Mandelson's flawed tuition fee proposals

Pat

Presumably we need to widen access to university so that we can have an educated body of indebted unemployed. We are fast approaching the time when those who leave school straight into a job will have greater lifetime earnings than those that go into university. Time to market test the value of education- no good doing a study, the academics will slant it.

C Powell

Education should NEVER be used for social engineering. People should be educated for its own sake and be given the skills, knowledge, enthusiasm, ability to learn and desire to keep learning throughout their lives which will enable them to do whatever they want, regardless of what some pontificating little twit of a minister thinks or says.

It has been the left's (but by no means only theirs) obsession with using education to achieve something else (equality / social mobility / skills for business etc) which has proved so catastrophic to education in this country.

And as for universities, they should be free of government control. Let them decide who to admit on the basis of their ability and aptitude (not where they went to school or what their parents did or any other irrelevant rubbish) and let them have enough of an endowment to ensure needs-blind admission policies. If this means that we have fewer but better universities and get rid of the third-rate colleges offering fourth-rate degrees so much the better.

"Set the people free". Maybe that could be the guiding principle of the next government.

David V Jones

Isn't there a logical flaw here? The government's argument was that anyone with a degree has a much greater potential earning power. Therefore it doesn't make any difference what the social origin of the student is; all students will pay off their debts from their subsequent earnings and are therefore in exactly the same position (assuming, that is, that the government is right - which I don't accept).

David Ossitt

"I'm not prepared and the government is not prepared to see an increase in fees and funding for the universities"

So there you have it; the primping, preening, non-elected Lord Highest in the land is admitting that he and the government are not prepared.

What he meant but could not say; was that he will not allow it, nor will he let Gordon and the government allow it, because he is in charge.

I have always been of the opinion that having something to look-forward to, is one of lifes greatest pleasures, I am almost ecstatic with the anticipation of him getting his just comeupance.

Oscar

These proposals are a model of Mandelson style smoke, mirrors and deceit. A proposal to raise university fees is being wrapped up in the guise of the 'equality' agenda. At the same time, by stealth, the government is actually cutting funds to Universities by more than a billion pounds. This proposal will create student poverty for the vast majority, deter many on middling incomes from getting to University and will not further the already failing and bloated 'participation' agenda. The government already chuck loads of money at schemes like 'Aim Higher' and outreach workers. What do they achieve? Like so many government schemes, the funding just does not deliver results. There is an appalling problem with students not having the literacy skills required for HE level work; the consequence is extra coaching, stress and ever higher drop out rates. What we need is a good education system that delivers results, opportunities for the most talented to get HE, no matter what their background, and solid, reputable courses of high quality for those that get to University. The government has succeeded in delivering more or less the reverse of all these objectives.

Nicholas

"I'm not prepared and the government is not prepared . . . "

Interesting choice of wording for an unelected SoS. Mandelslime puts himself first and then speaks on behalf of the government. He is supposed to govern on behalf of and with the consent of the people, not with some personal mandate based on his own preferences and prejudices. An arrogance displayed by other New Labour henchpersons including Burnham and that other pea in the pod Bradshaw.

They really are detestable.

John Moss

Oh please. Treat these people like the adults they are.

Give every 18 year old a book of vouchers worth £25,000 to use for university fees or training relevant to their job.

Need we do any more?

John Moss

Follow up for clarity:

A book of vouchers worth £25,000 - to be used in the next following five years - ...etc

TrevorsDen

It would be laughable if it were not so pathetic.

As the price for Mandelson keeping him in office (but increasingly not in power) Brown is allowing Lord Rio to run riot with policy all over the government.

After spending 10 years undermining and squabbling with Blair, Brown is now reduced to seeing his own Premiership usurped by the pompous odious unctuous - slimy - Mandelson.

How are the mediocre fallen.

Emil

This "it's only fair that those who can afford it pay a little more" is fine, until the list of things this logic applies to grows by the day..........

I.M.

when are we going to realise that fostering excellence and extending access is mutually exclusive?

Excellence can only be fostered by adopting an academic rigour that is blind to background.

That's not to say that we shouldn't do a great deal better in the education of all of our children, but why should our Universities be dragged down to meet the failure of our comprehensive education system, simply because our politicians haven't got the balls to admit they've failed?

Jeremy

'tis a pity. 'tis more than a pity...'tis a tragedy.

