Would you like to tuck a fiver down my y-fronts?

Horrific image, isn't it?

But Richard Drayton, an eminent Cambridge professor claims - with some cause - that this highly-educated government's philistine attack on education will turn educators into whores.

"A nomadic global pirate class buys 'onshore' services from prostitutes and politicians, journalists, mercenaries and academics...(who) can become a kind of intellectual lap dancer, gyrating to excite the attention of the rich and to provoke small tips."

He's right. If you read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, you'll recognise what's happening. In the aftermath of any disaster, the hard-right free-marketeers take the opportunity to cut and public services, demonising government as 'socialist' or 'incompetent. The hollow irony this time is that the disaster is one caused by free-market economics. They've smashed up the world economy and their solution is… more of the same!

Academics think of themselves as professionals because we get paid monthly and choose our own clothes, but we're deluding ourselves. I've never had a permanent job: I'm on a series of temporary ones. That means no security and no prospect of doing ordinary things like get a mortgage, saving for the future or not worrying about the possibility of long-term illness. More importantly: the more we're kept in a state of fear (they call it 'flexible employment'), the less likely we are to disagree with management or protest when they arse things up.

Right now, I'm acting as union representative for a colleague in an employment dispute. How am I meant to negotiate robustly, knowing that the people on the other side of the table will be examining my contract in the summer? How can I choose interesting, perhaps provocative texts for study when I'm aware that the institution is terrified of radical ideas and edgy texts?

The proletarianisation of education won't just beggar me and my colleagues: it is leading towards bland, safe curricula and self-satisfied students. How can I tell someone their work isn't good enough, knowing that their responses to satisfaction questionnaires will contribute to discussions about my job and - much more importantly - potential course closures?

What we'll end up with is boring courses taught by cowed academics churning out high marks to high-paying customers. Society is the loser: undereducated conformists do not generate cultural, scientific or economic innovation.

Drayton's not impressed by his colleagues' responses to this situation:

 "most British scholars have made only token opposition to these changes".

"The British Academy has offered cowardly hand-wringing, (while) vice-chancellors and many administrators have been active quislings, merely asking how they can best adapt to the new order," he said.

Students: how not to treat your research

You might think that a government-commissioned review of higher education funding would be utterly scrupulous in the way that it conducted and processed its research, even if the head of the commission, one Lord Browne, is a perjurer.

You'd be wrong. In a move which would get him expelled were he a third-year undergraduate writing a dissertation, it turns out that he spent almost £70,000 on qualitative focus groups, and then promptly suppressed the evidence because the results weren't what he wanted to hear. He could have presented their views and provided a counter-argument, but - in true Tory style - he just decided to ignore them and go ahead anyway.

I guess old habits die hard.

Will students desert £9000 per year universities?

That's what the Oxbridge-educated Minister for Universities thinks - as though there will be a market, and that 18-year-olds are rational consumers in this ideal market.

Wrong. Firstly, every university will have to charge very near the maximum just to replace the 80% cut in the teaching grant (so students will pay triple what their older siblings paid for a slightly worse education). Secondly, if there's a range of fees, hard-nosed consumers will ask what's wrong with the discounted ones. Who wants to be the Aldi of Education?

(Willetts wrote The Pinch: How The Baby Boomers Stole Their Children's Future, a book about how his generation snaffled the good housing, free education, top pensions, healthcare, benefits etc. and denied the same to the current generation. Then he voted for benefit cuts, pension cuts, pay cuts, mass redundancies, tuition fees, EMA abolition, NHS cuts and on and on and on. Who says the Tories have no sense of irony?).

Yet another punch in the face from the government

Most governments, surveying a low-paid workforce and economy based on exporting manual work, would think that boosting education is the way to success.

Not this one: the 19 out of 28 multimillionaires who form the Cabinet like a compliant, uneducated, obedient workforce. They don't want to pay for education. After all, they can afford fees and the universities they go to own large amounts of land and possess huge bank accounts.

So they're cutting education funding - a billion or so last year, £940m today. No new equipment, no new books, no new staff, bigger classes and a worse experience all round. And don't go thinking that the massive new fees will help: they won't even cover the 80% cut in the teaching budget from last year.

What a dumb and depressing approach from supposedly the cleverest people in the country.

