David Willetts is prone to awkward gaffes. He once claimed that raising tuition fees would create a fairer, competitive system where only universities in ‘exceptional circumstances’ would be able to charge the top rate. Two thirds are now planning to. He then decided that feminism was the ‘single biggest factor’ in the decline of social mobility since the 1960s. His latest scrape has been announcing that the solution to his messy, down-and-out, reaching-broke university system is to award extra, off-quota places to the rich – on the condition that they do, of course, pay that bit extra for them.
It is a proposal so nonsensical, so deluded and utterly defenceless that Willetts was forced to withdraw his support for it within four hours of it being announced. Cash-for-places means precisely that. Universities who have filled their quota of places the normal way would then be able to charge premium rates for off-quota ones. The candidates who take up the extra places would not be eligible for publicly funded loans to pay tuition fees or living costs, thus plumping up university coffers but not simultaneously draining the public purse.
Put very simply, the wealthy students who do not make the grade first time round get a second chance if they can afford to buy their way in. Willetts was blowing a lot of hot air about a ‘needs-blind’ application process, where all candidates are first assessed regardless of income, and the most privileged offered those at the premium rate. This is a sly way of trying to mask what the proposal actually means: within the quota places would still be awarded to the best and brightest, rich or poor, but those who narrowly miss the cut would be offered a back-door route in.
Aaron Porter, for once stepping up to the plate, called Willett’s mess ‘a two-tier system that allows the richest, less able applicants a second bite at the university cherry and denies low- and middle-income students the same opportunity.’ Imagine an Oxford course with a quota of 100 places and 300 applicants. The 100 places would still be awarded to the best applicants; another 10 could be offered to the wealthiest of those 200 who were unsuccessful.
Perhaps loading the rich into less well-funded courses is a good thing. If half of all places were awarded on income as opposed to merit, university education could become entirely self-funding. Let’s add a few thickos to the mix if it means we can pay for a new whiteboard.
Except, of course, university education is not about which students’ parents will subsidise teaching hours and extra equipment. What Willetts offers is a system which manages to leave even the wealthy short-changed. Would you have been quite so proud of receiving an offer from Oxford if that offer could also be bought by those with the sufficient cash? Even worse, if you were the one whose offer had been bought for you?
What Willetts proposed was a two-tier muddle where, on one level, breeding matters rather than brains. The rich already possess multiple advantages in the race for university places: private education and out-of-school tuition, exposure to a culturally rich environment which working-class children are denied. Ring-fencing another advantage at the level of applications themselves will not help them, and it will definitely not help the worse-off. The outrage which accompanied this horrible idea speaks for itself.
When David Willetts was a shadow MP, he wrote a book called The Pinch: How the Baby-boomers stole their children’s future. Rather ironically, he’s now coming to steal yours.
