Can a law degree be done in two years instead of four? Can a maths degree be finished in eighteen months rather than three years? Could a University offer courses six months on and six months off in order to enable a student to work and earn in order to sustain the six months on? Or even to take up an internship or work experience in the particular field in which the student wants to work.

The vote tomorrow will lay down a gauntlet to universities and give them two years to get their act together.  I wonder will media or golf course management be quite so popular when the student is taking on a £9000 per year loan to study?  Or will degrees which prepare for a career, provide steady employment and high salaries suddenly become much more attractive.

I have a constituency with 80,000 residents. Many have expressed to me their dissatisfaction with the fact that they are expected to pay taxes in order to subsidise courses in David Beckham and feminism.  Courses which are more about entertainment than academia.  Like me they wonder why students only have four hours of lectures and one of tutorial per week.  And that’s for a hard core course.

The arbitrary target set by Labour that 50% of all young people should benefit from a University education was always ridiculous. It was never attained. The number of students who dropped out in the first year was never reported. The statistic per head of university population in terms of those who began and those who finished depicted the fact that you cannot engineer education or indeed society without causing pain.

During this experiment, as evidence presented to the Education Select Committee stated, Universities suddenly felt the need to recruit on site Psychologists and the number of students taking anti-depressants steadily rose. All because young people had been channelled down a path they should never have trodden.

If anyone from any background wants to attend university and achieve an academic degree which will benefit both society and themselves, then everyone should have an equal opportunity to do that. 

If that were the case, if courses were taught in an expedient way, if students maintained an inherent value for the course they undertook and if universities could provide greater support to students with a far larger number of personal tutorials, then maybe one day we could see a university education provided for free. But whilst we hold onto the false mantra that an arbitrary target should be reached, whilst in the meantime providing courses on surfing and movies, then students will have to pay. Because the tax payer simply can’t any longer.

Education cannot be exempt from the financial measures we have to put in place in order to pay the debt Labour left behind.

Remember the note ‘the money has all been spent’? That was the note that really read ‘the end of the tax payer subsidising Mickey Mouse courses’. And amen to that.