When my mother left my father she earned so little that my teaching degree (no fees then) came with a full grant of £1000 a year.
At the time only about the top 10 per cent of sixth form students went on to do degrees and there were, as I say, no fees.
When my own children were going through the education system the New Labour argued that poorer people were subsidising the rich to attend university free. They wished to extend university attendance to the top 50 per cent of the school cohort and argued that a graduate would earn £400,000 more over a lifetime than a non graduate.
I have watched the results of the introduction of £1000 and £3000 fees per annum by Labour and the raising of the top limit to just over £9000 for the 'best' universities by the Conservatives with interest.
What happened:-
-The £9000 limit became the default minimum immediately. The least well performing universities charged the same as Oxford and Cambridge. There was, in effect, no market at all as was intended.
-A degree which, when 10 per cent of the cohort held it, was worthwhile, became devalued when half of the students had one. Many of these students were not academic at all and courses and standards had to be dumbed down to accommodate them further devaluing a degree.
-Steep divisions between the value of different institutions and different degrees became apparent although all the students were paying the same for their tuition. This made maths from Cambridge much more worth having than media studies from the Iniversity of West London, for example.
-With the new influx of huge amounts of money universities hiked the salaries of their very senior staff and started huge building projects on borrowed money. Neither really much improved the experience or standards of education for the students.
-At the same time much teaching work was hived off to unpaid graduates, again, to the detriment of students.
-Many arts and humanities course were run with minimal teaching hours. My child had six hours a week of English degree teaching for her £9000 which was clearly inadequate.
-The latest drawback of the new system is that,in order for universities to secure their £9000 without having to put too much effort into teaching the students, they are n ow making unconditional offers to the clever, well educated children of the middle classes.
There are many other points that could be made about this higher education feeding frenzy but it is clear that the whole system is now a mess and almost more unfair to the students that the situation when only the academic children attended university.
Interestingly, my child, who had a first from a top university, and her partner, who has a masters in physics, say that they will not send their children to university but will guide them towards professional apprenticeships and pay for prep schools to give them a good start.