Tuition fees work. By the standards that any progressive is supposed to hold dear – higher overall participation rates in universities and higher participation rates among low income groups – experience from other countries shows that fees work. As the think tank Centreforum showed four years ago in an in-depth study, fees have long been the norm in Australia, New Zealand and the United States and these countries have seen “their universities’ reputations grow and their higher education participation rates rise across the social spectrum.”
Meanwhile, the UK has been sliding backwards. In 2000, the UK had the third-highest graduation rate among OECD countries, with 37 percent of young people getting a degree. The average was 28 percent. But in 2008 the proportion had fallen to 35 percent, below an average of 38 percent.
As the Centreforum report explained, in other countries higher “fee income not only allows for significant investment in teaching infrastructures and staff recruitment, but because it frees up resources that can be recycled in the form of scholarships and bursaries to help bring students from low income families into the system.”
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