Daily View: University funding cuts

Clare Spencer|08:12 UK time, Thursday, 24 December 2009

Graduates Business Secretary Lord Mandelson said university funding in England will be cut by £398m for 2010-11. Commentators weigh up the merits of Labour's years of higher education expansion, threatened by these cuts.

The Independent says not all recent expansion has been healthy:

"Rapid expansion has meant that insufficient attention has been paid to every student; in some places teaching quality and standards have been diluted, and the drop-out rate has been high. If, as seems inevitable, many universities are to be allowed to charge higher fees, students need to know they will get value for their money."

Ross Clark in the Times says Labour has got the universities they deserve:

"Labour's expansion of university education promised disaster from the beginning. The 50 per cent target had all the signs of being plucked from the sky for the 2001 manifesto with no regard to whether half the population is mentally equipped for an academic education."

The former minister for education George Walden says in the Telegraph that the suggestion to shorten courses is not possible because of the school system:

"Academics at university complain about the amount of remedial teaching they have to do, in maths especially, before students are ready to tackle their courses."

The Telegraph editorial warns against preparing students for the workplace instead of for life:

"Yet these fast-track courses will turn the clock back 20 years, to the time when polytechnics offered vocational degrees to the less academically gifted. It seems inevitable that a two-tier system will develop, as the most academically rigorous universities continue to offer high-quality courses - though for higher fees."

Harry Phibbs at the Daily Mail suggests the best alternative is for universities to become financially independent:

"Shifting the burden of university funding from the taxpayer to the student may seem tough.
But how much better to have the dons running their colleges in the interests of the undergraduates than according to the erratic whims of Lord Mandelson?"

The Guardian seems alone in seeing, in its editorial, the recent expansion in higher education as a success, one which will end:

"All these pressures mean participation will be narrowed, and that fairer access - another Labour success story - is put at further risk, while social mobility is suddenly a luxury for another day."

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