This probably won't sound either outrageous or unusual if you're not from the UK, but nonetheless...

It seems as though the government is going to pass it's Bill to raise undergraduate tuition fees to £3,000 per year. Right now, they're £1,000. The £3,000 will have a lifetime of about 5 years, before it's raised again.

Now, when I was at university, and it wasn't so long ago, not only were there no tuition fees, but you also got a grant of about £2,000 a year from the government to cover maintenance. Back then, you could get by on not much more than £2,000, if you had university owned accommodation.

So, why are the government, a supposedly left-wing government, putting up the fees.

Well, they claim that it's to fund expansion of higher education. Now, I work for as an administrator for a major UK university, and I've at least got my ear to the ground for some of the thinking, and that thinking isn't that the money will be going to allow more students to get to university. It'll be used for other things entirely. It's pretty much a windfall. Universities aren't short of money. They are tight on budgets, but no one's going hungry. No one's short of equipment. Unlike schools.

No, I suspect that the government have a different agenda in mind. They don't want universities to have more money. What they want to do is cut the government contribution to universities and leave it to the private individual to fund their own way. The government has other priorities. There are already whispers that money that was going to go into teacher training has been diverted to the so-called reconstruction of Iraq (most of that money is going directly to large companies for projects chosen by us rather than by the Iraqis, but that's another topic entirely), to pay the debt run up by the war, and for tax cuts for the better off. Money set aside for poverty reduction programmes in impoverished countries has already been diverted away from those to go to the Iraq-company-profit-bonanza. But that was never much money in the first place, so it's got to come from somewhere else. Education is an easy target. After all, why spend money on training teachers now when the benefits of that wouldn't show until after the next election? (Governments only understand the next election. The concept of "long-term" is alien to them.)

Now, the government says that by allowing fees up to £3,000 (and if it's up to £3,000 it will be £3,000, because no university will consider charging less--they figure that would be a sign saying their courses aren't as good as other universities'), they will be able to afford bursaries for poorer students. In fact, only a tiny amount of the fees will be diverted that way.

So, what can be done about funding universities? Well, I hate to say this, but this really is a case where greater efficiency will work. Universities have plenty of money. They have a completely different idea of efficiency to other public sector institutions and a completely different idea to private companies. The staff are used to having pretty much anything they want whenever they want, no questions asked. You could cut all budgets by 10% and there'd be no noticeable change. Maybe eventually someone would have to keep their computer a year longer than they'd like. Maybe the rooms wouldn't be decorated so regularly. Maybe people would have to stay in 3 star rather than 4 star or 5 star hotels. Maybe *gasp* someone would have to share offices. But I doubt it.

What seems to have been forgotten both by universities and the government is that the primary reason for the existence of universities is education. And it had better be education for anyone who is academically able and willing to do it, not just for those who've got the money.