Students will graduate to a life crippled with debts

Published: 12th December, 2010

• THE government is cutting money for university teaching by 80 per cent, much more than other services, and is making graduates pay the whole cost of most degrees. Students will be forced to choose the cheapest course, not what’s best for them – and will be paying back debts for 30 years.

Labour would avoid big cuts in university teaching grants and share the costs of higher education fairly.

The growth we need to combat the recession will not be found in these ideological cuts, but in encouraging industries to invest in new staff. Young people who could be helping work our way out of recession will be left in debt and without extra help to find work when they leave university saddled with huge loans.

The education maintenance allowance is so important in encouraging children from working-class backgrounds to have the opportunity of being able to attend higher, and maybe further, education. Limiting the social mobility this kind of allowance allows is highly unfair and certainly far from “progressive”, whatever the Coalition may claim.
Eileen Irvin
Islington resident and student

• AS a prospective student, I believe Lib Dem MPs should honour their pledge to vote against any increase in tuition fees. 

Having said that, I am truly gobsmacked by the two-faced posturing of Labour politicians on the issue. From the way they are acting you would think the proposals which are causing so much grief had nothing to do with them.

But which party was it that commissioned the Browne Report that recommended these increases in tuition fees? Which party was it that brought in tuition fees in the first place, despite it never being in their 1997 election manifesto?  Which party was it that introduced top-up fees for students despite a 2001 manifesto promise saying it  never would? The answer to all these questions is Labour. 

Labour doesn’t even have an alternative policy now.  
Sophie Bertrand
Highbury New Park, N5 

• IT was good to see our MP, Jeremy Corbyn, giving his full support to protesting students  and speaking about working-class students being priced out of universities or facing bills of £50,000 or more, because of the Con-Dems’ trebling of tuition fees (Students ‘paying for banking crisis’, November 26). 

There is also the effect the fees rise will have on services, business and the economy in general, as it could well lead to a shortage of graduates and people taking up highly skilled professions in a few years. Eventually, companies and organisations would have to entice qualified graduates from overseas to fill the shortages. 

The policy of trebling tuition fees could cost this country a lot more in the long run than will be generated in revenue by the increase. 
M Still
N5

• DO Islington’s Lib Dems support higher tuition fees or not (Lib Dems reject Clegg stand on tuition fees, December 3)? The other week, your front page made a big splash of Lib Dem councillor Greg Foxsmith’s honourable stand against tuition fee rises, saying the public would never trust Nick Clegg again (Top Lib Dem slams Clegg ‘betrayal’, November 19). Yet hidden away on page 15 is a statement from Councillor John Gilbert, their more senior finance shadow, saying he supports the tuition fee rises (Why we compromised on tuition fees, November 19). 

Put quite simply: Islington’s Lib Dems can’t pander to the local Tory right in the letters pages while playing to Islington’s left-leaning residents on the front page Whose side are they on? The Lib Dem-Tory government’s attack on our borough, or on the side of Islington’s residents? We have a right to know.  
Matt Creamer
Ex-Labour candidate, Highbury East