'Tis the season for humbug…

Paul Uppal should just shut up and sod off. Here's his contribution to the tuition fees debate:

I come from a working class background-seven children in a two-up, two-down. My parents took two jobs and I did not qualify for a grant because they supported my extended family in India. I worked my way through university. Is not it the case that it is not money, but individual personal ambition and aspiration that drives people?

Well. Distortion would be putting it mildly. My tears are rolling down my cheeks obviously. But has anyone heard of grants being refused for this reason? It's a lie. Paul Uppal paid no fees for his education - nobody did. Grants were available to almost everybody, and certainly were available to anyone from a 'working-class' family with seven children. By anybody's standard, such an account implies poverty, and therefore qualification for a grant.

Unless, of course, Uppal's telling porkies. Nobody was told by their local education authority how to spend their money: grants were distributed according to parental income and circumstances. If Uppal was refused a grant, it's because his parents were earning a lot of money.

I'm sickened by the sight of a multimillionaire property speculator not only denying his constituents the education he had, but preaching to them about the virtues of selfishness. His vision of humanity is horrifying: where is altruism, community spirit, the desire to serve mankind? Most politicians would at least nod to these virtues, but Paul - admirably in a way - is remarkably honest. He's in politics to look after himself. He's driven by 'personal ambition and aspiration' and there isn't room in that selfish little brain for a better vision of society.

I'm not angry. I'm sad. Sad that such a small, bitter and reactionary man, one so lacking both in intellect and empathy, can represent the people of this country.

If you want to hear a Conservative argument against fees (and Uppal was there to hear it), read the words of Julian Lewis:

I want to go back to that one occasion, in January 2001, when I was asked to supply my profile. I said:

"I grew up in Swansea and went to the same state grammar school as my father, Sam. The difference was that he had to leave at 14 to help his father as a tailor. He used to tell me,"

when I asked him, that I did not need to know about tailoring, because

"he would be the last of the tailors in my family,"

as now there was a system of students grants. I continued:

"He is an exceptionally intelligent man who would undoubtedly have succeeded at university if he had been able to complete his education in the late 1920s,"

in the same grammar school that I went to.

"The university grant system gave me my opportunity, and I never approved of the changeover to top-up loans-let alone for tuition fees."

I have been listening to some of the arguments-we are beginning to go round and round the same track-but I was particularly struck by the elegant process of ratiocination by my hon. Friend Nick Boles. He was able to make a convincing case that the more we charge people to go to university, the more people will go and the more poorer people will go. In that case, I am tempted to vote against the Government on the grounds that they are not charging enough. Perhaps we should charge quadruple fees, quintuple fees or even sextuple fees, to ensure that the entire population of the country can go to university.

University lobbying - 70s style

This is how they did it then, and no doubt how the élite universities do it now:



In honour of the government's decision that they don't need actual scientists on the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, I wanted to post a clip from 'The Challenge', a wonderful Yes Minister episode in which Dr. Cartwright explains to the hapless minister that experts are kept away from ministers because they just complicate the issue with their inconvenient facts and knowledge. But it's not on Youtube. Damn.

The Tories put up a 'facts about fees' website which was so misleading that I won't link to it, but I will link to what academics do best: taking apart those 'facts about fees'. Very instructive.

You should also read this great article about 'the death of the public university in England' (thanks to Ms. E-Mentor). Wales and Scotland are fine because they're not ruled by Tories or Lib Dems.

Facing down the apocalypse

If you're up for some philosophy and fighting talk, read this excellent piece on our current political and economic condition. 

Ask your MPs: was your education free? Find out what your MP’s degree was in. If they are a Lib-Dem, ask them how they can sleep at night. Ask them whether they want to be re-elected next time. Tell them everyone regards them as a traitor and a hypocrite – unless they do the right thing, unless they vote the right way. If your MP is Conservative, ask them whether they want to be re-elected. Ask them: is this vandalism ‘conservative’? Is it ‘big society’? If they are Labour, ask them whether they want to be re-elected. They can reverse this.

Also tell them this: the theoretical and ideological underpinning of right-wing economic theory and ideology since Thatcher has been based on the classical economics of Adam Smith. Which is great. This is because, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith argues that education falls into the category of a non-economic institution that must nevertheless be funded by the state, because the economy can’t fund the right sort of education (namely, putatively ‘useless’ education); and without an artistic and cultural education society and the economy will fall into a vicious circle of decline and be unable even to provide a workforce, let alone ‘lead the way’ in a ‘global knowledge economy’.

