Comment: University will become the preserve of the elite
With the government’s decision to raise the cap for tuition fees to £9,000, access to higher education will become a financial leap of faith for poorer students.
By David Lammy MP
Wednesday was an incredibly important day for higher education in this country. In a little more than 10 minutes, universities minister, David Willetts, completely revolutionised the experience of Higher Education in this country.
Despite years of consensus that higher education ought to be funded by its three primary beneficiaries – graduates, employers and wider society – the government now plan to effectively end the state subsidy of many degrees, leaving them to be entirely financed by the individual. The result: student fees trebling to as high as £9,000 per annum.
There are obviously wider questions surrounding the equity of the individual shouldering such a burden when the state and employers benefit so much from an educated workforce, as well as more party political questions that surround the Liberal Democrats and broken pledges. These, however, are for other times and other debates.
My main concern when I was a minister was widening participation and extending opportunity to under-privileged young people. In government raising access and ambition was nothing short of a moral crusade – by the end of 2009, we were spending £580m per annum on bursaries, scholarships, summer schools and information days for underprivileged 14-18 year olds.
Our investment paid dividends: since 2004/05, participation amongst the poorest 20% of the country increased by 32%, compared to just a 4% rise amongst the richest 20%. The number of university places taken up by ethnic minority students increased from 13% in 1994/95 to 23% in 2008/09 – a figure that in line with their size in the young population. In inner city constituencies like mine in Tottenham, we saw the number of young people entering undergraduate courses more than double over 10 years.
Our policies raised aspiration among people who had never before been touched by university. Schemes like AimHigher broke cycles of poverty and under-achievement that had lasted, in some families, for generations. Access was widened not by chance, but because we wanted it to happen.
That is not to say that access to higher education is now equitable. There remain huge concerns that certain areas of the sector, particularly the more research intensive end, are still dominated by a privileged few.
The Sutton Trust estimates that there are 3,000 ‘missing’ state school students from the 12 most selective universities each year. These are students that received the required grades but ended up, through poverty of ambition or application, elsewhere. 45% of Oxbridge entrants in 2007 and 2008 came from just 200 schools, the other 55% came from the 3,600 other providers of post-16 education.
The growth of ethnic minority participation has been impressive, but remarkably absent from the most selective institutions: there are more Black students in London Metropolitan University than in all 20 Russell Group Universities put together. Most shocking of all, only 1 black-Caribbean student was admitted to the whole of Oxford University in 2009.
Labour have to be honest and admit that however successful the schemes and initiatives to drive up access and participation, they did not match the scale of our ambitions. In circumspect we relied too much on the good will of individual universities when in fact it is the government that has to step up and take responsibility for something so essential to social justice and fairness.
As a consequence of yesterday, the entire widening participation programme is thrown out of kilter. By raising fees to £9,000, the government has raised the stakes that the poorest and most under-privileged students must gamble when they take the leap of faith by going to university. How will trebling fees encourage the sons and daughters of nurses, social workers and dinner ladies to achieve what their parents never had a chance to?
Worse still, by introducing variable fees, the government has made it inevitable that some of the most capable students from the poorest families will make choices based on cost rather than academic talent. Are we really comfortable with a system where students turn down Oxford University for Oxford Brookes in order to be in less debt?
The coalition hides behind toothless access agreements made by Universities in order to receive extra funding and nebulous, unexplained concepts such as the National Scholarship Scheme as ways to improve access, but have yet to publish the mechanics on how this will work.
In Wednesday’s Westminster Hall debate (attended in good numbers by Labour and Conservative MPs but with not a single Liberal Democrat in sight), I pressed the coalition on their commitments to access schemes like AimHigher that reach out to 30,000 under-privileged teenagers a year. None could be given. It looks and feels like many other coalition policies: numbers were crunched, money seemingly saved, policies were announced but no thought was given to the repercussions.
If these plans for higher education succeed, and they are likely to with the votes of many Liberal Democrats, then it will challenge the very nature of higher education as a force for social change and upward mobility. Higher education will become the preserve of the elite that can afford it and make that financial leap of faith. In this government’s hands, higher education is not about raising ambition, but consolidating privilege.
David Lammy is the Labour Member of Parliament for Tottenham and former minister for innovation, universities and skills in Gordon Brown’s government.
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