Higher Education Fees

In the short time available to me, I want to focus on the question that really vexes most people in all parts of this House: what effect do the different systems of university finance available to us have on social mobility? Will this Government's proposals encourage more people whose parents did not go to university to do so? As we have often heard, there are many very strong opinions in this House on the answer to that question. Many Members believe fervently that the fees proposed by the Government will deter people whose parents did not go to university and who come from families on low incomes from going to university. It is also true, as we heard earlier, that some opinion polls suggest that a very large proportion of people say that they will be deterred from going to university. Yet people do not always do what they say they are going to do—[Interruption.] We are all flawed. I have tried to find research to give us some facts to work with, because projections of what people will do are not nearly as interesting as the facts about what they have done. Several countries operate their university systems on the basis of quite substantial fees, chief among them the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, as well as ourselves. Unfortunately, there is not much research out there that goes into the question of the kinds of people who go to university, but fortunately I have found one such piece of research conducted by a group called Higher Education Strategy Associates. It carried out a truly systematic comparison of what it calls educational equality and it discovered, extraordinarily and against our expectations, that high fees do not deter people from low-income families from going to university.