How can we keep university study accessible and affordable?
Dr Steve McCabe has been a lecturer at Birmingham City University since 1987 and has seen firsthand how the world of higher education has changed over the years.
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00:00In my 30-odd years of being in academia, students have gone from being consumers, if I should
00:07use that expression. It's not necessarily that they passively enjoy education, but it's
00:13changed the dynamics. Of course, students do go in as paying customers. Of course, the
00:18whole aspect of student fees, and most particularly when it was set at over £9,000, was to make
00:26universities much more competitive. Indeed, there is a league system that's always been
00:29there and we see students applying in huge numbers and oversubscribed to certain universities
00:35and less so for others. It's created this interesting market, which in better times
00:41was sustainable. The difficulty we have, of course, now is that for a variety of reasons,
00:46universities are finding their income stream is now less certain. Of course, it's making
00:52the continuous survival of some universities less certain than they might otherwise like
00:57to be. The worry is that the majority of this debt will never be paid off, with most
01:01being written off after 40 years. University study is now more accessible than ever, but
01:06how can we keep it that way? This amount of liability that students have at the end would
01:11increase if it went up to 15,000, 20,000. Indeed, do we want to end up in a situation
01:17like America where students go to university and your parents have to save from the moment
01:23they're born to be able to afford it? The difficulty is we've ended up in the worst
01:28of all places, a system which students are not particularly happy with, and their parents
01:33for that matter, and the universities are not particularly happy because they're not
01:36bringing enough money in to afford it. I have no instant solutions and I suspect that in
01:41the many things that the new Starmer government have got to look at will be the affordability
01:47and the funding of universities, but there are no easy answers. Of course, it's always
01:51about pumping extra money in, and of course the government have got lots of other priorities
01:55to deal with before they get to universities.