Rightly rejecting the idea of lifting the cap on tuition fees in English universities, the higher education minister, Robert Halfon, last week urged the HE sector to read the signs of the times. “I just think we have to be real,” said Mr Halfon, “that we have to live in the world as it is, which is an incredibly difficult one faced by cost-of-living challenges.”
He was responding to increasingly loud warnings from vice-chancellors that a university funding crisis is becoming acute. Given the mounting level of debt already being taken on by less well-off students, it would indeed be wrong to pile yet more financial pressure on them. But when it comes to addressing the wider context of festering discontent on England’s campuses, it is Mr Halfon and the Conservative architects of a failing system who need to get real.
