Barry: Please excuse the degree of cynicism

Sep 23 2009 by Barry Gibson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

AS you may have guessed by the large number of fresh-faced types wandering round the town centre, the academic year has begun.

It’s another way to mark the passing of time – it is now 12 years since I started university. For those of you without a maths degree, that means I was a fresher in 1997.

And I was very lucky to begin my academic career that particular year. For, you see, I was in the last batch of students who didn’t have to pay tuition fees.

Had I been born a few months later I would have gone to university in 1998 and would have left higher education with about £5,000 more debt which I would still be lugging around with me today.

We were the last of the generation whose schooling took place entirely under a Tory government. So we got to study at university for free.

Tony Blair’s New Labour was elected just as I was doing my A Levels and it took this so-called progressive party a year to push through tuition fees, meaning I escaped. Not, that I remember, tuition fees featuring heavily in Labour’s 1997 manifesto. Things can only get better, eh?

The issue of funding higher education has been controversial ever since and this week the Confederation of British Industry – the guys who brought you the credit crunch – have come up with their own plan to fund university places.

And – knock me down with a feather – the CBI has proposed something which would hit the poor rather than the rich. I know, I’m shocked too.

According to the CBI report published on Monday, the answer to university funding is to raise the annual tuition fee limit of £3,225 and squeeze students further with fewer grants and harsher loans.

This may bring in more money in the short-term, but in the long-term it would make Britain an even more unequal country, with higher education closed off to working-class people.

It seems to me far fairer that students should pay for their education after they graduate rather than before. Then the funding which universities need can be supplied without making higher education the preserve of the rich.