Some students are finding that this is one market where the customer is always wrong
Slowly but surely, the demand for university continues to grow. Amid tales of woe from unemployed graduates, and even while a demographic dip is making 18-year-olds something of a rare species, new figures from the clearing house Ucas reveal that applications have, once again, crept up. The effect of the great recession, which has greatly swelled the number of hopefuls in the last few years, has been not only sustained but somewhat intensified, with another 2% increase. But hopes may rise and be dashed ? if the means to fulfil them do not keep pace. Record numbers who have bought the university dream ? youngsters prepared to work hard and be saddled with debts ? could be disappointed.
The clustering of English university fees at �9,000 is of obvious significance to would-be students, and is also deeply embarrassing for ministers who had promised that such stratospheric levies would be the exception, not the rule. It is not in itself, however, quite as ruinous for the sector's finances as some over-excited reports suggest. Not every student gets a costly loan to cover their fees, and not every student's fees will be levied at the full whack, thanks to scholarship schemes. Factoring these in, and remembering also that the exchequer will eventually recoup much of the money that it lends out, the budgetary hole that results is measured in millions as opposed to the panicked predictions of billions. Even so, there is a gap, and it admits no room for expansion to meet rising demand. Indeed, with the large budget for scientific research properly protected, it will probably require fresh retrenchment from the freeze on numbers which the coalition has already imposed.
The deepest pangs will afflict those who receive rejection letters over the next few months, but there could also be frustration in store for many getting the green light. After a full quarter-century during which numbers have increased continually and funding only falteringly, universities are already creaking. Few students paying the full price in a market that is rigged against them will be satisfied by the service they receive. Every last crumb of direct support is being removed from the teaching of arts and social sciences, on the strength of the Browne report, a technocratic document which did not contain the word "humanities". Many who stump up the full �9,000 in exchange for a few weekly hours of crowded lectures and photocopied reading lists will soon cotton on to the reality that they are cross-subsidising laboratories and field trips on other courses. The government's big idea is for profit-hungry providers to set up shop, and drive rip-off colleges to the wall. It might work in theory, but it will never do so in practice for as long as the Treasury continues to impose manifold restrictions on the creation of the surplus places this would involve. The new educational market gets tangled up in other ways with the quotas imposed by a cash-strapped Whitehall. The universities that more people would like to attend do not have the freedom to answer that demand, and the old notion that good A-level grades should be a passport to a good college, which is already fading fast, will become a distant memory. Even as students are metamorphosed into paying punters, some are finding that this is one market where the customer is always wrong.
With much of the architecture of the loan system specified in law, there is limited freedom to address its emergent shortcomings. So desperate is the scramble to rescue nice ideas about choice from being entirely drowned in dark financial waters that some people are even asking whether top colleges might start auctioning some share of their places to those English students with the deepest pockets, a previously unthinkable thought that was unthinkable for good reason. The university dream risks souring into a politically poisonous mix of debt and disappointment.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/27/higher-education-marketplace-students
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