Universities

Tuesday

James Forsyth

The Lib Dems need to get their act together on tuition fees

There have been a huge amount of police out in Westminster today. After being caught off-guard by the student demo a few weeks back, the cops are now leaving nothing to chance.   But if the police have now got their act together, the same cannot be said of the Liberal Democrats. They are currently considering whipping their MPs to abstain on tuition fees despite the fact that the government’s policy is one that has been crafted by a Lib Dem Secretary of State, Vince Cable, and a Tory Minister of State, David Willetts.   If the Lib Dems were to abstain, it would play to the worst stereotypes of

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Dave Spart Returns to the Guardian

Well, perhaps he’s never left. There’s much to enjoy in – and something nostalgic about – this piece by Michael Chessum and Jonathan Moses in today’s Guardian. Apparently “politics as usual has failed” so, naturally, alternative methods must be sought. Now, as it happens, one can understand why students are disappointed by the Liberal Democrats’ flip-flop on university funding. But this is bunk: And mobilise we must. The coalition’s proposals represent a nigh irreversible transformation of higher education, and the commodification of knowledge and learning. Mobilise all you like, comrades. But while there’s an intrinsic value to knowledge and learning they are also, quite evidently commodities. That’s why they have

Wednesday

James Forsyth

A model for coalition policy-making

David Willetts and Vince Cable deserve huge credit for coming up with an impressive agreement on higher education funding that both the Tory and Liberal Democrat leaderships can live with. They have taken the coalition beyond the coalition agreement and shown that it can make sound policy on even the thorniest of political issues. But as important as the agreement is the way that it was hammered out. The discussions were civilised and empirical. There was—in stark contrast to the ‘blue on blue’ debates over defence and welfare—no negative briefings or anything like that. My main quibble with it is whether the £9,000 cap on fees is set too low

Peter Hoskin

The tuition fees compromise

Away from the mid-terms, we have the little issue of tuition fees. David Willetts will today set out the government’s response to the Browne Review, and it’s expected to look something like this: a £9,000 cap on fees, but universities will have to show that they are making extra provisions for poorer students if they charge over £6,000. Students would effectively be loaned the money by the state, and would start paying it back once they earn £21,000 after graduation. It’s certainly a compromise arrangement, constructed with one eye on the Lib Dems and another on the universities. For Clegg’s backbenchers, there’s a rejection of the unlimited fees advocated by

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

The universities strike back

A wander through to p.14 of the Sunday Times delivers one of the most eyecatching political stories (£) of the day. The headline: “Cambridge may go private in fees row”. And the content: that officials at Cambridge Uni are dissatisfied with the findings of the Browne review, which they see as too restrictive. Their issue is with the fees that are imposed by the government should a university charge above £6,000 for a year’s tuition. This, they claim, prevents them from pulling in the kind of Big Bucks that Ivy League institutions have in their bank accounts – and could lead to British universities falling behind. So, why not go

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Winning over the squeezed middle

Politically, one of the key questions about Lord Browne’s suggestion that tuition fees should be raised is how the tribunes of the middle classes react. Will a rise in fees be seen as another burden on those who work hard, play by the rules and are already bearing more than their fair share of the costs of the state? If the argument is to be won, the coalition will have to show that students will now get more out of their university experience. There’ll have to be an emphasis on how these changes will make universities improve the quality of the teaching that they offer. It’ll be worth watching to

Monday

David Blackburn

Making the case for further tuition fees

Ever the opportunist, Ed Miliband recognised that university funding could be the coalition’s first test of resolve. Opposing a tuition fee hike has given him the chance to serenade disgruntled Liberal Democrats and to discard New Labour’s sheen (which so incensed Alan Johnson, the minister who introduced the fee in such difficult circumstances). Miliband is determined to mould the Labour party in his image. Speaking on the Politics Show yesterday (16:20 in), he said that the party, Johnson included, will strive to deliver a graduate tax. After a summer’s procrastination, the government has run out of time. The substance of Lord Browne’s recommendations is in the public domain and it

Friday

Lara Johnsonwheeler

The decline of the Gap Year

When I say that I doubt that I will take a Gap Year, many adults are surprised. “Why”, they say, wide-eyed, “it’s such a wonderful growing experience / important rite of passage / chance to save the world.” Hm. All this may be so, but I am by no means alone in dismissing a year spent abroad. I can see many reasons for this. The first comes from the infamous video “Gap Yah.” Everyone has seen it. My grandmother has seen it. If you haven’t seen it, then you can find it here. In addition to being very funny and easily quotable, it does highlight a significant reason for the

Monday

David Blackburn

David Miliband and the graduate tax

As James Kirkup notes, it looks as if David Miliband supports a graduate tax – only ‘looks’ mind, we can’t be sure. The university funding debate is now captive to ill-defined terms – is what is being proposed a tax, a fee or a contribution? David Miliband is hard enough to comprehend as it is, but is he talking about a graduate contribution or a graduate tax? How would either be assessed? Also, does David Willetts make any more sense?

Thursday

James Groves

The return of traditional subjects

Today’s A-level results once again see the pass rate continuing to rise, in this instance for the 28th year in a row, with 97.6% of entries gaining an E or above, up from 97.5% in 2009. While not wishing to detract from the efforts of students and teachers, unfortunately such a rise has become all too expected, to the point where there would almost have to be a public inquiry if it were not to happen. Nor should the introduction of the A* at A-Level warrant particular attention, except perhaps to say that it serves as a symbol of how far we have allowed grade inflation to go.    

