Turns out even the NUS has been hacking away at funding for poor students, in their case focusing on methods that have the greatest impact: cutting maintenance grants and raising the interest rate on loans. All to maintain political appearances.
This highlights a fundamental problem with fighting against fees in preference of graduate taxes. Campaigning on the basis of labels rather than substance leads to inferior proposals. In the desire to avoid talking about “fees”, people resort to more damaging tactics under the waterline, out of sight. I think the most valuable thing about tuition fees is that it brings things out in the open.
Maybe increasing fees so that they actually pay the costs of tuition will cause inter-generational warfare. Good. Because really, the alternative is that we keep the kind of arrangements in place we’ve had for the last few decades. Are the Lib Dems, out of power for 70 years or so, really trying to maintain the status quo?
Do students of today think that in the coming years, middle aged bureaucrats will be better able than people their age of predicting the future? Do the collective aspirations of our brightest youths take second place to the statistical calculations of the state? Does a teenager brought up in a media saturated world really want to retreat to the elitist academic attitude of the 80s and before, which sidelined those who wanted to learn how to record music or make films?
I hope the collective answer of upcoming generations is, “No, we’ll be independent and pay the tuition fees. But as long as everyone’s paying for the benefits they enjoy, we’ve got a few tweaks we’d like to make to Capital Gains, and property taxes, and inheritance tax, and tax loopholes, and infrastructure investment, and democratic processes, and transparency in government, and …”
This whole debate has missed the point. Not all young people either need to go to University or would benefit from so doing. The expansion over the last decade is neither sustainable, desirable or necessary.World renowned nursing colleges, maritime colleges,teacher training colleges have expanded away from their specialisation & excellence & become counterfeit universities to the benefit of virtually no one. The Lib Dems were daft to sign their stupid pledge but, despite the pain of tearing it up, it was the right thing to do & the proposed policy is a better offering than anyone else has come up with.