Two thousand protestors marked the first anniversary of the 9 November 2010 student riots yesterday in London. Unlike the infantile violence of one year ago, this event passed by largely without incident.
Scotland Yard has said that the total number of arrests amounted to twenty-four, mostly for breaches of the peace, and one for possession of an offensive weapon.
There were approximately double the number of police officers than protestors. The Met was well prepared, with some four thousand officers on duty, efficiently corralling the march as it wound its way slowly from Bloomsbury to the City.
The students are right to complain about the government’s trebling of the tuition fee cap to £9,000. The overall package is an improvement on the previous system, with better terms for poorer students, but that does not make it a good policy.
£9,000 is too high a price for many young people to pay, even if they don’t have to begin repaying it until their salary hits £21,000 and even then on reasonable repayment terms.
But £9,000 is also too low a price for some young people to pay. There will be a significant minority of students whose willingness and ability to pay are sufficient to match higher tuition costs.
The better thing for the government to have done would have been to accept Lord Browne’s original recommendation to remove the cap on tuition fees and allow universities to set fees however they liked, accompanied by stringent access requirements. Instead, dull-headed complaints about fairness were heeded. The Liberal Democrats, already bitterly regretting their pre-election pledge waving behaviour, insisted on this fudged solution ahead of genuine fairness. It was a most invidious and unthinking act of grievance, inflicted on an entire generation.
There are many things about US universities that I would not want to import to the UK. However, consider this: at Harvard, only 5% of students pay the full rate of tuition fees, which, including accommodation and extras, can be as high as $50,000 per year. The average annual fee paid by a Harvard student is approximately $12,000. If your household income is less than $60,000, you pay nothing at all.
Harvard can subsidise poorer students because it extracts maximum willingness to pay from richer students. It can do so to such an extent because of an endowment fund that no UK university apart from Oxford or Cambridge could match, but UK universities would not be required to go to such an extent.
It is vital that the correct information, advice and guidance (IAG in the HE jargon) are available for young people making decisions about university. What holds people back is not the fee itself but the lack of awareness about financial support. A lot of support currently on offer goes unclaimed. Students also need to consider the ‘value’ of education more, which means asking searching questions about factors such as future employability and teaching hours.
If that information is freely available and understood, then it should be obvious that the higher the headline fee, the better the package is for the poorest students. Until people can comprehend that simple fact, the debate will get nowhere. The UK’s universities will remain underfunded and students will feel short-changed and excluded.
Instead, the student protestors are being fed a steady diet of stubborn and angry nihilism by the NUS and splinter groups of the creative unemployed.
There were signs last year that the NUS leadership had a grasp of the reality of the situation, whatever they were saying in public. An opportunity presented itself to accept the coalition government’s fair and improved tuition fee regime and work constructively with ministers to guarantee important policies such as better access, better support and better information.
That opportunity passed and, sensing weakness at the NUS, a handful of resourceful attention seekers, such as the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, filled the vacuum.
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