The cuts announced on Monday are bad news for Labour’s achievements in widening participation in higher education.
Cutting 10,000 extra places is a false economy, because all it does is create 10,000 extra places in the dole queue. These places were costed, funded and, most importantly, necessary to deal with the huge upsurge in demand for a university place that is currently taking place. It is indicative of this government’s priorities when the excuse for the cut is that they were not “value for money”, yet leaves 10,000 18-year-olds claiming unemployment benefit this summer.
David Lammy MP, shadow minister for higher education
It seems socially and economically self-defeating to slash the number of university places by ten thousand at a time of record demand and a challenging climate for youth employment. Universities and their graduates should be at the heart of the government’s plans for recovery and growth; instead they’re facing the sharp edge of David Laws’s axe. George Osborne claims “we’re all in this together”, but it will be applicants from the most under-represented backgrounds who are left on the scrap heap this autumn.
I doubt this is what many students and lecturers were voting for when they supported the Liberal Democrats in a number of university towns and cities. Liberal Democrat MPs who support this measures should be held to account in seats like Manchester Withington, Leeds North West and Cambridge.
Wes Streeting, president, NUS
The cuts announced today by the treasury are bad news for young people. Slashing the promised additional student numbers will make it even harder for young people to achieve a third-level education, and is likely to hit those from lower-income families hardest. Removing the temporary jobs option from the Young Person’s Guarantee scheme demonstrates the coalition’s lack of commitment to supporting young people struggling to find work in the recession. The government wants to “cut with care”, but it’s obvious that young people are low on their priority list.
Christine Quigley, chair, London Young Labour
Cuts in university places are cuts to aspiration. 10,000 fewer places means 10,000 fewer people who want to go to university having the opportunity to reach their potential. We wouldn’t expect any different from the Tories. But it wasn’t just David Cameron and George Osborne wielding this axe. Nick Clegg and David Laws are their partners in crime.
In Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Manchester, Leeds and Nick Clegg’s very own Sheffield, Liberal Democrat MPs were elected by pledging to stand up for students. Instead, they have helped the Tories slam the door in the faces of thousands of students planning on starting uni this September.
Joseph Sherry, national chair, Labour Students
This is perhaps the most short-sighted of the decisions of the new Coalition Government. The effect of this decision is to put 10,000 people onto the dole directly and even worse, it delays by 1 year at least (depending upon future cuts), the capacity of the country to benefit from the high-level skills these 10,000 students will have gained in approx 3 years time.