Theresa May dithers on university funding

PRIME MINISTER Theresa May has admitted that there is a problem with funding higher education in the UK. She has decisively announced that she is going to think about it for a year or so and wonder what to do.

The present funding system doesn’t make anyone happy.

•Universities don’t like it because tuition fees don’t bring them in sufficient revenue to teach undergraduates, while competition for scarce research resources skews academic research towards issues which are profitable in the short term.

•Undergraduates don’t like it because all but the richest have to take out loans to pay the tuition fees, which leaves them in debt when they graduate and start looking for work. Paying off the debt (added to high private rents) makes it hard for them to save up to buy a home. Students are forced to take part-time work to make ends meet: the extra demand for this kind of work forces down wages and makes it harder for mothers to find part-time work to fit around child care.

•Taxpayers may find the system of undergraduates paying their own way superficially attractive, but if the system makes the economy stagnate, taxpayers will soon go off it.

So desperate is Theresa May to keep taxes down that she has refused to look at more public investment in higher education – preferring to look at ways of making degrees cheaper in order to keep the costs easier for students to pay. Options her Funding Review is likely to consider include cramming three years learning into two years and channelling some undergraduates away from university study and into job-specific training.

This is potentially bad news more generally. Internationally, governments agreed years ago to dismantle the public sector and place services such as energy, telecommunications, transport, health and education in private hands. That process has been underway in the UK for many years, and is now beginning in education.

The argument is being made that higher education benefits the individual who receives it more than it benefits society as a whole, so the individual must pay. As Theresa May said when she launched her review, students “who benefit directly from higher education should contribute directly towards the cost of it.”

The counter argument is that if graduates go on to higher paid jobs, they will also go on to pay more tax – but that collectivisation of funding higher education is an argument the Tories’ review will want to avoid.

Shifting the funding of higher education from the public purse to the individual could be just the start. Who benefits from staying on post-16? The individual student does – so why don’t we make a modest charge to them for sixth form education?

Theresa May has already cut funding to primary and secondary schools. As the consequences of those cuts emerge, there will be calls to find new ways bringing additional funding into schools. Perhaps next year Theresa May will be saying that children, “who benefit directly from being able to read, write and do sums should contribute directly towards the cost of learning to do so.”

•Read more about it:
Students: better off with Labour
Row breaks out over student funding

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