Sunday 20 February 2011

Will students desert £9000 per year universities?

That's what the Oxbridge-educated Minister for Universities thinks - as though there will be a market, and that 18-year-olds are rational consumers in this ideal market.

Wrong. Firstly, every university will have to charge very near the maximum just to replace the 80% cut in the teaching grant (so students will pay triple what their older siblings paid for a slightly worse education). Secondly, if there's a range of fees, hard-nosed consumers will ask what's wrong with the discounted ones. Who wants to be the Aldi of Education?

(Willetts wrote The Pinch: How The Baby Boomers Stole Their Children's Future, a book about how his generation snaffled the good housing, free education, top pensions, healthcare, benefits etc. and denied the same to the current generation. Then he voted for benefit cuts, pension cuts, pay cuts, mass redundancies, tuition fees, EMA abolition, NHS cuts and on and on and on. Who says the Tories have no sense of irony?).

1 comment:

Neil80 said...

Yep, I wondered the same about Willets and his book!

I think there will be lots of problems with the 9k fees. The first being that students will demand a lot more for the increased amount they are expected to spend, yet there won't be much more to pay for improvements to facilities.