Douglas Carswell's Blog

University fee cap must go

You can borrow money to buy a home.  You can spend your own cash on a car or all manner of electronic gadgets.  So why is it that you are not free to invest in your own future by paying for a university education?

Capping student fees isn't just bad for universities deprived of the extra cash.  It hurts students.

Far from making university education more accessible to more students, the cap puts degree courses that might otherwise exist entirely out of reach of UK students.     

British universities increasingly compensate for the fee cap by offering places to overseas students who are free to pay.  The cap thus actively prevents young British people having opportunities that are open to students from around the world.

One argument against scrapping the cap is that it might prevent people from poorer backgrounds from getting degrees.  Nonsense.  The best universities are desperate to attract the best students.  It is in their own self-interest to ensure bursary schemes and scholarships are available for those that might not otherwise be able to pay back the cost of their studies. If government wants to help, they could offer tax incentives to support endowment schemes to fund scholarships.

Others complain that without a cap, different universities might set different fees.  Indeed they would.  But why is that a bad thing?  Those universities only able to charge low fees might ask what it was about higher fee universities that allowed them to ask students to contribute more.

Removing the cap on fees would ensure that universities were better at offering the right courses, in the right numbers, to more people.  That might even prompt a little overdue innovation, such as two year degree courses.

In a free society, universities should be free to charge their own fees, and young people should be free to invest in their own future.  It is wrong that they are prevented from doing so by politicians.

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