A new government should usher in an era of fresh debate about higher education, moving beyond the same old questions

I’ll miss it really. In the next few days, the posters will slowly start to come down and half-read pamphlets will be thrown out. The candidates and their merry band of leafleteers will disturb us no more.

I know it hasn’t been so joyous for a lot of people (maybe they didn’t get the chance to pose with a life-size picture of Nick Clegg), but I think the doorstep chats have been quite fun. They’ve also confirmed something pretty obvious: tuition fees are the student issue of the decade.  

I’m going to skip over the well-worn arguments because they’ve had more than their fair share of our attention. The outburst of protest has been a worthy use of political capital and I don’t want interest to dwindle. But the 2004 fees hike has eclipsed all else. 

Over recent years, a great debate has broken out over who gets to come to university, and cost is just one part of it. Since Labour set a 50% target for admissions we’ve had to ask whether there’s such a thing as an ‘optimum’ student population. Otherwise, what should guide it? Demand? Economic need? The preservation of academic ‘integrity’? There’s a fierce debate to be settled, and the student body should be weighing in (I hope on the side of demand). 

Last summer, student numbers breached a government-imposed cap by roughly 22,000. According to Ucas, more than 30,000 applicants were turned away. Obviously it costs money to keep pumping more and more young people into higher education. I think the right policy response is to have a reserve – so in boom years, like the one just past, we can pick up the financial slack. If students want to extend the opportunities they’ve enjoyed to others, they’ll have to lobby for the extra cash. 

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to question the quality of degrees. Depressingly though, subjects like media studies or sociology have been swept dismissively aside without a vigorous student response.  

Surely in a time of strife for the newspaper industry – readers flocking online and investigative journalism on the slide, media studies is immensely important. I fail to see how it is any less worthy than History or Politics. Societies have been debating media influence since the dawn of the printing press, and we still haven’t found a happy balance between free speech and mass deceit. This is the stuff of All The President’s Men and Citizen Kane. If anything we should encourage more people to study it. 

There’s plenty of itty-bitty reform that students could be agitating for. I know I wasn’t the only doe-eyed first year to have their preconceptions shattered. It turns out, for many, that a personal tutor is the least personal relationship you’ll have at university. For those of us in the airy-fairy arts world, contact time means a couple hours per-module per-week. We’ve got stuff to read, but at some point it’d be good to understand it. 

This, admittedly, is one of the best things about tuition fees: ‘value-for-money’ has shot up the agenda. For £3000 you expect more than a smattering of seminars and a library card. It’s not an easy fix. Lots of resources are poured into research, and I’m not inclined to pull them. But there are things we could do. 

I think we’ve reached a point where ‘live’ lectures can be dumped. In my experience they’re hardly ever interactive and could easily be televised. There’s some raw pragmatism here but also some real opportunities. It would free up time for more seminars and more research. Students could watch online when it suits them, pausing, rewinding, maybe even shaving another hour from our busy, busy lives. Best of all, we could marshal the most talented speakers to cover more lectures, or bring several together for debate. That’d do something to mollify the bias marring some modules. 

Next time Hyde Park’s student streets bristle with campaigners, I hope these are the things we’ll talk about. It might not be as animating as the fees revolt. You might not feel the spirit of 1968 flooding through you. But swivel the guns of protest at something dull, and a more exciting education could edge closer.

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