It’s time to end Tory uniphobia

Before the exams meltdown, universities were losing both friends and influence on the Tory benches. They were deemed to be on the ‘wrong’ side of the referendum and then enemy combatants in a low-level culture war. The ministerial message to young people was shifting from the sensible ‘you don’t have to do a degree’ to the openly discouraging ‘too many go to university’. The high watermark of uni-phobia perhaps came last month when cabinet ministers denounced Tony Blair’s target of 50 per cent of children going to university and warned that any institution finding itself in financial difficulties would be ‘restructured’. To say our universities feel unloved by this government is an understatement.

But the furore over the botched exam results has shown that most people are still very keen on universities. MPs have been besieged by thousands of families worried about their children’s future and enraged by grade downgrades and missed university offers. Are ministers really going to respond by telling kids (other people’s obviously) to take short vocational courses instead? Does any MP seriously relish the failure of a university in his patch? I doubt it.

Perhaps the best policy of the coalition era was the abolition of student number controls. Dismantling this ‘cap on aspiration’ was a flagship Cameroonian policy that modernisers rightly predicted would enable tens of thousands more young people from under-represented groups to access higher education. Today, students from disadvantaged backgrounds are more than 50 per cent more likely to attend the most selective institutions than a decade ago. This is what happens when there are more places: universities can enrol bright kids from Sunderland without turning away lavishly educated ones in Surrey.

There has been plenty of focus on the fees universities charge.