A drop of 8.8 per cent in the number of students applying for university is surprisingly small, actually, when you consider the size of the hike in tuition fees. Still, the figures released today by Independent Commission on Fees prompted an angry response from Labour’s Shabana Mahmood, who said:
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‘The Tory-led Government’s decision to treble tuition fees at the same time as cutting funding for higher education is already putting thousands of people off university who otherwise would be eagerly preparing to start their courses.’
It’s easy to brand this drop of 37,000 applications from the 2010/11 academic year as a failure for ministers who have insisted that the fee rise should not put off prospective students. But it depends whether ministers are concerned that some young people are having a longer and harder think about whether university will actually benefit them, or whether
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Everyone is talking about Reform: Rachel Reeves complains that Nigel Farage ‘doesn’t have a clue’ how to make the economy grow. Kemi Badenoch says Reform is offering ‘knee-jerk analysis’ rather than thought-through policies. The obvious rejoinder is that Reeves doesn’t have any growth and Badenoch doesn’t have any policies, so these criticisms are a bit
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