Both houses of Parliament have now approved measures that allow the cap on tuition, currently set at ￡3,290, or $5,150, a year, to rise to ￡9,000 starting in 2012, at the same time as central government funding for university teaching in most subjects will be cut 80 percent. There would still be some government support for science, technology, medicine, nursing and “strategically important languages.” Government-funded loans to cover the fees would be available, to be repaid only after students graduate and are earning more than ￡21,000 a year.
But as students return to campuses this week, and with the details of the government’s plans still not due to emerge until next month, the dispute seems far from resolved.
Len McCluskey, the newly elected leader of Unite, Britain’s largest union of private sector workers, said that trade union leaders would meet early in January to discuss a “broad strike movement” to support the students in their opposition to the government’s austerity program. In an article in a British newspaper, Mr. McCluskey said the student protests had “put the trade union movement on the spot,” adding that “students have to know we are on their side.”
Student activists were also predicting a resumption of hostilities. “We have to make sure that these protests don’t just die away like the anti-war marches did,” said Joseph Blake, a freshman at Leeds University who participated in demonstrations there and in London. “It took three years of people shouting in the streets for the government to change its mind about the poll tax,” he said, referring to a shift in the funding of local government under Margaret Thatcher from a property tax to a levy on individual adults. Introduced in 1990, the poll tax was extremely unpopular, prompting widespread unrest and contributing to Mrs. Thatcher’s downfall. Her successor, John Major, reinstated a system of local property taxes in 1993.
Meanwhile, the government has been pressing ahead with changes, with the higher education minister, David Willetts, writing in late December to advise the head of the Higher Education Funding Council that “we have to control public expenditure costs by controlling student numbers.” Last year, nearly 200,000 British students failed to gain admission to a university, and though the government made an additional 10,000 places available in response to the rise in demand for the 2010 and 2011 academic years, Mr. Willetts and the business secretary, Vince Cable, said that after 2011, “the 10,000 extra places will not be repeated.”
The only thing that all sides in this process agree on is that the landscape of British higher education is about to be transformed. For the government, the changes are part of a bold experiment to “lay stress on choice for students” by enabling “universities to respond flexibly to demand,” according to the Willetts-Cable letter. “Institutions which are chosen by students because they offer better quality, responsiveness and value for money should be able to grow if they wish and — if necessary — at the expense of those that perform less well.”
But this reliance on a student-driven market to allocate educational resources requires young people to make choices about their own futures before they are equipped to do so, critics say.
“Even at a time of huge reductions in public spending, the cuts imposed on universities and students” by the government are “particularly disappointing,” said Les Ebdon, vice chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire. The failure to provide for growth in student numbers “is highly unlikely to achieve the government’s objectives of promoting innovation or add to capacity to promote regional or national growth,” he said in a statement.
The government’s decision to shift a greater portion of the cost of education onto students themselves, at the same time it imposes overall cuts on the level of support for university teaching, means that “students who do go under these conditions to study arts subjects will have taken out huge loans for an education inferior to what we’re getting,” said Lucy Vaughan, a student at Goldsmith’s College who took part in the London protests. “They’ll face much larger classes, less contact time with teachers — they just won’t get as good an education. And it will cost them three times as much!”
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