Think your skint now if your an undergraduate? Well going to university is set to get a lot more expensive if the findings of a survey of the top brass (VC’s) across UK universities is anything to go by. Apparently undergraduate fees will have to rise to £6,000 per year, and as high as £10,000 for some science courses (the current fees are pegged at a maximum of £3,000 per year). Its all set for 2009 when the government will have its big ‘review’, read here price rise!

Why the rise? Well the VC’s argue that fees are still too low, for instance Amercian universities recieve an average of £11,500 per student compared to England’s lowly £7,300. Few would doubt the linkage between the resources available and the quality of graduate produced, but unlike the American system we are unlikely to see a market in higher education just yet. This is because our maximum leviable fee will likely become a flat fee as has happened with the current £3,000 (with the exception of 1 university) your not going to get Harvard prices just yet … unless the top universites decide to go private that is.

Dare we say it but how you choose your university will become ever more important, and that means examining the critical staff/student ratio; Americans have been tuned to this for many years, the British need to catch on!

Here is a quote for you from Baroness Walker, then Minister for Higher Education in the run up to the 2001 election, she said when responding to numerous press speculation at the time “There is absolutely no question of top up fees being introduced in the next parliament, as your story suggested last week [THE] …. if elected, we would continue to rule out top-up fees” (Letter 1/6/2001)

This, if ever proof we’re needed, that you can’t trust them as far as you can kick them! No wonder many people consider our so called right honourables to be a bunch of lying toe-rags with posh sounding titles.

It seems to me that the problem in political life is not, as our MP’s seem to think, that there is too much cynicism about politics these days, rather given their records, that there is not enough!

Down at Oxford, points really do mean prizes, and not the old university either, but the new one! Oxford Brookes university is offering a £2000 per year discount in top up fees to top students with 3 grade A’s at ‘A Level’, making the offer worth a potential £8000 (its available every year, even if its a 4 year course). That adds up to a substantial saving if you can pull off those A grades.

What this demonstrates is the increasing competition among universities for good quality students. And, as with any market how long will it be before other competing institutions make similar announcements? Indeed, you could push this concept further, what about higher fees - above and beyond the current levy - for weaker students?

Hitting students where it hurts really would be an extra incentive to excell prior to entering university, being a bit of a slacker wouldn’t just mean relegation to clearing, it would also mean a larger overdraught - social engineering at its finest?

There’s a debate raging at the moment, and its one sparked by the pre-eminence of the American Ivy league in the international university stakes. MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for those who don’t know) in Cambridge, Boston, is a renowned world leader in science and technology research and teaching. So much so that over here in Europe we are apparently feeling the pinch.

In an attempt to keep up with such lofty institutions there is a proposal by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission to create a ‘European MIT’ in an effort to “act as a pole of attraction for the very best minds, ideas and companies from around the world”.

All this sounds very nice, although the Vice-Chancellors aren’t too impressed by the idea (no surprise there then) citing duplication of existing partnerships in an effort to stave off this latest challenge to their own best interests.

However, the real subtext here is the spending gap between Europe and the US, and Japan (and increasingly China and India) on research and development, namely, you guessed it, were falling behind and the European MIT is one proposed attempt to close the gap.

You see we really do now live in a globalsied world and the competition between nations for those prized foriegn students is ever more keen. Furthermore, if we continue on the present course of reducing the student spend per head here in blightie, we can only ever fall further behind the likes of the Ivy League.

Like it or not but they set the bar regards academic excellence and research endeavour, and we in Europe are trying to keep up!

Simon Jenkins recent article in Timesonline http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3223-2320577.html argues that there is no good reason for universities not to be charging the full fees to all students. Jenkins highlights the numerous virtues of this, namely weeding out the time wasters, increasing the funding to halt university decline, and ending what is in effect a middle class subsidy.

Whilst all this has its merits and indeed imposing full fees may alert the less studious to value their education more than hitherto, there are other down-sides, namely, accelerating the commodification of university education. Anyone faced with repaying between £27,000 - £45,000 on graduation will perhaps be forgiven for single mindedly pursuing those subject areas which provide the greatest advantage and renumeration in the labour market at the expense (and perhaps decline) of other worthy subjects.
Anyone who has spent any time in Aisa for instance can not help but notice that there are few philosophy graduates, or literature, history or arts graduates, rather there are inordinate numbers of buisness and management schools along with the expected focus on hard sciences. Do not the arts, literature and philosophical thinking also benefit society, no more when we leave the office and working routine behind, and allow ourselves to contemplate, think and imagine beyond the constraints of narrow instrumental reason and economic rationality?

I think that universities charging full fees would discourage the malingerers and party people surviving on the bare minimum educational effort, but there would also be some hefty downsides and ultimately one which risked impoverishing not only the HE sector but wider society.