I suppose the Animal Farm slogan for Labour's entire approach to education would be "Illiteracy for All" - and when the "All" can no longer spell the word "Illiteracy" they will know their work has been done.

So well done to Lord Mandelson - for taking us a few steps further down to that...End.

Pete Hoskin

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Dirty Euro

I dissagree everyone should pay the same fees. With government providing the fees. The wealthy will pay via taxation. If you get rid of everyone paying the same fees, then wealthy students might start insulting poor students for their fees.
It destroys the payment system.

Fergus Pickering

The 'traditional university experience' is so much bollocks. A university is not a finishing school for the middle classes. Traditinally Scottish university were stuffed with poor students living at home and LEARNING - learning is what universities are traditionally about. What this government has done is - out of their silly shibboleth equality - opened up the universities to everybody, which of course includes the stupid and the idle. Of course the upper class idle and stupid went to Oxbridge anyway; there were plenty of them, among the men anyway, in the Oxbridge of the 60s. The Scots (god fellows) used to weed their students out quite unjmwercifuly at the end of each year, but I'll bet they don't now.

mitch

This unaccountable fool has far to much power for my liking and is probably pulling browns strings.It will all end in tears again because he has a talent for self destruction.

TomTom

So Sandwich Courses were abolished, Technical Colleges disappeared, Polytechnics vanished and now all "Universities" are to become Technical Colleges....quite the NuLabour way to mix everything to a puree in the blender

Pete-s

Clearly we are now into our SECOND unelected PM. Should there not be a formal statement that McDoom as stepped down. Oh! also a GE would be 'the right thing to do'.

FergusMac

Delete everything after "Mandelson's flawed".

EC

"I'm not prepared and the government is not prepared to see....."

Spoken like an EU Commissioner!

oscar

Treversden 'How the mediocre are fallen' - brilliant! It is ever more obvious that Mandelson is top dog and Brown has been reduced to grinning mascot. At least he used to look serious, but now he invariably wears that foolish rictus smile. Oh the ignominy.

Victor, NW Kent

Meanwhile Ed Balls aims for "equal capability for all".

Mandelson went university for free as did Balls, Brown etc etc.

He went to a grammar school and then to Cambridge.

In 1971 he left Labour to become a communist.

He will not allow children a grammar school education nor will he allow them free university education.

Karla

"...but the technical knowledge and expertise required of science and mathematics students means that if they lack the basics they have little hope of success." The key word here is 'success'. If this is defined as 'the acquisition of a piece of paper' (according to which the bearer is a graduate) then ,undoubtedly, the government will make sure a given percentage of entrants will be successful. This, in fact, is the essence of spin. Whether a student is successful, or not, is irrelevant; what matters is that the government can report that he's succesful.

alex

There is an assumption that middle class parents will pay these higher fees: they won't. Their childern will be made to payment them. How is that fair.

Dirty Euro

We should just pay through the taxation system.
Education should be free, Why do Oxbridge need to raise fees? They make it seem like they are doing their students a favour, by increasing their fees, i bet the increased fees will be a nice bonus for the profits. If people people want to go to higher costing universities then why are private universities like Buckingham not opening more places for people who to pay higher fees.
Why is unis charging higher fees good for anyone?

Nicholas

EC: "I'm not prepared and the government is not prepared to see....."

Spoken like an EU Commissioner!

No, spoken like an EU CommissAR!

Verity

How can the writer refer to this sleazy, disgraced, slithering lowlife as "Lord" Mandelson? It's like referring to "Lord" Ahmad. These scuzzballs and all the rest of the appointed dross must be swept out of our second chamber, which should be returned to the hereditaries, which worked. When it was the hereditaries, this chamber was respected throughout the world. Now it's what you'd expect to encounter in Africa.

2trueblue

Mandy is beginning to fall over his ego.....I'm not prepared...'
ho elected him?

David Ossitt

Did you see her being interviewed by Nick Robinson on Newsnight yesterday?

It made me feel soiled and in need of a shower.

George Laird

Dear C Powell

“Education should NEVER be used for social engineering”.

Do you favour the rich middle class continuing the education cartel by chance?

“People should be educated for its own sake and be given the skills, knowledge, enthusiasm, ability to learn and desire to keep learning throughout their lives which will enable them to do whatever they want, regardless of what some pontificating little twit of a minister thinks or says”.

