Sometimes you just need to call something out for what it is. English undergraduate education is a hot mess that works in the institutional interests of universities, not young people.

Yes, there are bastions of excellence. But, in expanding an elite system that served a small slice of society a few decades ago to cover about half of young people, politicians have given far too little thought about how to do this in a way that serves students, not universities.

The announcement by the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, that tuition fees will increase from £9,250 to £9,535 is only the latest patch for a system that requires more fundamental reform.

The cross-party political instinct to expand post-18 education and training to more young people has been the correct one. But it has been done badly. The costs of expansion have been shifted away from taxpayers towards graduates, and it has been achieved by lifting caps on student numbers so universities can effectively recruit as many undergraduates as they want, and bank the fee income.

Under the current loans system, a graduate with median lifetime earnings who started in 2024 is forecast to repay £45,600 over their lifetime, after interest and any loan write-off – a bit less than the £52,300 that the typical graduate who started in 2022 under the previous system is forecast to repay. Those repayments essentially take the form of an extra 9p on the pound of income tax on all income above the repayment threshold, until the loan and........

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