But if they don’t care about other people and other places, then tell them this: if you kill a city or a town’s university, you rip millions upon millions of pounds out of that place’s local economy. You devastate its infrastructure. So it’s not just others who are hurt. You may lose your ‘Marksies’ Food Hall, your Jamie’s Kitchen, your theatre, your art galleries and your ‘cheaper car insurance’.

Tomorrow is meant to be a national day of action - sit-ins, teach-ins, school walkouts: if nobody turns up to my class, I won't be too sad.  

I'm so very proud

Two of my excellent students made this video for the fight against education funding cuts, and I know virtually everyone in it.



(I make a cameo appearance, complete with Penfold voice and Eric Pickles's spare chins).

A cunning plan to finance education for the public good

This is from a quality article in today's Guardian. It makes sense to me.

The current frontbenches, in all political parties, illustrate the kind of person who went to a top university when tuition fees did not exist – people from intellectual, financial and class elites. There may be many more universities, and many more students. But the introduction of tuition fees has not much changed that past demographic.

Actually, those more expensive educations at more prestigious institutions, unless the Russell group gets its way and no cap is placed on fees, are likely to be subsidised by the inflated fees of students receiving cheaper educations at less prestigious institutions. It has already been predicted that no university will stay far below the cap, because a "cheap course" will advertise the institution and its course as "less good". Not so very progressive. 

Browne and his allies will argue that his reforms will in some ways return higher education to its more stable past, but better. In all likelihood though, the elite will still go to the elite universities, which will have gone private, charging as they see fit. The bright-without-background will go to the public universities, which will come to seem more like polytechnics, except that the students will be paying for their betterment and any success that may come with it. Which group will bag the best careers? The already affluent, or the self-improvers? Like all market mechanisms, this one will ensure that the rich get richer and the poor, if they make headway at all, will do it more slowly, and more encumbered. 

How can one ensure that all who benefit from higher education contribute? The government benefits, because so many graduate jobs are in the public services. Employers of graduates benefit, because therein lie profits. Graduates benefit, and so do their proud parents, because therein lie achieved hopes and expectations. Society benefits the individuals in it to a greater or a less extent. How to neatly encapsulate all those benefits, so that all those who are enriched by them make their contribution? I can dimly imagine something that might work. It could be called "higher-rate general taxation". Or something.

In defence of humanities

The core of the Tory Scum-Lib Dem attack on education is a denial that it's a public good - especially the humanities.

I'm very well aware that signing petitions doesn't do anything (a million people marched against the Iraq war), but it's a gesture of opposition. So please do sign this one:

We are a group of academics, students and business people who are campaigning for recognition of the humanities and social sciences as an invaluable public good that should not be abandoned to market forces.

If you think that university degrees should enhance employability, then the Humanities and Social Sciences matter because they develop crucial skills, including:

* Critical thinking and analysis

* Capacity to understand and negotiate cultural difference

* Creativity and imagination 

For the universities to offer contemporary relevance tomorrow, or in ten years’ time, they need to be in a position to decide what they teach today on intellectual grounds, not on the basis of whether or not a subject happens to be “popular”.

The UK government is currently preparing a White Paper on higher education. We urge them to reject the impoverished vision of higher education outlined in the Browne report, which surrenders everything to market forces. This is not only an impoverished vision of the role of universities in society, but also an impoverished vision of the future of Britain as a democracy, a society, a culture – and an economy.

We urge them instead to pursue a bold vision, to recognise the humanities and social sciences as a public good, and to invest in their future rather than leaving them to the vagaries of the market. 

Education cuts: keep on fighting

Don't get fooled into thinking that you've done your bit by protesting on Wednesday and now it's time to accept what's happening.

The education cuts are part of an all-out assault on the the kind of country the British have built. The poor and the vulnerable are being abandoned to the cold wind of free-market capitalism without benefitting from the positive aspects (did you know that FTSE 100 directors' pay went up 45% this year?).

Fight the cuts and fight the ideological attack on education as a public good. Protest when other groups - workers, the unemployed and the sick - are attacked.

Join the next wave of student protest on Wednesday 24th November. Sign the petition. Even - if you must - join the Facebook group. Don't just fade away.

They think it's all over… it is now.

The BBC live stream is a good way to follow the student protests, for good or ill.

