Tuition fees - should we charge?

This autumn, we are told, there is going to be the mother and father of all battles within and around the Government on the vexed subject of tuition fees. Most of the public seems against them. Many MPs, me included, have signed a motion in the House of Commons questioning them as a good idea. The Conservatives have said simply that there would be no tuition fees if they were in Government

The problem is with all of this that it seems we know what we are against, abut we are not sure what we are for, or indeed quite what it is that is being proposed in the first place. What is being suggested is that Colleges will be able to charge fees for tuition, up to a maximum of £3000 per year, and well below the actual cost of teaching a student, if they so wish. They do not have to. The cost of the fees will go on the debt a student has after graduating, and will not be paid up front.

The argument against the proposals comes in two forms. The more fundamental of the two is that everyone should get their tuition free. The taxpayer should pay for it. The less fundamental one is that introducing a potential variation in fees charged might introduce elite higher education, which only the better off can afford to attend. The less popular less prestigious universities and colleges will perhaps decide to charge no fees, and a divide will be set up.

My concern is with the second argument rather than the first. We know that Higher Education needs to be properly funded. But we can also see that there are now vastly larger numbers of students in Higher Education than ever there were before. We only need to look at what has happened in Southampton to see the truth of that. When I was a student at Southampton University, there were something like 6000 students in the City overall. Now there are more like 30,000. I think all in all, that is a good development - there is now access to higher education for students and their families in a way that never happened before. If we - say - went back to a grant based regime, and expected the taxpayer to fund all the costs of tuition, the Government - any Government - would only be able to afford it without bankrupting the public purse or radically reducing money for health and pensions by cutting back drastically on student numbers. And then we would be back to a position where only the better off had access to Higher Education. So it is right that we look carefully at how a system of widespread access to higher education can be funded properly.

But of course that wide access needs to mean more than guaranteeing larger numbers of students some kind of higher education. Access to the best universities ought to be equally available to everyone who is able to benefit. Places at Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Southampton or wherever ought to be equally open to all. That is a real concern. We should not knowingly introduce a system that maintains access overall, but restricts access to the best colleges to the people who would always have gone there whether or not number overall had expanded. The debate should not be about what are, frankly, some opportunistic and unrealistic notions about abolishing all fees: it ought to be about fair access to higher education for all – and I for one, hope that whatever system emerges from the present discussions will maintain that principle.

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