- guardian.co.uk, Sunday January 26 2003 02.15 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday January 26 2003
As we were commiserating, a couple of the American graduate students, overhearing, interrupted, saying: 'Consider yourselves lucky - we already owe $40,000 [£25,000].'
Such a sum seemed unthinkable to us British students who had never stopped to question our right to a place at university. I was aware, in an abstract way, that some of my friends came from wealthy families and important schools, and a couple of others were from working-class backgrounds and were the first in their families to go to university, but these things were rarely mentioned.
The point was that Cambridge had democratised us. It didn't matter if your father was a builder, a teacher, a chief executive or a lord - we were there on the strength of our academic ability, not our families' ability to afford it, which was what a selective and free university system was always supposed to achieve. Had we been applying today, the same would not be true. Many of us would never have bothered to try for Cambridge in the first place.
Opponents of top-up fees talk of the prohibitive effect on students from the poorest backgrounds, but in truth those students face a raft of financial difficulties with or without top-up fees and how best to encourage them is a separate argument. Hardest hit will be the lower middle-class families who have always intended and encouraged their children to go to university but simply can't afford to. Those students will stop setting their sights on the best universities, which they will now see as increasing their potential debt rather than potential opportunities, and higher education will be no different from the two-tier secondary system, where the quality of your degree will depend on what your parents can afford or how much debt you are prepared to take on. We will have lost a system that was once the envy of American students.
