Bridget Phillipson’s latest humiliation is good news for Britain

University College, London
University College, London

At last! A Labour u-turn which might materially benefit our economy, rather than just accelerate our descent into perma-stagnation and mass impoverishment. The Government has announced it will raise the tuition fees cap and let them increase with inflation to just over £9,500 next autumn.

It’s been delicious to watch the fallout: Bridget Phillipson, Labour’s class warrior-in-chief, was flailing in the chamber on Tuesday as she defended her party’s 74th volte-face since October. “There are no easy options,” the education secretary dutifully recited, and she probably meant it. After all, just last year Phillipson vowed to overhaul the graduate repayment system to give young people “breathing space at the start of their working lives”. Now, she’s increasing fees by nearly £300 a year.

Labour’s plan is imperfect, and hardly represents a total rejection of Tony Blair’s calamitous expansion of higher education. If anything, they should go much further, as an increase this small risks sustaining failing institutions on life support – some 40 per cent are expected to run deficits this year – when we ought to let them die. And there’s the small matter of student loans, many of which are expected to be written off with the embattled taxpayer once again left footing the bill. One for David Goldstone’s in-tray, perhaps, as he assumes his role as Chair of Labour’s newly-established “Office for Value for Money”.

Ultimately, the level of fees is a secondary issue. The bigger problem is that we lack a functioning market in higher education. If fees were set freely, we would see competition and differentiation. It would be more costly to study Medicine or Engineering at Imperial than Drama or Geography (reportedly the two degrees offering the worst value for money for students) at some second-rate institution. And it would allow universities to hike costs for STEM degrees, perhaps reducing the cohorts they churn out with certificates in Tourism Management.

But something must bring this racket to an end. To promise young people prestige and a pay packet that may never arrive, in exchange for almost £30,000 and three years of their lives, is morally repugnant. Well over a third of university-educated workers outside London are now in jobs which do not even require a degree. A 2020 study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that one in five students would be financially worse off over their lifetimes for having gone to university, as the effects of tax, lost earnings during study and fees gobble up any benefit they might have gained.

Dr Stephen Davies, formerly of George Mason University, argues the central problem is that higher education institutions have been reduced to “certification machines”. To that end, students are not the customers, but the product. But if the real consumers in this dysfunctional wheeze are graduate employers, they ought to have skin in the game. They should care that only a quarter of UK graduates have high-level literacy skills (a figure which, quite incredibly, is higher than the OECD average). Higher fees might be the trigger they need to reevaluate their approach.

Even if this is for the public good, it could be politically costly for Labour. It took the Liberal Democrats 14 years to recover from their tuition fees betrayal, and young people are unlikely to show much clemency towards Keir Starmer who, just four years ago, pledged to abolish them entirely.

But young people should reserve some of their wrath for the sector itself: for the university administrators on absurdly inflated salaries who often pursue neither academic excellence nor the public interest, and the growing ideological uniformity amongst faculty. We now barely blink when professors are hounded out for holding mainstream views on transgender issues, or when academics tweet such drivel as “congratulations to Kemi Badenoch, ‘the shining ebony example that the Psychosis of Whiteness is not reserved for those with white skin’”. But if we must have homogeneity of thought in academia, we should at least spare the public – who may not be university educated themselves – from paying for it.

Let’s hope that even a small increase in tuition fees can precipitate a sharp fall in demand and applications. Some universities make a major contribution to our national and cultural life and to the economy. Many do not, and the state shouldn’t be in the business of artificially propping them up.