you one truism that I shall always hold dear; that education is the most powerful weapon we have in our fight to better ourselves.
If you listened closely whilst eating your cornflakes on Tuesday morning you could probably have heard the champagne corks popping in Oxbridge as the details of the Browne Review finally emerged. Both Oxford and Cambridge have long extolled the benefits of allowing universities to charge higher fees for undergraduate degrees and it is with open arms that both the institutions, and no doubt countless others, will welcome the latest government commissioned review into the sector’s funding.
The government, hardly averse to cutting public services, will no doubt also welcome the findings, happily accepting increased student contributions as a green light to decrease higher education spending. It’s important here however to separate what may happen to the higher education sector from the deficit reducing cuts this country is experiencing; these moves are not budget balancing knee jerks but an ideological shift on the government’s part to move the responsibility of paying for education from the state to the student and is a shift that, when considering my opening gambit, I wholly disagree with.
An abundance of rumours had circulated in the build up to the release of the report with most sources estimating a fee between £7,000 and £10,000 as the recommended upper limit for a year’s worth of undergraduate education. Browne’s suggestions, however, go even further and allow for fees upwards of £12,000 per annum although they do include stipulations that a percentage of any tuition fee charged over £6000 is given to the state in lieu of increased lending to students.
Hypothetically a basic 3 year undergraduate degree could saddle a student with £36,000 worth of debt, an astronomical amount of money to ask a 17 year old to commit to burdening himself/herself with. This is before we factor in maintenance loans and any personal debt the students may incur during their studies which could easily add on another £10,000.
Bearing in mind that since top-up fees were introduced in 2006 there has been no quantifiable evidence that the students paying these extra fees have received any form of vastly improved experience during their time at university, the decision to move the onus to pay from the state to the student becomes increasingly clear. Vince Cable’s statement to the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon that “the government is going to invest in higher education” is, quite bluntly, not true and is a complete falsification of the direction in which the Browne Review seeks to send the sector.
Telling also of the way Browne would see our higher education sector function was one particular passage of the review, namely the heavy handed notion that funding should be pulled almost entirely from “less economically important” subjects. Whilst not alluding directly to ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’ its not difficult to extrapolate from the report that Browne sees arts and humanities as serving a less important role in the country and as such evolving to become a privately funded pursuit. A dangerous vision for the future indeed.
Thankfully the recommendations protect the guarantee that education should be free at the point of entry; Browne’s model continues to provide students with loans covering the whole cost of any tuition fees incurred. Welcome also is the proposed increase from £15,000 to £21,000 as the earning threshold for paying back one’s student loan.
I’d add to this that I’m proud to live in a country where, in practical financial terms, higher education tuition fees cost nothing up front but we can go further; these ‘deal-sweeteners’ do nothing to address the deterrent effect that a high cost education has upon people from lower socio-economic backgrounds wishing to learn.
It’s much easier to take the decision to take on thousands of pounds worth of debt if your parents have the capital to bail you out if all goes wrong or if you have the savings to pay your fees up front in the first place. Education should always, without exception, be afforded to those with the ability to learn and never denied on the lack of an ability to pay.
Until the government can produce quantitative data that opportunities for students from poorer backgrounds are in no way jeopardised by increased tuition fees, the Browne review should not even be considered. It is morally unjust to play fast and loose with the futures of our youth especially when based almost solely upon an assumption that a loan will placate any financial anxieties a student may have.
In these choppy economic times I have often found myself advocating investments over cuts but I find no example more suited to this ethos than the future of our education system. Increased debts and inaccessible courses are not the way to encourage learning and advancement and as such are not the way to creating a highly educated, working economy. To these ends, the Browne review should be rejected at all costs.