The demonstration has certainly monopolised the coverage, which is great. However - rolling news is desperate for material, so it's not too difficult. Students are good at this stuff: Twitter and iPhones mean there's an avalanche of material flowing in.

However: I suspect that the coverage would have ended hours ago if the demonstration had remained entirely peaceful. Both sides know this. Unfortunately, the media have form in egging on the behaviour of a minority and then running it as representative (as they are now). On the other side, some protestors will be only too aware that polite protest doesn't get the attention of the press, while others are ready for any opportunity to sell sectarian papers, chant slogans and smash a few windows.

I wish I'd been there - the issue is more important than a couple of seminars - but I also have a responsibility to the students who for whatever reason, chose to come to class. Had I been there, I'd not have supported violence in this context (it's not the Miner's Strike) and the hijacking of the protest by splinter groups, but I certainly support the occupation of Tory HQ. Compared with other countries (and the UK in the 1960s and 1970s) this is mild stuff.

If you need a reminder that the vast majority of students on the march were peaceful and determined to make their point clearly, he's a video of their reaction to one of the provocateurs chucking a fire extinguisher off the roof of Tory HQ: a round of boos and the chant 'stop throwing shit'. Good on them.



Let's hope this march is the first in a massive series of resistance actions from all sectors of society in the coming years.

That's certainly true in some students' minds. Sky News has such a bad reputation now (think Kay Burley - and here -  and Adam Boulton) that their live broadcasts are fair game, as the Guardian reports:

Sky News ran into difficulty about 5 minutes ago when they attempted to go live to one of their reporters on the ground. She appeared to lose her temper as students standing around her began to pitch in with comments like 'ladies and gentlemen the insurrection has started.

"They just want to shout people down," said said, turning to them and telling them (as well as the studio) that the vast majority of people at the protest didn't support what has happened.

Sky cut the link, with an anchor saying, not entirely convincingly : "I'm not sure what was happening there."

So, how's the student demo going?

Well, it looks like several more thousands on top of the predicted 24,000 students - possibly 50,000. It's got a bit tasty in places - the Tory Scum Headquarters has been raided and had a few windows broken.

Fires burning, eggs thrown, windows smashed, activists with scarves across their faces barricaded into a marble-clad lobby after exchanging punches with police, all to chants of "Tory Scum". Feels like the 1980s here at Millbank Towers.

Protesters are shouting: "Nick Clegg, we know you, you're a fucking Tory too."

Footage of Nick Clegg promising to scrap tuition fees was met with chants of "wanker, wanker", while Sally Hunt, UCU's general secretary, led the rally in a cry of "You say Tories, I say scum." 

I know it's slightly irresponsible - the rightwing newspapers will feature this isolated violence as though it was common and representative - but I have some sympathy. Compared with the French and the Greeks, a few broken windows is nothing, and perhaps a useful sign of the depth of feeling about this crude and reactionary policy. (Suggestions that I'm leading the chants are unfounded - but I hope they got 'Tory Scum' from meticulous reading of Plashing Vole).

Unfortunately, it was probably orchestrated by one of the ridiculous micro-splinter-sects that gather around any demo. They probably think it's the first blow in the people's uprising, and it just isn't.

I'd prefer a mass outbreak - an invasion of parliament or something like that. A few idiots breaking windows can be used as rightwing propaganda, whereas the lesson of the Poll Tax riots is that ordinary people can be provoked into disorder if the cause is just. A meaningful attack on a well-chosen target is political - a few broken windows is little more than vandalism.

Back to the 1980s is good: the Tories and their Lib Dem butlers need to realise that they don't have the consent of the population, no matter how often they repeat 'we're all in this together'. It's clear we're not: the poor are going to suffer much, much more.

These boots were made for marching

Today's the day of the big National Union of Students and Universities and Colleges Union demonstration against this government's short-sighted and reactionary attack on higher education.

I'm not there. This is heartbreaking. It's a cause dear to me, and I love a good demonstration. The repetitive chants, the splinter groups plugging tired old dogma, the newspaper sellers, the thrills that rush through the crowd as someone does something naughty, the witty placards, the thwack of banner on helmet, the sinister clicking of hooves on concrete and the smug pretence that turning up is somehow rebellious (or useful). Feeling superior to the office workers staring at us through plate glass, the tiny, tiny possibility of serious violence.

