Ed Miliband’s announcement committing a future Labour government to cutting university tuition fees by a third is a game changer in this election.
Vice-chancellors will no doubt shout loudly about a funding shortfall. Yet they personally have been cocooned from the great recession, as the inflation busting double-digit pay increases awarded to them over the past decade show. On average, the heads of the UK universities were paid an increase of 5.1 per cent last year. Over 30 higher education institutions saw vice-chancellors’ pay skyrocket by between 10 and 61 per cent in 2013 – a whopping 122 times the current rate of inflation. At least 22 leaders of Britain’s universities are currently paid more than the prime minister’s salary of £142,000.
At the heart of this policy therefore is fairness and inter-generational mobility. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats believe that trebling the cost of tuition without any corresponding improvement in the performance of universities and what they achieve for students is the answer.
It is true that after an initial decline, applications from poorer students have recovered since fees were increased to £9,000. But look at what has happened to youth and graduate unemployment over the same period. Data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency shows that the numbers of graduates in work 3.5 years following graduation in the UK has steadily declined since 2003. The stark fact is that too many young people are presented with the difficult choice of going on the dole or applying to university. We simply cannot divorce the rate of fees people seem prepared to pay from the insecure conditions of the labour market.
The other sad truth is that the promise of the knowledge economy, fuelled by university expansion since the 1980s, is no longer translating into the promise of Britain. That promise, almost unbroken since the end of the second world war, has nearly always resulted in the next generation doing better in terms of improved living standards than previous ones. But as the work of Alan Milburn’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission stated recently: ‘The top universities and the top professions have been dominated by a social elite for decades. In the next five years they have the chance to break from that past.’
Lowering tuition fees to £6,000 will be just the start of a wider debate about what universities are for in the twenty-first century. Of course, we should not discount the wider cultural, civil and democratic role these autonomous institutions play in the fabric of our society. But searching questions do need to be asked about whether a £200bn student loan book, in which over £90bn is expected to be written off, is actually a fair deal for future taxpayers.
Moreover, our country needs to break loose from this snobbish concept that the only ladder of opportunity to social progress and higher pay is via university. Delivering on a new British promise requires the plural – ladders of opportunity – where public resources are used more wisely to subsidise higher quality apprenticeships and business start-ups, for example. Why should universities have a monopoly on public funding to grow the talent pipeline the country will need to power Britain forward in a new global age? Surely, there is more to solving the skills and productivity crisis than expanding traditional degrees.
Labour’s reduction of fees will make university cheaper for everyone. It will reduce the debt burden on future graduates, giving them more money each month to pay for other things, like saving for a house deposit. Above all, this policy will help trigger a wider debate about a number of difficult policy choices that will need to be made by the next government. Speaking some home truths to the occupants of ivory towers is a good start.
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Tom Bewick is chief executive of the International Skills Standards Organisation. He is the author of ‘World class apprenticeships: Are they the answer to the age of stagnation?’, available for free at www.insso.org from 2 March 2015
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For ‘Britain’ read England. I know Labour don’t like the E-word but it’s in England that Labour introduced tuition fees and it’s in England where you’re planning to lower them to £6000.
Imagine another universe in which Labour were promising to reduce fees for Scottish students from £9000 to £6000. The social media graphic would say “A Scottish Labour government will cut tuition fees for Scottish students…” The Scottishness of the policy would be trumpeted, no one would be in any doubt as to its territorial extent.
But Labour just can’t stand to use the word England in case the English start thinking of themselves as a political community; in case the English demand an equal measure of democracy within Britain; in case we turn against the Scottish Labour MPs that imposed these fees on English students in the first place.