The Northampton South Conservative MP, Brian Binley has launched a scathing attack on the Government’s higher education policy saying ministers should not be convinced that a university degree offers a “monopoly route” to success.
Writing in his latest blog, the 70-year-old MP, who did not go to university but did build up a successful business from scratch, said the Government had become “obsessed” with quotas in relation to the proportion of students attending university and claimed there was a “latent snobbishness” about people who had not gone on to study a degree.
He said: “University admissions have nearly trebled since 1979, and most ministers and Parliamentarians are proud of their degrees. But this personal embellishment should not convince them that a university education offers a monopoly route to success; nor that those of us who did not go are necessarily poorer in any sense in consequence.
Mr Binley added: “Fundamentally, to argue there are certain groups within our society who cannot hope to succeed without state intervention as a justification to skew the system in their favour is profoundly insulting, fundamentally wrong and an exercise in sophistry.”
And he claimed the expansion of the university system, particularly following the conversion of polytechnics to universities, had meant the whole system was “unsustainable” forcing the controversial introduction of tuition fees for students to pay for the demand.
He added: “Perhaps the reason why many working class youngsters don’t share his zeal for higher education is nothing to do with their socio-economic status, but a worrying poverty of ambition, which is far more entrenched than a superficial ‘call to arms’ can answer. Unlike the minister {David Willets}, they have, in all likelihood, been fed on a diet telling them that they have little or no chance of participating in these grand councils of learning, and, after more than 10 years of such indoctrination, it should come as no surprise that they don’t have much enthusiasm for this venture.”
Mr Binley insisted there was “nothing wrong” with not having a degree, or opting for vocational training and simply raising individual aspirations should be a much greater priority, albeit a “much harder” task to achieve.
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