Happy days…

Seriously though, I think the presence of thousands of people vocally objecting to a dumb policy is important, though it won't make any policy difference. These bastards need to know that there is opposition, that they don't have a mandate for all this. Certainly any Liberal Democrats with a university constituency should be shivering with fear. After publicly signing solemn promises to end student fees, they should know that they're guaranteed to lose their seats in 2015.

Follow the march here.

Here's Stewart Lee on the subject:

Again with the pointless questions, Paul

Yesterday saw the government attack the principle of egalitarian access to higher education and of education as a good thing per se. You'd think, perhaps, that an MP with 23,000 students in his constituency, and a university which is one of the biggest economic forces in the area, one which is in severe danger under the new system, would stand up for us.

I wouldn't think that at all. If I saw Paul Uppal stand up in the education debate, I'd just expect another (literally) pointless platitude that makes him sound attentive without actually doing any damn good at all.

I'd be right, too.

Is the Minister aware of the words of Michael Arthur, chairman of the Russell group of universities, this morning? He said of the coalition's funding initiative that it sends a signal that the Government recognise

"the importance of higher education to the future of our country, its economy and our ability as universities to help the country out of recession."

Well done Paul. The Hegemon isn't in the Russell Group. We provide high quality (mostly) education for local, mature and previously struggling students. Exactly the kind of learners who are going to be cast adrift. We're going to lose our jobs, and our students are going to lose what for many is their only chance to escape a dreary life of unfulfilling labour.

But that's OK. You've allegedly got a politics degree from Warwick, a nakedly capitalist Russell Group institution. Never mind us.

One other interesting note. David Willetts is the Universities Minister who yesterday imposed fees of up to £9,000 on students, and removed all state funding for arts, humanities and social sciences. David Willetts is also the minister who recently published a book called The Pinch, in which he explained that his generation enjoyed all the benefits of a decent state: free education, student grants, final salary pensions, cheap housing, etc. etc., then withdrew them from the generations below. I didn't realise that he was actually suggesting thing as a great wheeze and a blueprint for government. That's why he's Tory Scum.

Out of the mouths of babes and infants

Quite literally, in this case.

The government's removing several billion pounds from higher education. But they're putting £150 million in a fund for poorer students to go to university (not sure how there are going to be enough teachers if they all choose business and law).

Where's it coming from? You'll love this.

Michael Gove's taking the money from the free school meals budget. Half a million children of the poor can go hungry.

The government will announce a £150m bursary system to encourage the most deprived students to apply, money that will be saved by scrapping free school meals to half a million primary schoolchildren.

What can I say? Tory Scum.

We don't need no education…

…seems to be the government's message.

Today they issue their response to the Browne Report. This government of Oxbridge multimillionaires (all educated at private schools and then at no charge) asked a multimillionaire former oil company chairman with a little problem telling the truth to courts, and they got a multimillionaire businessman's response, which is exactly what they wanted.

Everyone's horrified by the disgraceful decision to at least double the fees paid by students, and rightfully so. But a lot of people haven't quite picked up on the - to be generous - philosophical reasoning behind it.

To Browne, educating the young is no longer a good thing in itself, something the public and the government should support. If you follow this logic, then it's time to abolish free state schooling. After all, every parent should be willing to invest in their child's future, and handing cash to the school of your choice should lead to better and more useful education.

Instead, it's a consumer choice which should be provided through a free market. The customer is now going to be wholly in charge.

Perhaps that sounds like a good thing. Students will pay for useful courses and useless ones will wither and die. I'm not convinced. The problem with this economic model is that it assumes that the customer is always right because he or she is always perfectly informed and makes rational decisions.

This is, of course, utter, utter nonsense. Were you an entirely sane and reasonable individual at 18? I certainly wasn't, nor do I think I should have been. I'd been locked up in a poor quality and unpleasant school for several years. My educational performance was lower than it should have been: under Browne's plans, that means my 'customer choice' will be limited to a narrow ranger of poorer universities. Furthermore, I was determined to do a course I'd enjoy - the idea of choosing something boring and hateful because it would get me a higher-paying job was - and is - horrifying. But this is the logic of the new system: at 18, you must logical and cold enough to somehow work out what the job market will be like for the rest of your working life, swallow your dreams and knuckle down to three years of drudgery, for which you'll pay £18,000 in fees alone. (And let's not forget that the less you enjoy a course, the worse you'll do)

Unless, of course, you're from a rich family, in which case you'll pay the fees for an exciting and fulfilling course without noticing, and worry about employment later. This leads to an education system predicated on a lot of vocational courses with a select few very privileged students doing the fun ones. As Stefan Collini says in this article,

'it is a necessary truth about markets that they tend to replicate and even intensify the existing distribution of economic power. 'Free competition' between rich and poor means Harrods for the former and Aldi for the latter: that's what the punters have chosen'.

