The sharp rise in tuition fees announced this month is grim news. A barrier, probably an insurmountable one for many families on decent salaries, has been erected towards meeting aspirations. For once it seems as if the children of people who graduated in the late 1980s, through the 1990s and parts of this decade, will be worse off than their parents. It can only be a backward step if the succeeding generation is worse off than the preceding one.
There is, of course, no law of development: progress is not inevitable. But some things are in our control, including policy on access to higher education. Such access is probably the most important motor for social mobility. The current changes in fees have added the brakes.
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