How long can this uni situation be sustained?

THE continued rise in the number of unconditional offers for university students (this year 25% of offers were unconditional, up 60% since 2014) is symptomatic of one of the most important criteria in higher education today – money.

The desperate need to fill student places has resulted in some universities spending sixfigure sums on advertising on the London Underground. University vice-chancellors are now paying themselves astronomical sums in wages, many in excess of £300,000 per annum.

With total student debt more than £100bn (June 2017) and rising at the rate of £20bn a year, how long can this situation be sustained? And who is the real loser as a consequence of this ongoing Ponzi scheme? It’s us, the taxpayer, since most student debt will never be repaid.

There is no such thing as austerity in higher education. Funding is always available if a place is offered, no questions asked. Moreover, those students receiving degrees, that in many cases are completely worthless, are also being let down by the system – my local supermarkets have any number of graduates stocking shelves because there simply aren’t enough graduate jobs to go around.

Surely it would make sense to preserve university education for those careers where degrees are necessary/desirable and correlate graduate jobs available to the number of relevant places offered. We could then plough the money saved into areas where we are desperately short of staff, like nursing, and into vocational education and apprenticeships that would be much more beneficial to both our economy and the students themselves.

This current scandal is the sad and inevitable consequence of Tony Blair’s misguided aim of getting 50% of young people into university, and Nick Clegg reneging on his promise not to introduce student tuition fees.

Running higher education like a business makes no sense whatsoever. I read lots of articles that are fearful of a skills gap after Brexit, yet we have many of the answers in our own control. Geraint Evans Gilwern, Abergavenny