The real reason why the Government abandoned their plan to cut university tuition fees

The story emerging that the Government has abandoned its intentions to cut student fees (to £7500 a year https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/plan-shelved-to-cut-tuition-fees-good-university-guide-2020-vlnfv2cl9) does give a boost to Labour and the Greens in their promises to end student fees, but it also ushers in a load of nonsense about the alleged 'poor value' of university education.

We live in a captialist consumer society where few people turn a hair at the conspicuous consumption that captivates society, yet the right wing press cannot stop spluttering with rage at the thought that some students get the opportunity to study subjects which they don't deem economically or philosophically worthy.

Yet the reality is that far from university education being overvalued it is grossly under-valued, even on market never mind philosophical criteria. People may rail at the spectacle of the not-so-trendy universities charging the full rate of student fees, but meanwhile the top earners get a tremendous bargain by their children being able to go to the highest ranking universities for little more than £9000 a year.

The really odd thing, if you want to look at things on a market basis, is not that the University of somewhere in the shires charges £9,250 a year but that few seem to realise Oxbridge, Imperial, UCL and others could charge an awful lot more if there was a real market in university fees. Just look at the USA where if you want a place at Harvard you're looking at paying $70,000 a year!

It seems the Government has too much to spend on Brexit preparation plans. This will no doubt include paying for the farm produce tariffs that will accrue once we leave the EU in order to avoid lots of British farmers going bust and blocking up the roads woith theoir tractors in protest if the Government doesn't help them. Hence the Treasury refused to fund a drop in fees - the other option, of course, that of just ctting university income would have achieved an incredible policy outcome if actually implemented. - Chaos on campuses as protests erupted and the threat by leading universities simply to go private and charge their own fee levels - with the result that fees at the highest ranking universities would increase by large amounts, the opposite of what the Government wants.

At the back of this is quite a lot of upper middle class disdain at the thought that universities should be open to people they think shouldn't get in (ie people who don't earn as much as them) - but of course these upper middle class people don't want to pay the higher fees that a really free market in university tuition would generate.

Of course a left of centre Government that wouldn't have to spend all the money involved in ameliorating a hard Brexit could afford to scrap all tuition fees and deliver university education as the public good it should be - for free.


https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/apr/17/oxford-cambridge-universities-private-raise-fees