The reduction in children benefits and the increase in university tuition fees will hit middle England hard. I suppose they did not expect this to happen when they voted in a Coalition government (sorry my joke). It looks like we have moved to a U.S style private market system for university education but we have had no transitional period to adjust to this. The British government is eliminating children trust funds and so there are no secure long-term investment programmes to help hard-pressed families finance higher education if the state refuses to do so.
I invested in one of thoe investment schemes for children marketed by one of the major financial services groups and it has been very volatile in terms of
performance. One minute it was doing quite well then it halved. That is equity performance for you!
The universities themselves are not financially strong enough to offer reasonable bursaries and I am sure the government will still want to control these institiutions whatever happens. I saw Lord Browne defend his report last night on the BBC web but just raising university fees without any commitment towards improved teaching or research did not make a lot of sense to me. I suppose he hopes that market forces will work towards improvements.
The elite universities will become more elite in terms of student composition and the trend to increase the number of non-EU students will continue. I wonder if Vince Cable had that in mind when he took over his ministerial brief. The Lib-Dem politician has at least admitted to the fact that he benefitted from a free university education.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment