Andrew Adonis is right (I put up tuition fees. It’s now clear they have to be scrapped, 8 July) that the current fee regime cannot survive, but he understates the success of the £3k fee which he devised and which Charles Clarke introduced after the 2003 election. As the first director of Fair Access, appointed to ensure that no student was disadvantaged by these arrangements, I can testify that moderate fees, with maintenance grants for the less-well-off, was a widely accepted system, with rapidly rising access from disadvantaged groups, and an independent income stream for universities.
But Adonis is unfair in attributing to vice-chancellors the decision to raise fees to £9k. This was a political diktat, devised and imposed within a few weeks by ideologues within the Conservative party. Ministers were clearly told how universities would behave when presented with a fee regime which would in effect label their courses first, second or third class by price. To be fair to both David Willetts and to vice-chancellors, the choice was between the scheme on offer or massive cuts. Since then, a series of decisions by Conservative ministers have made matters worse, especially the abandonment of the categorical promise that tuition fee debt would never increase in real terms. The current regime certainly has to go.
But we need to revisit something like the Adonis/Clarke scheme rather than totally abolishing fees. Abolition will inevitably lead to a cap on student numbers and thus to fewer poorer students entering universities. We know that’s true. I urge the Labour leadership just to look at Scotland before they decide to replace one kind of unfairness with another.
Martin Harris
Former director, Office for Fair Access
• Lord Adonis asked: “How did we get from the idea of a reasonable contribution to the cost of university tuition – the principle of the Blair reform of 2004, for which I was largely responsible – to today’s Frankenstein’s monster of £50,000-plus debts for graduates on modest salaries who can’t remotely afford to pay back these sums while starting families?” Those of us who remember the introduction of fees will also remember the warnings issued about all courses costing the maximum amount and the original fee level being the thin end of the wedge with rises inevitable.
The one encouraging thing we can take from Adonis’s rather bizarre attempt to absolve himself of blame for the mess we find ourselves in is that a key architect of the original system has recognised that the game is up. Ever since the Liberal Democrats’ disastrous U-turn on a promise to scrap fees, all parties have been happy to keep quiet on the issue of university funding. The election focused people’s minds back on the issue and the time has surely come for a proper debate about how we fairly fund our universities in the future.
Sally Hunt
General secretary, University and College Union
• If anything, Andrew Adonis understated the problems of university tuition fees by largely ignoring the risk to public finances. The Student Loan Company (SLC) has declared that the current outstanding student loan debt relating to English higher education is £89bn, an increase of £13bn on 2015/16. Loan interest of £1.7bn was almost as high as loan repayments at £2bn. In two years’ time, the cumulative debt will comfortably exceed annual NHS spending in England. Yet as the government clings to the magic thinking that it will be repaid, the figures are not included as part of the deficit.
The government is creating a huge debt timebomb. Universities must be properly funded, as they generate far greater economic and social value than they cost. There is an argument that students benefitting from the lifetime earnings premium a degree brings should pay something above normal taxation. But the current system now lacks balance and any tenuous link to financial sustainability.
Inevitably, there is also a Brexit dimension. The SLC states that loan debt due from EU students is currently £1.7bn, with only £11m repaid in the last year. What chance recovering a substantial portion of this debt after we leave the EU?
Malcolm Ace
Burley, Hampshire
• The initial mistake in introducing fees for university students was to make them the same for every institution. It is fanciful to think that we have over 160 universities which are all equally centres of academic excellence. We need a premier league (Ivy in USA), a champions league and no more. Those 100 or so eliminated from these two divisions should become metropolitan or county universities charged with education from 16-80, embracing all of the further education sector. They should also have oversight of their local secondary schools.
Derek Wyatt (former MP)
London
• Those of us who opposed the introduction of tuition fees from the outset will be pleased to see it back on the agenda. Scrapping them would obviously have an immediate financial benefit to students but other damaging consequences may take longer to address. Regarding the student as a fee-paying customer to be competed for is a category error. The “customer” is “always right”, but students are not always right: sometimes they have to be encouraged to work harder, to put it mildly. And the thought of losing £27,000 if a non-performing student is failed is difficult to disregard.
League tables used as student recruitment devices and which include the proportion of firsts and 2:1s awarded have had predictable consequences. The idea that the prime purpose of a university education is to gain financial advantage in the job market has an affect on the curriculum and undervalues pursuits unlikely to lead to great financial reward. To entice more customers we have seen an explosion of building projects of doubtful usefulness in terms of teaching and research. The growth in administration, both in numbers and in salaries, to support the sales function and manage academic staff to meet competitive criteria, rather than support them in their professional responsibilities for teaching and research, sucks resource from the prime function.
The notion that the personal financial rewards from a university education should be, in part, paid back is in any case met by the fact that the higher paid pay more tax. The economic and social arguments for scrapping tuition fees are strong and let us hope they win the day, but the collateral damage may take longer to repair.
Professor Emeritus Norman Gowar
London
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