Wednesday 17 March 2010
smash the middle-class welfare state!
Chris Patten is on the money today. He says the "preposterous" cap on university tuition fees should be removed, and he is right. I do not see why a student should be subsidised in this way (bursaries for low-income students and to increase equality of opportunity are quite another matter) and why fees should be considerably less than my daughter (who earns £22,000 a year in London) pays for the nursery my granddaughter attends. I remember a conversation with a father of two teenage sons, the older about to go to Oxford and the younger expected to follow; the father told me he was "mightily relieved" only to have to pay £3,000 in fees for each of them - he would have to support them for food and accommodation whatever the level of fees, and he had been paying at least £30,000 a year in school fees. He couldn't see why he should get that level of subsidy from the taxpayer given his affluence, though he was glad to accept it, and neither could I.
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Presumably you've sent a cheque to HMG as a gesture of solidarity to the kidz who're saddled with a huge debt when they come out to no job ?
How times have changed. And the elder statesmen now including those who were at Oxbridge on State Scholarships plus College topups... With my father a low paid civil servant and mother going back to work despite my younger brother being disabled (but the city in which we lived did wonders for his education), that £100 p.a. extra made all the difference. But of course only 5% of us went to university then. I wonder how Chris Patten was funded through his first degree.
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