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Back they come. As the tourists leave London each September, they are replaced by a tidal wave of students some half a million strong.
Two-thirds are full-time, a fifth of them foreign. This migratory, crash-padding, pub-crowding, pavement-jostling population is excited, bewildered, vulnerable and often poor.
They are the new, educated huddled masses. Having come to the big city for an education, some get the finest on offer. Many get little or no tuition and end up having a paper qualification and a good time or a miserable one, according to luck. Does London need this horde, or should its student population be slashed as the capital's contribution to the impending masochism tango of cuts?
Higher education is a big London business, almost five per cent of the city's gross domestic product. The city's hospitality to thousands of overseas scholars, in part through generously speaking English, has made it the most popular student city in the world. Pubs, cafés and bed-and-breakfasts in student quarters such as Holborn, Islington, Southwark and Tower Hamlets depend heavily on this inflow. In addition, according to a survey from property agents Knight Frank, some 200,000 young people unable to find halls of residence now underpin the private rental market.
I have always regarded London as a tough place in which to be a student — big, anonymous and superficially expensive. Some foreign students I know find it terrifying. Yet to Britons and foreigners alike, to mature students or part-timers, transient teenagers or serious scholars, London has long been a place of intellectual and emotional asylum. It makes money. We cannot knock it.
So who should pay? This week the “savage cuts” debate turned its gaze on the universities. Government and opposition spokesmen talk openly of raising fees. The Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, reneged on his party's madcap pledge to abolish fees altogether and thus reinstate one of the biggest middle-class subsidies. His party is furious but it can hardly advocate cutting more deserving services in favour of students.
This week the Confederation of British Industry let the cat from the bag, with proposals that include a 70 per cent rise in fees to a maximum of £5,000, reduced maintenance grants and an end to subsidised student loans. It wants the Government to abandon its unattained, and currently unattainable, target of putting half the youth population through higher education and concentrate instead on those who really want it.
The CBI points out that Britain still has one of the most generously subsidised university systems in the world. A result is that, with rising numbers, resources are being spread thin. This has meant worsening staff/student ratios and complaints of poor value for money, especially from foreign students who pay full fees of more than £5,000, and £10,000 for postgraduates. Since most universities subsidise their domestic students from their overseas ones, London bizarrely invites struggling Pakistanis to cross-subsidise the education of rich Britons. Higher fees would have a number of consequences.
While they would make less difference to places such as the London School of Economics, the majority of whose students are foreign, it would pour money into universities that are mostly domestic. Assuming the Government's block- teaching grant to each university were not cut in parallel, higher fees would mean a real boost to the income of London's university sector, and thus a boost to London as a whole.
That should lead to better teaching. It should free universities from the horrors of paper-clogged Whitehall oversights of teaching and research. At one point government officials were actually counting pages of research or mentions in indexes to assess how much grant each university should attract. This explains why the Russell Group of the top 20 universities — including London's Imperial, LSE and UCL — welcomes the CBI proposal “if we are to survive intense and growing international competition.”
The proposed cut in the student loan subsidy would have less impact now that interest rates are low. But it would end the unfairness whereby non-graduate taxpayers are expected to cross-subsidise graduate ones despite the latter earning, on average, higher pay.
As for an end to maintenance grants other than to genuinely poor families, this would lead to more students working in pubs, restaurants and social services and to more living at home. It would replenish the labour market for disappearing East Europeans and induce London's housing to be used more efficiently.
This might not be welcomed by students or their parents. But it is a classic example of how the public sector will have to use various forms of charging to save money in a time of austerity. If hospital and residential care, planning applications and rubbish collection are all to attract higher charges, why not students?
British universities sold their souls to the Government devil over decades of state dependency. They have taken ever more cash from the taxpayer, and accepted ever more supervision in return. Students, half of them from homes that could afford to pay for higher education, were enjoying elongated, often inadequate courses at the taxpayers' expense. Nobody dared interfere because students and their parents were supposedly floating voters.
