Education Quandary

'I have two small children and am shocked to hear universities are likely to start charging £10,000 a year for a degree course. How are ordinary families like ours going to be able to send their children to university?'

Anyone with an income over £30,000 and children under 13 needs to start worrying now, because one way or another the cost of a university degree is set to increase.

The Government is shuffling its feet on exactly how, and won't now set out its proposals until early next year, partly because of internal arguments, and partly because it is scared witless of the wrath of middle-class parents who are going to feel it the most. But it knows it has to do something. British universities are going to the wall. Their funding has been held down for years, while student numbers have exploded. They are £10bn in the red, they can't attract top staff, buildings need repair, and lectures and seminars are stuffed to overflowing. And, really, what's the point of a university education at all, if it's all going to be so fourth-rate and threadbare?

One proposal is to allow individual universities to set their own annual "top-up" fees. But it is only the aggressively ambitious Imperial College, London, which has put a £10,000-plus tag on this. Others would probably levy more modest charges – £2,500 is one figure being bandied about. And in a market economy, different universities, and even different courses at the same university, will probably have very different price tickets attached. Add into that picture some mix of scholarships, student loans, graduate taxes and means-tested grants, and the top-up tuition pill, although still painful to swallow, looks unlikely to be the choking £10,000-a-year of recent reports.

Even so, thousands of parents will feel the pinch, and Donna Bradshaw, a director of the financial advisers Fiona Price & Partners, advises: start saving now. Exactly how will depend on a family's means, attitude to risk, and time scale. But one "secret weapon", she says, can be the family mortgage, which can be made to work in all kinds of ways to suit particular purposes. Another avenue might be persuading big-hearted grandparents to make an investment now in order to help their grandchildren later.

She also suggests getting children involved in any financial decisions that parents have to take, so that they come to understand exactly what it takes to pay for their education, and expecting them to find jobs and make their own contribution when they get to working age.

Because, tuition fees apart, today's "must-have" students expect their university years to come equipped with every electronic comfort, regular foreign travel, and a termly alcohol allowance equivalent to the gross national product of a small African nation.

"But there always comes a point when you can't do any more," says Ms Bradshaw. So maybe a culture where more students are forced to realise that going to university is a costly privilege, rather than the knee-jerk rite-of-passage it has come to be, will not be entirely a bad thing in some quarters.

READERS' VIEWS

It is not much consolation to your correspondent that, unless extra funding is found for universities, they will either cease to exist or not be worth attending, as they will no longer be able to reach the level of excellence needed to justify the term. If it is not possible to fund them through general taxation, fees it will have to be. If fees do come in, perhaps you should think not in terms of "sending your child to university" as if it was an automatic progression from school. Instead, you could encourage your son or daughter to work for a few years and return to university when they are mature enough to appreciate the opportunities it offers. In my experience, mature students get far more out of university education than 18-year-olds.

Jane Kay, Faculty of Law, University of the West of England, Bristol

If top-up fees were brought in now, neither I nor any of my housemates could continue with our degrees. None of us come from wealthy families and all our parents have had to make big sacrifices to help us. Because of this, we have all had to take out all the loans that we can, and will be leaving university next year with debts that it will take us years to pay off. We just couldn't manage if we had to pay out more, so higher fees would mean that people like us would be barred from higher education.

Gay Somerfield, Manchester

Gordon Brown wants a graduate tax, not top-up fees, and he is right. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development recently estimated that over his or her lifetime, a British graduate will earn £400,000 more than someone without a degree. A graduate tax is a fair way of getting higher education funding from the people who have benefited from it, while top-up fees penalise students from poorer homes. Either they will not be able to go to university at all, or they will be forced to consider only cheaper, and maybe only local, institutions, even though they might be high-fliers who are able to aim for the top.

Donald Milay, London

NEXT WEEK'S QUANDARY

I have a daughter who was born in late July and is supposed to start school next year, when she will only be four years and two months old. I feel this is far too young for "proper" school and would like to hold her back a year. Can I do this, and what would be the effect on her if I did?

Send your letters or quandaries to Hilary Wilce, to reach her by next Monday, 11 November, at The Independent, Education Desk, Second Floor, Independent House, 191 Marsh Wall, London E14 9RS; or fax 020-7005 2143; or send e-mails to h.wilce@btinternet.com. Please include details of your postal address. Readers whose letters are printed will receive a Berol Combi Pack containing a cartridge pen, handwriting pen and ink eraser

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