Scrapping student grants is a cynical and regressive step

The truly staggering thing about the Government’s decision to axe what little grant funding remained for poor university students and convert it into another means-tested loan was not how they got away with it – the use of a bizarre Parliamentary tool that allows legislators to shove through controversial laws without proper scrutiny on the floor of the debating chamber was surprising enough – but quite why they decided to do it at all. It is anathema to Conservatism, and it is among the most counter-intuitive socio-economic policies I’ve ever heard.

If the incessant talk of strivers and skivers hasn’t sufficiently bored the point home (and bored is the right word), David Cameron and his gang are supposed to be on the side of those “getting on in life”. By any measure, that “getting on” might reasonably include studying for a university degree and improving one’s lifelong earning prospects as a result.

To try to get on in this way is even more admirable – by the Tories’ bootstrap-pulling standards, at the very least – if the decision to study is not the unthinking consequence of finding oneself at the age of 18 with not much else in the diary, but taken despite (or because of) financial and other responsibilities to partners, children, parents, and so on. Enrolling at university in that case is a leap of hope and of faith: that there is a chance to change something about one’s prospects; that if you work hard, you can do better; and that if you take that decision, the Government will support you in your efforts.

All that faith, and for what? The Government is doing away with the levers of social mobility altogether.

There has already been criticism of the decision to abandon the concept of a student grant. These attacks have pointed out that forcing poorer, older, sometimes disabled students, or those from minority backgrounds, to take on more debt to study will simply put them off altogether. All that is true – but there’s even more to it than that. There’s a ripple effect that has gone unnoticed, but is deeply damaging.

Means-tested grants for the poorest undergraduates were retained while all other lines of student support became loans because they removed a final but fundamental barrier between the classes. They allowed poorer students the freedom their wealthier classmates took for granted: to choose an institution and to select a degree course for its own merit, not with one eye on the additional costs it might accidentally incur. The grant didn’t do anything so bold as level the playing field, but it kept the bumps at scaleable height.

Without a grant to iron things out, choice is no longer free. It means the poorer candidate choosing a less prestigious university which is closer to home to avoid the high cost of rent. It means choosing a course that doesn’t require spending on tech or tools to help complete it. It means choosing a safe subject that trains a candidate for a profession, or over education for the love of it. It means not taking a risk. It means settling, not “striving”. It is making the best of a situation, not the best of oneself.

After musician David Bowie and actor Alan Rickman passed away last week, a meme did the rounds on social media calling for investment in education; without the art schools of the 60s there would have been no Ziggy Stardust, it claimed. And now, with the possibility of study for its own sake across all the disciplines removed, this generation and the next cannot be assured of reaching its true potential.

So why is Cameron persisting? Since the Government already predicts fewer and fewer students loans will be fully repaid, it’s already lending out the same amount of money and not expecting to get it back.

There is, of course, a simple – and cynical – explanation: converting grants into loans makes the public finances look much stronger. What a shame that the Treasury can’t think more carefully about the economic strength of its own people: allow people to lift themselves up, to be inspired, and they will create and earn wealth which returns itself to the Treasury through income tax. Ask them to accept their lot, and they’ll accept a lot less from themselves too.