The View From Here

So university students are going to have to pay part of the cost of their courses. There are some who regard this as the end of civilisation as we know it. Others regretfully accept it as inevitable. In my view, it is a healthy development.

In the past decade university education has been allowed to grow - more than double in size, in fact - without much thought being given to its shape or direction. At a time when youth unemployment was a potentially serious threat to social cohesion, it was convenient to have something that more and more young people would volunteer to do - providing, of course, from the Treasury's point of view, that it did not cost too much.

Expansion has therefore been on the cheap. The amount of money that universities receive per student has been severely cut back - by 30 per cent in the past six years - and students' maintenance grants were first frozen, then reduced. In consequence, we have impoverished universities and students with not enough to live on.

But more than that, we have had a flowering of courses, such as tourism, media studies and various socio-cultural combinations, which are superficially attractive and relatively inexpensive to put on. Students have been prepared to take them as a free "good", if that is all they have been able to get into. Whether they will still want to sign up when they have to pay remains to be seen.

Paying gives power to students. It will cause them to think much more seriously about what part a degree course might play in their lives - what it could do for them and where it could lead. They are also likely to be more demanding and so become a more effective means of quality assurance than anything the vice-chancellors or funding councils can devise. As a result we should get better degree courses.

The size of the system will also be more in the hands of the students. With a significant contribution from them, there need be no arbitrary ceiling on expansion. But there could also be some contraction, if that is what realistic judgements about the value of a degree were to determine.

Paradoxically, having to pay fees could even help students financially. In recent years they have been meeting more of their living costs at university, but this trend has been largely unacknowledged. As the maintenance grant has been reduced it has been replaced to some extent by a government-subsidised loan system. But surveys have shown that the maximum grant and loan together fall about pounds 1,000 a year below what is necessary for a typical university student to live on. Hence many students have been slipping into unforeseen debt and finding themselves having to pay high interest charges to banks and other lenders.

The corollary of requiring students to pay fees is to put in place an equitable mechanism to enable them to raise the money that they need, as painlessly as possible. Under present proposals, repayments will only be triggered when the financial benefits of higher education begin to show through in the salary, and they will be over an extended period. The position of students from lower-income backgrounds will be protected by means-tested exemptions.

The universities should benefit, too. They have been limping along on inadequate funding, unable to plan sensibly. Providing the money goes to the universities - and it is a big proviso, because in Australia, which is some way ahead of us in introducing charges, the government decided to keep part of what was raised - the universities will increasingly be able to respond strategically to students' wishes, expressed through which courses they are willing to pay for.

Given the much greater say students will have in the future of the universities, it is perhaps surprising that more ways have not been found for employers to back their requirements by making systematic contributions to the costs. I would also have thought that Dearing and the Government could have gone further, in allowing universities freedom to price their courses so as to become even more sensitive to the supply of students and to what employers want. The Government would still be able to intervene in a more market- led system of this kind by offering merit scholarships, selectively supporting students in certain subjects, like science and engineering, and giving grants to particular sections of the community - for example, minority groups.

But that may be for the future. As technology advances, it will free up more time to allow more people to engage in education for longer. It is important that the time is not just occupied but spent wisely. Paying towards tuition is an important way in which students can ensure that higher education serves them, and that the courses on offer mean something and lead somewheren

The writer is professor of policy research and director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Brunel University.