9 december 2010, trapped inside the treasury

Minor riots in london today as parliament voted on increasing student's tuition fees from some £3k to some £9k. Epicentre was the treasury, with me sat inside talking about tax incremental financing and social impact bonds as the chants grew louder and the nice russian security lady came around to ask us to close the blinds. The country's bankrupt and all that, but it's a difficult one to call this for those of us that got our degrees free and indeed were given a pretty decent grant to go on holiday, sorry to university, for 3 years. Actually I learnt tons and have pretty much traded on it the rest of my life, so I definitely see it as a public good we should all be paying for. I see too though that its particularly hard on the working majority that didn't go, and so whose taxes in effect subsidise those that did. Universities certainly need and deserve the funding, but every corner of the uk government is girding itself to stop making and funding central plans and to make people and institutions call their own shots, and pay for them too - so why should the higher education sector be any different ? Everybody wins really when the student pays - except the student. It's too obvious to say many can't afford it, as it's actually free to go, you just have to repay the loan over your working life. Far, far too many in society though, and surely a massively disproportionate number of the disadvantaged, will simply not have the family or environmental history, support or culture to give them the confidence to do this, making them naturally risk-averse to take on a sizeable debt. So too many of the talented don't and won't go to university. Didn't stop many brilliant entrepreneurs though, although I have to say, it might have stopped me.