Publications
Time's up: why the Lib Dems should end their opposition to tuition fees
| Author: | Julian Astle |
| Date of Publication: | December 2008 |
The Liberal Democrats stand alone among the three main political parties in the UK in promising to abolish university tuition fees. They do so in the hope that making tuition ‘free’ will draw more students from low income families into the higher education (HE) system.
This superficially attractive proposition ignores two important facts, however.
First, there is no such thing as free tuition – someone, somewhere has to pay, and under the Liberal Democrat plan that ‘someone’ is the taxpayer. And since most taxpayers are non-graduates with relatively low lifetime earnings, the policy involves a significant redistribution of resources from poor to rich.
Second, the abolition of fees will do almost nothing to get more poor students into university as the Liberal Democrats claim. Why? Because the gap between the HE participation rates of rich and poor students was neither created nor worsened by the introduction of tuition fees – indeed research suggests that the gap actually narrowed slightly in the years after fees were introduced in 1998. The real reason students from low income families are not going to university in greater numbers is that too few are achieving the exam results they need to apply. This fact is borne out by a recent study showing that, although the poorest 20 per cent of students are six times less likely to go to university than the richest 20 per cent, there is almost no difference between the participation rates of poor and rich students with the same ‘A’ Level results.
The Liberal Democrat policy on fees is therefore both regressive and ineffective. If the party is serious about widening participation in higher education, it should take most of the £2 billion it would cost to abolish fees at the time of the next election, and use it to raise the attainment levels of deprived school pupils instead. It could begin to do this by increasing its planned investment in the ‘Pupil Premium’ – an innovative system of deprivation funding designed specifically to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged children.