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?

The hard sciences have been going through a bit of a hard time of late, departments have been closing in physics, chemistry and engineering up and down the country like nobodies buisness. Why you ask? Well science subjects are just plain expensive to teach (around £8000 per student) and added to that, demand from students just keeps dropping - a double whamy! Nevertheless, the underlying problem is that the hard sciences just aren’t sexy enough to get the right number of bums on seats.

In response, increasing numbers of universities have been saying they just can’t afford to keep departments open, and in what is now a market system, where money relentlessly follows the student, they seem to have a point.

It doesen’t take a genuis to work out that this trend has dire consequences for the intellectual landscape of the country, after all, we only need so many media and criminology students.

HESA to the rescue, with an extra £1000 per sicence student in 2007. Although this is welcomed by the universities it only addresses one element of the problem, you still need to attract people to hard science. My own university achieves this through a cunning deception, chemistry becomes ‘forensic science’ .. and the students follow in droves. Of course, its still mostly all chemistry, but with a makeover al la CSI .. well you gotta start where students are at right!

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.

The recent report findings from the think-tank Reform make an interesting counterpoint to much of the government’s pronouncements on the benefits of higher education. The ‘iPod generation’ (Insecure, pressurised, over-taxed and debt ridden), are according to Reform, facing a combination of rising debts, higher costs of living and low earnings growth, all leading to the prediction that the average 20-35 year old graduate will face a total tax burden of around 48%!

The report goes on to say that for the Class of 2006 student debts and high taxes will leave recent graduates living on an average of £8,500, and the average student will leave university owing almost £15,000, and graduate debt is up 318% since 2000! All pretty bleak .. not that it seems to have deterred many people from going to university.

Of course these figures are for the average student, and I’m wondering what the best strategy for a prospective undergraduate is in face of this new reality .. ?