I think the twits are interested in the discrimination in the system that is costing them votes.

“It has been the left's (but by no means only theirs) obsession with using education to achieve something else (equality / social mobility / skills for business etc) which has proved so catastrophic to education in this country”.

Maybe some people are setting right a few wrongs.

“And as for universities, they should be free of government control”.

I disagree completely, the opposite is needed.

“Let them decide who to admit on the basis of their ability and aptitude (not where they went to school or what their parents did or any other irrelevant rubbish) and let them have enough of an endowment to ensure needs-blind admission policies”.

Why not remove completely state funding and charity status?

“If this means that we have fewer but better universities and get rid of the third-rate colleges offering fourth-rate degrees so much the better”.

Hmm sounds a bit snobby, keep the rabble in menial jobs and limit opportunity, very noble concept, few takers I feel.

"Set the people free".

Don’t you mean keep the education unregulated and out of state control so that current practices of discrimination continue?

“Maybe that could be the guiding principle of the next government”.

Access to education sets the people free not those who administer the policies of who gets in.

Finally, social engineering already takes place that is why discrimination is so rampant.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

brian kelly

Universities should be available only to those who have reached or exceeded the required educational level and in that sense should be unremittingly elitist. The education at universities should be raised year on year. At the same time the conservatives must relentlessly strive to raise educational standards, teaching and discipline in our state schools. In 10 years we will start to see the tremendous benefits to our country and young people and which will transform society and the economic prospects for us as a nation.

George Laird

Dear Brian Kelly

“Universities should be available only to those who have reached or exceeded the required educational level and in that sense should be unremittingly elitist”.

What a load of rubbish you spout.

“The education at universities should be raised year on year”.

This is generalised pap, previously in universities you didn’t need to have a teaching qualification to teach your subject.

“At the same time the conservatives must relentlessly strive to raise educational standards, teaching and discipline in our state schools”.

Actually schools should be teaching people how to think.

“In 10 years we will start to see the tremendous benefits to our country and young people and which will transform society and the economic prospects for us as a nation”.

Isn’t that what has been happening since 1167 AD in Britain?

Or are you so deluded that you think Scots Tory Michael Gove can turn the universe around over night?

Finally, you aren’t one of the elite are you?

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

Verity

2trueblue - Quite. Dismissed twice from the governance of Britain for slippery financial malfeasance. I mean, that's a lot! Not once in disgrace, but came back to disgrace himself a second time!

And it was OK! A magical new world where honour means nothing!

And is now leading the (unelected) British Prime Minister through the nose.

Is there a foul smell around here?

Yet, inexplicably, now a plastic lord, like "Lord" Ahmed, who threatened the joke Home Secretary with sending round 10,000 of the Muslim "boys" to the House of Lords ... that kind of nobility ...

When we get a real Conservative in, and David Cameron's down the Swanee, or at least the Rhine or whatever their rivers are called over there, we need to start afresh.

An independent, which we have always given blood for, Britain and the ability to cleave to the Anglosphere. Which Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Peter Mandelson, Jackie Smith, Ed "So What?" Balls, Harriet Harridan put their soft little shoulders to the wheel to destroy.

Our future is the strong Anglosphere and an alliance with China.

brian kelly

Dear George Laird. So I am to understand that you believe that all is 'tickety boo' with our system of education and all that needs to be done is... nothing. Well, I strongly disagree with you. And to reply to your sneering and patronising remarks I am a semi retired pensioner who has spent his whole working life as an engineer in the industrial sector and am very far indeed from being one of the ‘elite’. I have the greatest respect for learning and education both academic and vocational but have the utmost contempt for much of what passes for them in these latter years – and extremely saddened at the effects it is having on our country.

George Laird

Dear Brian Kelly

"So I am to understand that you believe that all is 'tickety boo' with our system of education and all that needs to be done is... nothing".

No; I didn't say that but your ideas are not viable.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

brian kelly

Dear George Laird - I wonder why you think they are not viable?

brian kelly

Dear George Laird. Furthermore I do hope that with your human rights cap on your thoughts and energies occasionally turn towards the hundreds of thousands of unemployable teenagers who are being churned out by our education system: so many in fact that this govt feels it needs immigration to compensate. It is an absolute disgrace and an economic and social disaster. All these lives absolutely blighted. It is a scandal.