The universities minister,David Willetts, has refused to withdraw his claim that most universities will charge more than £6,000 a year only in exceptional circumstances, as cabinet ministers privately admitted the plans were in serious disarray.
Ministers are now looking at cutting student numbers to offset the higher than expected cost of loans to the Treasury from a higher average fee.
Even modest institutions look like they'll be charging £9,000 a year tuition fees now that is allowed in law.
Willetts said he didn't see this coming, but that's just another example of his failure to engage even one of his supposed two brains. When it's apparent there are more students than places in the UK university system - a situation created not by demand for education but because having a degree is now used as a basic filter for entry into many jobs, whether or not degree level education is a pre-requisite for undertaking the resulting tasks on which the person will be engaged - this outcome was inevitable.
Two things follow. First it shows that Willetts does not undertsand the demand for education - which is a classic Giffin good because of this perverse incentive to buy it, whatever the price.
Second, note what it says in the second para of the Guardian article quoted. The government is going to have restrict demand for places because the loans it is going to have to create to finance loans of £9,000 a year are too great in value: the cost of education has not risen but the cost of creating the financial services products that are to be used to fund that education are now too great. But those financial services products are the main reason for this change; that and restricting access to jobs.
The government wants people to be in debt. People who are in debt don't riot, they think. People who are in debt are slaves to the wage system. They do what they're told. That's the real reason for student debt. It's a financial services product intended to be sold as securitised debt, for which the 'market' has unlimited need, but which achieves the social goal of ensuring those without wealth are kept firmly in place.
And it restricts access at the same time: I suspect that's a goal too. That opens the way to two things. First it opens the way to privatisation of universities - and second it lends support to the demand for lower tax - because it will be claimed tax can't supply an essential education so it has failed and so must be cut. Blow those whose lives are messed around in the meantime.
This is nasty social engineering to create financial products that enslave people and at the same time ensure the failure of universality to benefit the creation of a market which will always deliver a second rate product.
This suits the 1%. But I'm not sure the 99% will put up with it for long.
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http://news.aol.co.uk/uk-news/story/coalition-under-fire-on-economy/1706154/
Lets hope the 99% don’t put up with it, personal debt is a bad thing for the economy, the government and the person, however the government is passing the whole burden of a big gash right through the middle of the capitalist world and passing it almost directly onto the people at bottom.
The problems are never fixed just slapped with a plaster and passed round the board.
Pretty much anyone who works in the university sector has known that charging the £6000 would be the exception, not the other way around, Richard. In fact shortly after the level of cuts to the teaching grant was annouced I was told by a reliable source that £7500 was the break even baseline at ‘new’ universities if standards and student numbers were to be maintained (it would by definition therefore be higher at pre 1992 unis). Consequently as we were at the same time being told that we had to improve the “student experience” by doing more face to face teaching, seminars, and such like (i.e. contact time) then fees above £7500 had to be on the cards.
Finally, “increasing access/participation” policies have been in place across the HE sector for years (though more vigorously implemented in some institutions than in others) so that was never going to be a deal breaker when it came to charging £9000.
All of this Willetts and his department could have learned in a few short conversation. But then again perhaps they knew this and what we are really witnessing is what you capture so well in you final paragraph. Well said!