What future does an obscure language have, or history, or English, come to that? Why would you become a primary school teacher, a social worker or an environmental expert? What if all the potential doctors decide that 7 years + is too long and too expensive compared with the rewards available from doing a business degree and going into hedge funds? Well, says Browne, we'll support certain courses - which isn't a free market at all, but a system of bribes subverting his supposedly purist consumer model.

The real damage of the Browne report is that it, like Gradgrind in Dickens' Hard Times, only understands education as something you buy to make yourself a lot of money later on. Paying higher fees won't even get you a better education: the money is meant to replace some of the teaching grant universities get from the government, not to add to it. So you'll be paying more to sit in bigger classes with fewer books and less contact time. The idea that universities will compete on fees is a bold-faced lie: they all need to charge the maximum just to avoid going too far backwards. Massive cuts are built into the plan regardless of the fees issue. 'Efficiency' is the cry - but we're already cut to the bone. I teach more than ever, and therefore teach worse than ever. I have no time for research, so I'm losing touch with my field.

Course are going to thrive or fall based on 'student satisfaction'. Now, I want my students to be happy on my courses. I don't want to bore them, and I want them to feel intellectually challenged. However: happiness doesn't always flow from me being passionate about 18th-century Welsh literature, for instance. A student may well be unhappy because their interests lie in other fields in the subject, whereas I feel that in 20 years time, they'll understand that knowing about Renaissance drama will enrich their lives and inform their understanding of the bits they were more interested in.

There has to be some room for professional judgement. I know what makes for a rounded degree in English, or Cultural Studies. An 18-year-old just doesn't, because she hasn't had the chance to experience the richness and variety of the texts or the theoretical ways of thinking about them. You wouldn't let a toddler choose sweets for dinner every day, and you shouldn't let a teenager decide what universities teach. Instead, you ask for the trust of those students, and rely on their sound good sense to understand that guidance from an expert is in their best interests - that way, they get a good grounding in the field while (hopefully) discovering specific areas which really excite them, areas of which they may never have heard.

Nor does happiness flow from the marking system. A student who fails an essay may well blame me or the course for which she's paying so much money, whereas I see assignments as ways to gauge what's working and what needs attention. A student who leaves a class thinking she's understood everything there is to know on a book is happy… and wrong.

Of course, I can produce happy students very easily. I can reduce their workload, remove long or difficult or boring texts from the schedule, teach endless courses on Twilight and Skins, give high grades to everybody, tell them what to think and never ask a difficult question. After all, my new job will be to serve the students a degree with their lattés, not to assist them in educating themselves. Once I acquire a reputation as basically a chilled-out entertainer, they'll flock in, assured of high grades and an easy ride.

Can a student every be fully informed about the job market, and about the new education market? She may feel trapped in a poor course because her A-levels went wrong, or because she went to a poor school. Can a student who's only ever experienced my courses judge quality? Where's the comparison?

I feel utterly sorry for the next wave of students. They're being handed the responsibility for the continuation or closure of their institutions, and told (by people who did whatever degree they fancied, for free) that they're only allowed to choose courses which will make them rich. Not useful, not fulfilling, but rich.

To them goes the responsibility for deciding what 'efficient' means: this is the kind of efficiency which saw Arabic language provision close in the 90s. Courses will end up like mobile phones, flogged as fashion items to people we'll be encouraged to treat as fickle and greedy.

What Browne represents is a mechanical, reductive, selfish and greedy philosophy of education as a means to get rich. Not as a way to enrich your mind or your community, but the equivalent of going down the bookies' with your kids' child benefit and hoping that it'll pay out.

There's no room for culture here: 'Higher education matters because it drives innovation and economic transformation'. Farewell a career in diplomacy, in education, in social work, in anything that doesn't make heaps of money for the individual (and the destructiveness of that job isn't a problem - your degree could lead you to arms dealing, being a loan shark or whatever - that's efficiency).

