The Stupid Party

The Liberal Democrat education spokesman (or as he grandiloquently styles himself, 'Shadow Education Secretary'), Phil Willis MP, declares:

Labour makes access to higher education dependent on the ability to pay, not on the ability to learn. This Bill will widen the social divide and makes it less likely that students from poorer backgrounds will access Britain's top universities.

He's referring to the proposal contained in the Queen's Speech that universities be able to charge top-up fees. The quality of thinking he exhibits is appropriate to one who believes 'access' is a verb. Students from poor families are not charged fees and never have been. They are moreover hardly representative of the student population. As Alison Wolf, Professor of Education at London University, noted in Prospect last year:

[T]he middle classes are the major beneficiaries of mass higher education. They are the ones who meet the entry criteria in vast numbers. They obtain their higher education overwhelmingly at taxpayers' expense. They benefit from it over a whole lifetime, through far higher salaries and far lower risks of unemployment.

In opposing tuition fees, the Liberal Democrats, and for that matter the Conservatives, are thus demanding a state-administered subsidy and entitlement for the middle classes. I cannot think of a single plausible economic or ethical argument for that stance. Higher education is of immense benefit to those who receive it; those who receive it should pay for it. Higher education is not obviously a public good (in economists' jargon, a good that has positive externalities and that cannot be provided in individual amounts); attempts to argue that it is generally have little economic logic behind them. The common argument that an educated workforce is essential to British competitiveness manages to misunderstand 'competitiveness' (see the post before this one), eschew empirical evidence (I know of none in support of the proposition) and misconstrue the rationale of education (the cultivation of the life of the mind is valuable independent of any economic benefit whatever; the proper, as opposed to common, criticism of almost any academic discipline that includes the word 'Studies' in its title is not that it is vocationally worthless but that it is intellectually vapid).

Reactionary, regressive and incoherent, representing sectional interests at the expense of the public good: what a policy; what a party; what a dismal reflection of the state of modern Liberalism.