Higher Education: To fee or not to fee, that is not the question

Since the publication of the Dearing Report in 1997, much of the debate around Higher Education has focused on whether tuition fees should form part of the funding for the sector or if taxation should cover the full costs of education.

For those opposed to fees, the whole country benefits economically, socially and culturally by providing young people with a university education. For those in favour, raising the aditional funding universities needed to compete globally from general taxation appeared to unfair, given that the majority of taxpayers did not have a degree and those with a degree stood to earn more over a lifetime.

Twenty-five years after their introduction, and depite the nature of graduate employment changing significantly in the meantime, debates around fees seem to continue to focus on whether they should exist at all, with Labour regularly being pressed on the issue. When the party appeared to commit to reversing all student loans in 2017, it subsequently had to water the wording down to an aspiration when the sheer cost of what was involved became apparent.

What is almost always missed is that if the goal is to make education more affordable without bankrupting universities, achieving that balance is unlikely to be found on one end of opinion but somewhere in the middle.

I have long been a fan of John Denham’s work and not just because he was one of my MPs whilst I was at the University of Southampton. He was one of the party’s most independent thinkers during his time in office and was regularly making contributions to debates outside of established party positions or raising issues which had been entirley ignored.

As a former Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, he understood the issues around Higher Education funding in detail and in 2014 he have a talk to the Royal Society of Arts explaining how within the current funding you could greatly reduce the level of fees, while supporting poorer students, and providing universities with greater funding for research and training. I was going to go through the way this was achieved in detail, but why not let the man do it in his own words.

To be clear, the precise model presented in this talk is now unlikely to be achievable–even when I had the chance to discuss it with him two years after the talk it required a lot of revision–changes to the rules around student loans, increasing global competition in Higher Education, funding pressures on universities, and the state of public finances all pose far greater challenges to finding after 13 years of Conservative Government than they did after four.

The point here though is that while doing away with fees entirely has an appeal to it, the realities of both the public finances and the financial state of Higher Education currently makes that option very challenging. Yet, that doesn’t have to mean just accepting the system as it is. Other options for improving Higher Education do exist, you just have to be open to them.