Creative Commons licensed photograph courtesy of Flickr user jgraham.

Even after eleven years, there’s still something a bit shocking about tuition fees. If the vice-chancellors get their way, fees will rise to at least £5000 per student per year. It’s a policy that flaunts its pragmatism on its sleeve. I still think fees defy any principled justification. If you think HE deserves state funding, fund it properly. If you think it doesn’t deserve state funding, don’t fund it. But funding HE most of the way, then extorting the rest from the people attending the courses? There’s just something absurd about the whole thing. I want to tap David Lammy on the shoulder and whisper: “Psst! Stop it! Be rational!”

But the consequences of abolishing tuition fees would be unpleasant too. Either the total amount of state funding for undergraduate courses would have to increase, or the total number of funded undergraduate courses would have to decrease. Most people are quite happy to bite one bullet or the other. I’m not so sure. Take the first route, and I can guess where the money would come from. It would be taken out of the research pot. Academia in areas without demonstrable practical utility would end up more atrophied than it is already. Take the second route and Oxbridge would get by fine, but the dream of giving at least half the population a higher education would be dead.

Filed under: barackobama, education, jonathanbirch, labour, religion, ukpolitics on March 17th, 2009