Pricing universities out of reach

When I was 18 I wasn’t very interested in studying, so the idea of going to university never really raised its head. In those days, like many of my generation, all I wanted was a few beers of a night and the chance to meet lots of girls. So I went to work in a job I hated, on a salary that offered no real opportunity for expansion and with no real career prospects.

Fortunately ten years later my thinking had changed and I applied to do a degree. Now I was never one of those academic elite who felt able to go to Oxbridge. I was closer to one of those oiks that went to what they now call a new university – in those days we called them polytechnics.

I was very grateful for my place and particularly relieved that I was given a full grant and even a few pounds extra because I was a mature student. Had I have been forced to pay student fees there is no way I could have afforded to go. I was a husband and a father (though I was to be divorced just weeks before going to ‘the poly’.

I studied hard, managed to obtain a good degree and went on later to gain a teaching qualification and a master’s degree. Because of circumstances I had an employer who paid for both of these postgraduate qualifications – again if I had been forced to pay the fees myself I would not have been able to afford them.

I am in no doubt I have been very fortunate.

Today I hear Oxford will probably charge £9,000 a year for tuition fees to study at their illustrious university – slightly less than the annual salary of someone on a statutory minimum wage and substantially more than the amount a married couple receive on the dole.

For someone like myself, who went back to education later in life this huge hike in fees is a disgrace and divisive. It will mean very few working class people will be able to think about going to Oxford or any of the other ‘red bricks’– even if intellectually they would be able to cope with the standards required.

So we have a situation, thanks to Cameron and Clegg, where the working class, and particularly those who are out of work, can never aspire to entering the portals of academia. Effectively they have made learning beyond the financial reach of the poor, the underprivileged, the unemployed, the disabled and ordinary working class folk with families who want to return to education.

Oh, and what about the single mothers who want a chance to develop their lives once their baby is old enough to be handed to a childminder?

It is an absolute disgrace and epitomises the divisiveness of this government – where the ‘haves’ can get the opportunities, and the ‘have not’s’ are forced to struggle through life, trying to make ends meet. No doubt Cameron would prefer the kind of society epitomised in the book “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist”. As society where the privileged have all the finer things in life and the working class scrape an existence, fighting a daily battle to survive

No guesses as to which side of the fence Clegg and Cameron want to sit on!