What was being floated might allow straight-A students who have tens of thousands of pounds to hand to buy their way into Oxbridge
Thin-end-of-the-wedge arguments are often lazy arguments, but glance back at the last quarter century in higher education you can see they have a place. When the very first loans began eating up maintenance grants, the spin was that whereas students could reasonably foot living costs, education itself would of course remain free. The line held for somewhat less than a decade, before the Dearing review proposed the first fees. New Labour implemented them, this time with the reassurance – repeated in its 2001 manifesto – that the sector was being put on a sustainable footing, so as to forever preclude university-specific charges, which would deter the poor from elite courses. By 2004, though, the argument had shifted on to the form that such top-up fees should take. Although backbenchers fitted a tight cap, Tony Blair forced the principle through. By now he regarded it as commonsensical for graduates of top courses to pay more, and he insisted top-ups were the inescapable corollary of the state investing in university for the half of the population who he hoped would attend.
Last year the coalition tripled the fees cap and snatched all subsidy from humanities teaching after the aim of getting half of all youngsters to university was quietly dropped. These fresh moves towards pay as you learn stirred anger on campuses and splitting headaches for the Lib Dems. But it closely followed a Browne report built on the firm logical footings of the now ubiquitous view of education as a financial investment. And the universities minister, David Willetts, a thoughtful and decent man, was proposing no more than another brick in the wall of the educational market when he told Monday's Guardian that he was looking at expanding "off-quota" places, which in plain English means places which could be auctioned off to the highest qualified bidder. As with private patients in NHS hospitals, the pragmatic case is easy enough to make – a public institution can cream in resources from the monied, and use them to service the broader community. But if Mr Willetts had cast his eyes up from the economics textbook, he would have spotted the obvious flaw. As educationalist Sir Peter Lampl, ordinarily no friend of the left, put it: "Students from privileged backgrounds are already way over-represented at our top universities and this will make matters worse."
A body swerve followed during the day. Having been on the BBC in the morning discussing how candidates who had made their grades but not been chosen for their course might harness private means, in the afternoon Mr Willetts headed for an emergency debate in the Commons, where he protested that his only aim was enabling charities to bypass the regular rationing of places by sponsoring students, as businesses already can. Between the two Willetts engagements, people clocked that what was being floated might allow those among the growing band of straight-A students who happened to have tens of thousands of pounds to hand to buy their way into Oxbridge. No matter whether this is efficient or might free up resources for the poorer, it is flatly unfair.
The business secretary, Vince Cable, had a hand in choreographing Mr Willetts's boomerang dance. The Lib Dems certainly cannot afford to slip further down the market road just now. But it was Dr Cable who sold the pass on the graduate tax he once wanted, and supported higher fees in return for important but obscure tweaks to loans and fees. There is no longer a line in the sand against colleges viewing themselves as commercial suppliers in a global market. Until that basic framework is challenged, the idea of places for sale will not be banished. Indeed, rich home students might start lobbying for the right to be treated like wealthy foreigners, who already buy their way in. Mr Willets was humiliated yesterday, but unless the drift of events is challenged, history will judge he was merely ahead of his time.