Across the public sector such happy days are over. There is no question of ending the means-tested concept of higher education for students whose parents — or whose estimate of their own future wealth — feel the game is still worth the candle. But it is right that going to university should be a considered career choice, not just a way of filling time.
It must also be right for the users of any service that not does rank as a vital welfare benefit to pay for it, to the extent that they can. That especially applies when the return to such payment, whether in income or in lifestyle, is as specific to the user as is a university education.
Higher fees would not, or should not, go to the Government. If they do, the whole debate is off. They should go straight from students to the colleges and universities that they are attending. In return they should demand a better service. That must be a gain to London from this reform.
Reader views (6)
There is a word for people who preach one thing a do another. Simon Jenkins, the failed economists of the CBI and the academics of the Russell Group, are all people who left University with no student debt. This was because their generation received 100% state support. They now want to impose on current students a burden of debt that will cripple young people for the rest of their life. If you believe in competition then fine, make the race equal, but don't let the privileged elite who have received the economic advantage of massive state handouts between 1960 and 1990 dictate a new set of rules. They are simply drawing up the ladder behind them to safeguard their privileged position.
There is a fairer way to fund Universities - a graduate tax. If you go to university then it is free but you pay more tax during your working life. This could be retrospective, then Simon Jenkins, the CBI, Russell group, politicians of all parties and Mr Tony Blair could all directly contribute to the privileged education that they got for free, rather than dumping the burden of their debt onto a generation less able to afford it. What is more none of them can complain after all we are prepared to subsidise bankrupt banks and free-market ideology with our taxes, so why not our future citizens and our Universities?
- A Debt Ridden Student, London
I'm supremely disappointed by the intergenerational insensitivity enshrined in this article. It would be crass to focus on the point that Jenkins, and many others his age, benefitted from an era where students were paid to go to university, and had guaranteed prospects on graduation day. So instead, let us consider the comparative situation befalling those who, like myself, recently finished university.
Thanks to top-up fees introduced just three years ago, the average student is now graduating with £17,500 in debt. Had they collected their degree this year, they would have been presented with the worst graduate jobs market for over three decades. He or she can forget about property ladders: house prices (despite the recent ‘slump’) are three times what they were twelve years ago. Lastly, that demographic timebomb that is the babyboomers retiring has just commenced, placing an ever-increasing strain upon future taxpayers, i.e. myself and my cohort.
In light of all this, I can’t help but wonder: for this heavily-indebted, job-seeking, property-less generation soon to be picking up the bill for an ever-aging population, how much more debt does Mr. Jenkins think they should be saddled with?
- Simon, London
It would be so nice if we lived in Fairy-Tale-Land, where people are fair to each other, and you really DO get what you pay for. This gentleman must live there-I don't.
- Ray King, kassel germany
John of London
Could not have said it better.
Also, if Mr Jenkins really thinks that a government, particularly an incoming conservative one, would not reduce the block grant to universities in tandem with the increase in student fees, then he is just stupidly naive. They may not do it in year one but they will in subsequent years - or night does not follow day!
As for the CBI, whose idea it really is, they are more likely being duplicitous (are they anything else?) and assume, unlike Mr Jenkins, that the government would reduce the block grant to go along with the increase in student fees. The net result is that the universities would not be any better of - indeed could be worse off if the government withdrew block grants quicker than any increase in student fees. But the CBI would have scored a winner in that the pressure for further tax imposts on them diminishes, while future students are truly stuffed. Nice one CBI.
- William, London
The fact is that FEWER people should be going to university each year, which would push up standards and breathe more value into the qualifications and allow a higher taxpayer subsidy to be more viable.
It doesn't matter how many graduates China is churning out each year, that is a matter for them, the point is that if we can't produce quality graduates there's no point producing them at all.
- Tom, London
"... proposals that include a 70 per cent rise in fees to a maximum of £5,000 ..."
Given that when university fees were forced through by the Labour govt by (worthless) assurances that fees would be caped at £3,000 just a few years ago ... How long do people think this £5K max will remain a max before the case is made to increase it again to say "a max of £7,500"?
- John, London
