The phrase "top-up fees" has gone out of fashion in debates about higher education funding. A pity, because it is a helpful phrase. Top-up fees were introduced because universities needed a lot more money to do their job. Taxation and endowments were insufficient to provide the right quality of education for the expanding numbers of people wanting degrees. University funding, in short, needed topping up.
Even when top-up fees morphed into the current system of tuition fees and loans in the 2004 Higher Education Act, the top-up idea remained intact. In the present system the fee element may have become more substantial and integral, but the top-up principle is still there. Co-payment by graduates was always a necessary addition to existing funding, not a substitute for it. Graduates now pay a deferred sum when they can afford to do so. But it is still essentially complementary to other funding. When the Browne review was commissioned in 2009, that was still the essential context.
That is no longer the case. Lord Browne's review significantly shifted the balance of university funding on to the backs of graduates. But it did so on the basis that the existing system was unable to fund the universities and that the complementary elements remained intact. The spending review has overturned all this. The basic problem with the new system, announced by the higher education minister David Willetts to MPs yesterday, is that graduates are being asked to provide levels of funds that ought to be shared more fairly with the taxpayer. The cuts to higher education teaching grants are so severe that ministers have had to try to protect taxpayer-funded teaching in what are deemed to be the core subjects of science, engineering, technology and maths, while everything else will be funded by what has now been rebranded as graduate contributions. Arts and social sciences will increasingly become the preserve of the privately educated and affluent, as languages already are. The divide between the endowed and the graduate-dependent universities will widen too. Jude Fawley would have understood all this.
The problem with Mr Willetts's policy is not that co-payment is wrong in itself; it is not. Nor is his system uniformly unfair to the poor; there is a lot of progressive support for the least well-off, both pre- and post-university, in his scheme. Nor are significantly higher fee levels out of the question in the right context. A graduate tax would not have helped either. The problem is that the Treasury has taken advantage of co-payment in university funding and has used it as a weapon to inflict insane levels of cuts on higher education teaching which graduates will now be asked to make good.
