Top-Up Fees Flop
The Greenaway-Haynes Report, published during the long vacation, promised that top up fees would be the answer to the university's problem of underfunding. Apparently our univerities would undergo a magical transformation if allowed to charge 'what the market will bear" for our education.
Undoubtedly, our universities do need more money; the UK now spends less than half of the OECD average on higher education. The report argues that students should pay extra because we're the ones who will benefit financially from our education.
However, the introduction of tuition fees, coupled with the abolition of the grant, led to a fall of 11.4% amongst mature students and 5.9% amongst students from "unskilled" backgrounds applying to university in 1998. Differential fees will hardly improve this situation.
The report's proposal to combat the inevitable drop in poorer applicants is to rely on a sudden outbreak of campus philanthropy. The US model is held up as the one to which we should aspire, with financial aid being given through a combination of outright grants, loans and jobs on campus.
Yet the report's authors fail to recognise that this system is not workable in the UK, as British universities' endowment funds are only a fraction the size of those at found in the US. Whereas Harvard has endoments of over £13bn, the only way students over here could pay their top up fees would be through massive extra loans.
According to the report, the 'market' is seen as the answer to all our problems, yet its introduction to the railways and the NHS has hardly been an unqualified success. The ability to charge top up fees might allow our "Ivy League" universities to obtain extra funding and provide a superior education to that at present, but would selection really be on the basis of academic merit rather than, by default, ability to pay?
Furthermore, the proposals fail to take into account those institutions which are not part of the prestigious "Russell group". Could we see some courses, which currently fill a significant number of places through clearing, forced by the market to charge lower fees than at present, thus suffering from even worse problems of underfunding? Institutions would no doubt be forced to respond to student demand to a greater extent than at present, squeezing some courses to the point of non-viablity by the market.
The justification of top up fees is rooted in the view of students as a homogenous middle class; school leavers with middle class parents who will walk into well-paid jobs.
Indeed, a system which delivers the funds needed for our universities to compete internationally, allows for the increased variety of courses, and genuinely helps to widen access and choice will require a more imaginative approach than this.
19th Oct 2000