December 06, 2003
Facing Defeat
It may surprise my American readers, but up until recently, the British Government paid for undergraduate university education. Students used to receive a grant to live (albeit to live like students, sustained with beans on toast) and it was unthinkable that they would pay anything for the education itself.
Then the number of students attending university and other budgetary concerns made the busary untenable. The Government went from paying students to live to loaning students money to live. These loans were to be paid back without interest when the graduate was making above a threshold salary and then on a graduated scale. Thus began the first step down the slippery slope.
The Government began charging tution fees, but only to families that had a threshold income. Even married students are assessed fees based upon their parents' income for the first two years of marriage. After all, since so many more students were going to university, somebody has to pay for it.
Now that the Government wants 50% of the population to go through higher education by 2010, and has lowered the entrance requirements to get them in, there is even less money to go around. At the top of the Government's agenda in this new Parliament is the introduction of top-up fees on top of tuition fees. These will be up to £3,000 a year. Of course loans will be available, so everyone will be able to go. They will just come out of university with enormous debt. Sounds like America, doesn't it?
Tony Blair is facing defeat in the House of Commons. The opposition to top-up fees in his own party is so strong that many of them are not only planning to vote against the PM, they don't care if his authority is so undermined that he has to resign. For Blair it could be a situation worse than the opposition to the war in Iraq. He shouldn't be surprised since the 2001 Labour Party Election Manifesto (that the official party platform) specifically said there would be no top-up fees that that the Party had always been opposed to them. There is also the hypocrisy of Blair and his Cabinet getting paid to go to top universities and then denying the following generation the same opportunity.
Tony's Labour colleagues like the idea of everyone getting a university education -- they just want the taxpayer to fund it. But that's where the fundamental flaw is. The creation of a nation of university graduates is not going to result in a nation of higher paying jobs. The same jobs, with the same wages, will be there on the other side.
Well, not all of the same jobs. There will be an even greater shortage of skilled tradesmen, such as plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, and the like. Uni grads in psychology and media studies can't fix boilers, but they can flip burgers and get fries with that.