How the Tories pushed universities to the brink of disaster

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : Any university would now be allowed to charge up to £6,000 a year, but in "exceptional cases" a university could charge up to £9,000 if it made certain commitments to widening access to higher education.
60% : For those who insist that higher education is a public good in an ethical sense, the original Willetts plan was always an abomination.
59% : Controversies surrounding "free speech" on campuses escalated from 2018 onwards, fuelled especially by new disputes over gender identity.
58% : A sense of emergency took hold last autumn, when it became clear that there had been a sharp drop in international students, whose higher fees have become pivotal to the funding model of higher education in the UK.
55% : The divide that the Brexit referendum exposed running down the middle of British society was, as much as anything, about higher education.
54% : But the rapid expansion of participation in higher education from the late 1980s onwards, the conversion of polytechnics into universities in 1992, and the limited but undeniable spread of critical theory and historical revisionism in the humanities and social sciences, meant that universities had become the more popular object of paranoia by the 2010s.
52% : It was Labour, after all, that first introduced "top-up" fees for university tuition, arguing that it was "regressive" to fund higher education through general taxation, given that graduates go on to earn more money than non-graduates.
45% : But many leading researchers had already taken jobs on the continent in order to retain access to EU funding, while elite European scholars are now less likely to take up jobs in British universities.
34% : Political insistence that higher education must operate like a market has led to many of the worst pathologies of market societies.
28% : As many academics have warned, the funding system of higher education is heading towards disaster.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.