Should UK students be charged university fees?

Charging students has removed the cap on places

Question: Should UK students be charged university fees?
Position‹2 of 2: Yes, the UK should charge for access to its higher education institutions.
Argument‹3 of 4›: Charging students has removed the cap on places

It is actually increasing places not decreasing fees that reduces inequality.

The argument

Proponents of this argument begin by relocating the source of inequality in higher education. The obstacle facing students from poorer backgrounds, on this account, was not principally the cost of attending university but the scarcity of places to attend. Where the number of places is fixed and the number of applicants exceeds it, places must be rationed, and the rationing device is grades. Grades in turn track the resources behind a candidate as much as the candidate: those who had been privately educated arrived with higher ones, and so the fixed supply of places was distributed disproportionately to them. On this reading the cap was itself the mechanism of exclusion, and removing financial barriers while leaving the cap in place would have changed who lost out only at the margins. The cap existed because of how places were funded. Where the government pays for every place, the number of places is whatever the public budget will bear, and the state must decide in advance how many students the system will admit. Charging tuition breaks that link. Once the cost of a place travels with the student rather than coming out of a central allocation, each university is in charge of its own intake and can expand to meet demand, because admitting another student no longer commits public money that has not been voted. The conclusion follows from the diagnosis. If the lack of student places is the root of the inequality, then the reform that ends the shortage is the one that addresses it, and fees are what made ending it possible. Proponents therefore argue that paying for tuition has reduced the problem rather than deepened it, and that the UK should charge for access to its higher education institutions.

Context

Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are almost twice as likely to go to university than they were in 2009, and this change has been credited to the removal of the cap on student places. For this reason, the argument equally stands that charging for tuition increases equality.

Premises

[P1]Students from poorer backgrounds were hampered less by finances than by competition for too few university places, which favoured the privately educated with higher grades. [P2] Introducing fees let universities control their own intake and removed the cap on student numbers, since the government no longer funds every place. [C] Therefore, because charging students has removed the cap on places and the inequality it caused, the UK should charge university fees.

Counter-arguments

There is some question about the reliability of these statistics, with evidence showing whilst the number of young people at university increased, the number of students in all types of higher education (such as vocational courses and apprenticeships) actually decreased.

Rejecting the premises

Rejecting P3. It may be that those who were previously more likely to study for an apprenticeship or vocational course are pushed into university courses which have now become the norm for higher education.