Cutting tuition fees misses the point. We need to overhaul the whole system | Matt Waddup

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There are good proposals in the Augar review, but it doesn’t confront the real problem: our marketised university system

There are lots of good proposals in today’s Augar review of post-18 education and funding in England, including the restoration of maintenance grants for the poorest students, new funding opportunities for adult learners, and the expansion of further education colleges. Yet its downfall is that it fundamentally fails to grapple with the contradictions at the core of our marketised education system. As such, it gets some big calls wrong.

For starters, the review correctly notes the plight of further education thanks to a decade of underinvestment, but the welcome call for increased spending is balanced out in a “rob Peter to pay Paul”-style raid. It will leave universities facing real terms cuts of 11% over the next three years – cuts that, if realised, would leave universities billions of pounds worse off and damage students, staff and the UK’s academic capacity.

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2XiZMGI

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