Without fees, the service universities can offer would be radically reduced.
The argument
The argument begins with arithmetic rather than principle. The number of young people going to university has risen a great deal, and in a free system the state funds every one of them. It is not possible to ask a government to meet an ever-increasing bill of that kind indefinitely, because the money comes from a fixed pool that other claims also draw on. Those other claims are the second step. A government funding higher education for all is doing so instead of something else, and the NHS is the obvious comparison: a vital service nobody would propose charging for, whose demands are also growing. If some services must remain free, then others must be charged for, and higher education is the more defensible candidate — it is not universal, its users are its direct beneficiaries, and they gain from it individually in a way that the patients of a health service do not. The consequence for quality follows from holding the budget fixed while the intake grows. Teaching a much larger cohort on a sum that cannot rise in step means spreading the same resources more thinly: larger groups, less contact with academics, more pressure on facilities and libraries. There is a tipping point at which the standard of what is delivered begins to fall, and a free system reaches it sooner, because nothing restrains either the growth in numbers or the cost of meeting it. Tuition fees are the mechanism that holds that point off. They bring in revenue that scales with the number of students, so an institution's resources grow as its intake does rather than being stretched across it, and they attach a cost to the decision to attend. Proponents of this position conclude that fees are what allows a system to expand without diluting itself, and that making education free would diminish its quality.
Context
Most years, just over 400,000 young people go to university. If we want to keep the quality of education high, we need to charge for higher education.
Premises
Counter-arguments
There is some question about the cost of universities themselves, with university lecturers claiming that they certainly have not benefited from the fee change. If costs are not increasing by as much as is claimed, then it remains to be seen where this money is going and what it is spent on.
Rejecting the premises
Rejecting P2. There are questions over who the funding goes to and what it pays for.