Sunday

Dale Bassett

What you need to know ahead of the Spending Review

This is the second of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. The first, on health, can be found here. What is the budget? Education is the biggest area of government spending after welfare and health, totalling £89 billion in 2010-11. This budget increased by 64 percent in real terms between 1999-00 and 2010-11. Total, per-pupil school spending doubled in real terms over the same period. Where does the money go? Expenditure on schools was £46 billion last year. The vast bulk of school spending goes on people: the average school spends 78 percent of its budget on staff. The byzantine arrangements for school funding mean that

Saturday

James Forsyth

The coalition’s university challenge

The contours of an agreement on how to pay for university education are clearer today after Rachel Sylvester’s interview with David Willetts. Up-front fees look to be on the way out.  Willetts tells Sylvester, ‘It’s very important that it’s signaled very clearly that the money that is paid back comes out of your earnings once you have graduated and are in work.’ It also seems that different courses at different institutions will have different prices. Willetts proclaims that he wants something that ‘links you to your university and the course you did at that university.’   So far, this looks like simply collecting variable fees through the tax system. But the

Thursday

Madsen Pirie

Gaining work experience

Twenty years ago, students typically took low skill “summer jobs” simply to earn money.  Now, most offices and organizations feature youngsters putting in unpaid time for work experience.  It might be a week or two, or even half a year. The practice has its critics.  Union leaders are decidedly edgy about free labour competing for jobs with their members.  There are charges of exploitation and bad treatment.  The caricature has unpaid interns working photocopiers or being sent to collect sandwiches or laundry for management, without gaining any useful hands-on experience. Some critics detect class bias in unpaid work experience, saying that only affluent middle class children can afford to work

Thursday

David Blackburn

Cable manoeuvring on the road to nowhere

Vince Cable has floated a solution to university finance, but he’s also politicking and I wonder what David Willetts, the Higher Education Minister, makes of it. The coalition agreement does not mention a graduate tax. The agreement merely states that the government will wait for the Browne Report into university funding. When in opposition, the Liberal Democrats did not support Browne because he was likely to recommend increasing tuition fees. Cable has pre-empted Browne in partisan spirit. If he can convince the government to adopt a graduate tax, he will have abolished tuition fees, which would do him no end of good with Lib Dem voters. It’s typical Cable: eye-catching,

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Cable’s aspirations

“Aspiration” tends to be a convenient word for politicians, in the sense that any policy that they can’t implement now can be glossed over as something they want to do in future. But, if Vince Cable’s interview with the Times is anything to go by, it could become a troublesome word for the coalition. Speaking about the Lib Dem’s election promise to scrap university tuition fees, Cable says that: “It is an aspiration, but we’re highly constrained financially and we have got to try to work out ways of doing it. I’m not Father Christmas.” But nowhere does the coalition agreement say that scrapping tuition fees is an “aspiration”. Instead,

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Cable begs for protection

Vince Cable is announcing to Metro that “We do not want to make such deep cuts to transport, energy, science research and universities.” Really? According to whom? The science budget, which has shot from £1.3bn to an indefensible £3.7bn, is a prime example of a cost that should not be borne by the taxpayer. Scientists are best left to get on with this themselves, and companies are more than capable of funding research. On energy, again, there are many expensive vanity projects just begging for the axe. Given that Cable is in charge of the universities brief – the most important part of his otherwise non-job – you can expect

Sunday

James Forsyth

Hughes pushes Lib Dems into the mix on tuition fees

The first Sunday of the World Cup is predictably quiet on the political front. But Simon Hughes’ comments this morning about tuition fees are worth noting. Hughes said “So to me the big task is to make sure the moment that Lord Browne publishes his report in the Autumn the Liberal Democrat case is entered into the mix. That we talk to Vince Cable, who’s the minster and my very good friend and colleague, and David Willetts, and we make sure the government understands that there may well be ways of finding the money universities need, and they need it, without penalising students from disadvantaged background. I think that circle

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Closing the gap between state and independent education

I do hope that Oxford will finally be free from government claims of snobbery soon. We learn today that the proportion of state school pupils it admits has fallen from 55.4 percent to 53.9 percent – but, as the university says, this is in line with the (appallingly low) proportion of state school pupils achieving three As. The problem lies with the schools, not the universities, and it helps no one to pretend otherwise. Here’s one figure that you won’t read in the ongoing “Oxford snobbery” story: in 1969, only 38 per cent of Oxford’s places went to privately-educated children. Why? Because the private schools in those days were not

Sunday

Alex Massie

Is Edinburgh University Scotland’s latest disgrace?

Imagine if Durham University were to decide that for courses heavily over-subscribed with qualified applicants it would reserve a small percentage of places for would-be students hailing from within 50 miles* of the university. Would anyone raise an eyebrow? I doubt it. Yet when Edinburgh University adopts precisely this approach – for some of the humanities and, I suspect, medicine – suddenly there are hysterical cries of “racism” and “xenophobia”. Tom Harris MP** [see update]  says this is “shameful” and goes so far as to label the university “an embarrassment to Scotland”. What piffle. It’s not the university that is obsessing about politics or the border here, it’s the likes

Saturday

James Forsyth

Recognising the best

On Thursday night Michael Gove announced that a Conservative government would pay off the student loans of those with good science degrees from quality universities. The move, paid for by cutting out a level of bureaucracy in teacher development, would help address the shortage of science and maths specialist in state schools. It was a smart piece of policy that even Ed Balls didn’t attack. But the Telegraph reports carping amongst various unions that the scheme does not go far enough. The NUT says that, “It is a real mistake to think that they can designate small number of universities as being better than the others.” This quote sums up