Do I sound like a punch-drunk boxer yet, repeating myself ad infinitum? I'm just so angry and dumbfounded by Browne's lack of intelligence, if that's what it is. I can't help feeling that this education model will work perfectly for him and Cameron's class: they'll have the money to send their kids to delightful ancient seats of learning to do delightful degrees (Fine Art, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, PPE) with individual tutors while our resentful kids will sit in crowded halls listening to someone like me (on a screen) delivering sessions on how to write a business letter.

Democracy, in the form of the state, has washed its hands of education. Never again will it express an opinion on what might be good for our students. Instead, a (rigged) market will decide - just like the 'efficient' banking system led to a perfect economy.

To the rich go the spoils: 'twas ever thus.

Remember kids: the Tories have always been evil. New Labour was moderately evil. The Lib Dems specifically begged students to vote for them to avoid higher fees. Don't forget.

To study, or not to study

This paper is a bit involved (because it's a proper academic study) but it's worth reading. It explores whether getting a degree is economically worthwhile, especially when fees rise massively.

Ordinary Least Squares estimates show high average returns for women that does not differ by subject. For men, we find very large returns for Law, Economics and Management but not for other subjects – we even find small negative returns in Arts, Humanities and other Social Sciences. Quantile Regression estimates suggest negative returns for some subjects at the bottom of the distribution, or even at the median. Degree class has large effects in all subjects suggesting the possibility of large returns to effort. Postgraduate study has large effects, independently of first degree class. A large rise in tuition fees across all subjects has only a modest impact on relative rates of return suggesting that little substitution across subjects would occur. The strong message that comes out of this research is that even a large rise in tuition fees makes little difference to the quality of the investment – those subjects that offer high returns (LEM for men, and all subjects for women) continue to do so. And those subjects that do not (especially OSSAH for men) will continue to offer poor returns.

There's good news and bad news.

For men, it's increasingly less economically viable: definitely not for humanities, and probably not even if you choose a science subject. If you want to study English, History, Politics or anything like it, you should view it as a luxury purchase, rather than as an investment. Which implies that only rich kids will do humanities, and they won't be choosing The Hegemon…

For women it's still worthwhile taking a degree, for a bad reason: women without degrees are paid even more badly in comparison to men than women with degrees.

Isn't life grand?

Not so hegemonic any more

My august institution's vice-chancellor has posted her response to the Browne report on education. It's thoughtful and useful.

The real horror is this bit:

Browne has gone beyond his original remit by suggesting that public funding or ‘subsidy’ for higher education be limited only to clinical training programmes (price group A) and priority programmes (price group B and potentially some of price group C). The removal of all HEFCE funding for bands D and C would remove 75% of our teaching grant (many other universities would lose over 90% of their teaching grants) and to replace this funding we would have to charge all students £6,500 a year.

This means essentially that Browne has offered on behalf of the HE sector that we give up all public funding for humanities, arts and social sciences.

One of the overlooked awful ideas is that student funding will be limited to those above a certain level of attainment. On the face of it, this sounds fine, until you think about all our mature students whose schooling didn't ever plan for university, the students who went to poor schools, those who've turned their lives around after wasting their time in school, and those discriminated against for various reasons while at school (for which there is lots of very good evidence).

I'd better look for a new job.

If you hate tuition fees, read this

Even if you're a fan, read this. I don't need to add anything, but here are some extracts:

There has been much talk about the mechanics of payback – when and at what rate – but few have contested Browne's premise: that students are essentially consumers who should pay for services they receive – the more upmarket, the higher the price.

Yet this is a radical departure from how we once conceived the public realm. Before Tony Blair introduced tuition fees, higher education was seen as a social good, enriching our whole society rather than merely an individual's future salary. It sounds quaint now, but the purpose of universities was to hand down to the next generation the stock of human knowledge and add to it. They were about learning rather than earning.

Until now we have assumed that once you walk through the door into a universal, publicly funded service, cash should not enter your mind. When you visit a doctor, you aren't asked which pills you'd prefer: expensive ones or the cheaper alternative. The idea would appal us. We expect a public service to be undifferentiated by cost.

Thanks to Browne and variability of student fees from college to college, higher education will no longer be like that. In the process a precedent has been set, one that could well be followed across the public sphere. From now on, it will be acceptable to identify the benefit recipients get from this or that service and ask them to pay more for it. We could well be looking at the dawn of what my colleague Aditya Chakrabortty calls the pay-as-you-go state.