Today's UCAS figures confirm that thousands of students - one in three - will have their dreams of a university education shattered by government funding cuts.
Sally Hunt is the general secretary of the University and College Union
Today’s UCAS figures show record levels of people applying to university, which should not come as too much of a surprise. The current generation of 18-year-olds have been encouraged to apply to university for the whole of their school careers and in tough economic times, people look to boost their skills if they find themselves out of work.
The figures should be an opportunity for us to praise a job well done by the government in promoting the value of education, and a degree, and recognising the power of education to transform lives and act as a catalyst for social mobility.
Unfortunately, today’s figures just confirm that thousands of students will have their dreams of a university education shattered by government funding cuts. The combination of record numbers wanting to go to university and such savage cuts in funding is producing a crisis.
With courses already closing and teaching staff losing their jobs, Peter Mandelson risks becoming known as the Doctor Beeching of higher education. Those students who are fortunate enough to secure a place will face increased class sizes, less contact with lecturers and will still leave university with record levels of debt.
Not funding higher education places makes even less sense when one considers the alternative of pumping extra cash into the benefits system to prop up record levels of youth unemployment. Other leading economies are investing money in universities in order to help economic growth and widen participation, yet our government is intent on doing the opposite.
This approach is an insult and a snub to the thousands of students the government has been encouraging to reach for university for the entirety of their educational career.
As I have said before on Left Foot Forward, the government has been so close to getting it right when it comes to opening up university education, but it has always failed to be bold enough. It has got more people to work hard towards a university place, but has now restricted places so many talented and qualified people will miss out.
The bottom line is that you cannot make savage funding cuts without serious consequences, despite Lord Mandelson’s insulting efforts to sell the cuts as an opportunity. The government is abandoning a generation who, instead of benefiting from education, will find themselves on the dole queue alongside sacked teaching staff.
The government can come out with as many statements as it likes about the importance of education, how it will be protected from the recession and its own commitments to social mobility, but the hard facts and punitive cuts tell a much harsher and sadly more accurate story.
24 Responses to “Thousands of students’ dreams of a university education shattered by government funding cuts”
Wit Ackman
No, your every point is wrong.
What you think you mean is irrelevant. It will be poorer families who suffer, as well as middle-class families. I don’t care what HEFCE have made their statistics say. Besides which, whilst there is a fairly manageable (yet now drastically failing and set to crash and burn) system of loans for undergraduates, postgraduates, mature students and other unconventional undergrad students are suffering majorly (not that I suppose the “old” system was some utopia for pg students). Only a very very few postgrads receive adequate funding, whilst the rest are struggling to survive whilst balancing 4 jobs alongside their studies (this is no exaggeration). Soon postgraduate students will be expected to pay perhaps upwards of £7000 a year, and the system will fall apart because it is not actually possible to earn that much money from a part time job, on top of the money needed for rent and living allowances. Government debate keeps the focus on UGs to avoid having to acknowledge this impending disaster.
As to the points made in your second paragraph: 1) all things are not equal, as I have already stressed – HE is facing MASSIVE CUTS and these are being evidenced in SWEEPING redundancies, research cutbacks, course closures, department closures, and even campus closures ; 2) your “greater contribution from graduates” supposes a different system than is currently in place (the NUS sponsored “Graduate Tax”). This system is bullshit too, and the careerist NUS have no respect from students because they simply don’t represent them. Nor do politicians. It might, possibly, not-withstanding inevitable cock-ups and systematic failures, be as useable as the Labour system briefly was (which is to say, useable for some; not at all useable for others). But, the Graduate Tax is far from the solution, and it is certainly not the change WE WANT.
Next, HE should change, but WHO should decide how it changes? That is the question. You suppose that our professional poliicians (i.e. bureaucrats, manipulators and criminals) should decide this, and that is exactly where you are wrong and where we differ entirely.
Leading on from this, recognising an emerging pattern, it should become clear that 1) this entity you call “universities” who might make their “own” decisions is a false construction; 2) that universities in the best analysis are not unities nor are they reducable to that detestable class of bureaucrats, manipulators and criminals otherwise known as university managers (e.g. Vice-Chancellors; i.e. those who will make spending decisions). Therefore, 3) revenue earnt from tutition fees would not go to universities per se, in order that they might make their own decisions, but instead to a destable class of morons who have inserted themselves in a position that removes power from those they supposedly represent (in this way, a university really is a microcosm of the nation). So your “neo-liberal”/”statist” dichotomy deconstructs: really they are both two sides of the same coin. The current system is awful, but at least it gives money in a (slightly) more direct way to research projects than I predict tuition fees will, quite simply because history and reality show that bureaucrats never cease to be bureaucrats.
So, I still agree with you: you are still a dumb economist and, I might add, less capable of freethought than your average rock, plank of wood, plate of blamange etc.
rob
@ Giles: I would rather see an increase in the mean tution fees (with support for thouse who really cant pay) than see a cut in the number of students.
Cant Col UCU
RT @ucu: Peter Mandelson the Dr Beeching of higher education? Sally Hunt on @leftfootfwd http://tiny.cc/h9eEc
Cant Col UCU
RT @leftfootfwd: Thousands of students’ dreams of a university education shattered by government funding cuts: http://is.gd/7W75y