University Funding
by michael
Disclaimer: I’m Oxbridge and Public School. Yeh.
As a current university student I haven’t liked a lot of what I’ve seen during the higher education funding debate/FUD-spreading/mud-slinging . First there was all of the stuff before the inevitable fee rise. That was never not going to happen but regardless, the campaign by students unions seemed to throw caution to the wind and sell it as meaning people from disadvantaged backgrounds wouldn’t be able to go to University. We are their peers and so if that is what we are telling them they are a damn sight more likely to listen than to the Government. It was never the case that this would be the result – the loan is pretty generous, the poorest students would get better non-repayable grants, and the repayment threshold was going up. That combined with the total debt being a little more than a single years average Grad salary makes it a decent investment in your future. I would have far preferred the line of my representatives to be letting people know that regardless of the headlines this means that nobody with the will, drive and ability to go to the best universities will be prevented from doing so by circumstance.
This ties in with the stuff on suggested race discrimination by Cameron and David Lammy but I am not going into that. It is messy and I don’t know enough. I think that Stephen Bush‘s interview in the Guardian covered that really well and anyone that hasn’t seen it should. (As an aside on that, I never understood why Hanna Thomas talks about ‘supervisions’ in a direct quote about Oxford. We call them Tutorials; Cambridge call them Supervisions. Maybe not relevant but seemed odd at the time)
Today I saw things like ‘Richest students to pay for extra places at Britain’s best unversities’ cropping up on facebook and twitter. Honestly, my first reaction was a combination of a horrified groan and disbelief at the idea, and that was the right one. To the headline and the article. It’s completely baseless. Of the 868 words of it, Willetts quotation makes up less than one-eighth. He is quoted as saying:
There are various important issues that need to be addressed around off-quota places, but I start from the view that an increase in the total number of higher education places could aid social mobility.
There would need to be arrangements to make sure any such system was fair and worked in the interests of students as well as institutions. But it is not clear what the benefit is of the current rules, which, for example, limit the ability of charities or social enterprises to sponsor students.
We are inviting ideas on the whole concept and we will listen very carefully to all the responses we receive.
Now granted, it doesn’t explicitly say that people aren’t allowed personally to pay for a place off-quota, but it doesn’t say it either. In fact it specifically says that it is businesses and charities that would be paying for the students’ education. The idea is obviously one designed to expand the schemes such as the ones KPMG are pioneering whereby people leave university not with debt, but having been paid a salary, with a recognised qualification, and a term of employment waiting for them. Considering the extensive requirements for diversity placed on these companies this could hardly lead to a discrimination. Nor do I really envisage a system akin to a tax-avoidance scheme funneling money through schools and charities to get this done. Hell, put a limit on the charities side of things to say that they can only do it for people that would otherwise qualify for full fee support and bursary.
Really this idea seems like it is very early days, but has the makings of something good. We have issues with university funding and we heard lots about how increased fees were going to put off people from poorer backgrounds. In an ideal world this would have been dealt with during the fees debate to ensure that these misconceptions weren’t prevalent. However, given they seem to be, this could be one way of addressing some of this. Not too long ago (I can’t find the link but will keep looking) I read of a charity that was taking kids from backgrounds that meant that they tended to have no experience of University, and were the perfect candidates to be put off, and then gave them encouragement and advice, along with some interview practice, etc. to make sure that they were in a good position to apply to places like the university I am lucky enough (but also worked hard) to attend. They were getting people in. Now combine this with benefactors that want to help relieve the fee burden and then we start to get somewhere.
There is no simple quick solution to how we fund higher education, but there is a simple fact that we have huge demand for education and little money to speak of. I would prefer a multi-pronged approach where the problem is tackled from several angles and artificial constraints are not placed on how many people universities can take. If it were to mean that universities started overfilling lecture theatres (more than they already do), or using grad students to teach (more than they already do), or any other of the myriad ways that more people could lead to a lower quality education, or indeed that suddenly if you had money then you were in, then I would be whole-heartedly 100% against this. Frankly, that is not what Willetts put on the table. He is quite clear about this in Hansard. Scepticism and firm guidance to make sure of a good result is excellent, but cheap politicking with a potentially good move is just daft.
Update 1: Edited 2011-05-11:1058 To include charity link to Guardian