The CBI report said that students should pay thousands more pounds for degrees to offset the decline in government spending on universities. The report also suggests that students should face increased loan interest, fewer grants and higher tuition fees.
NUS President Wes Streeting slammed the report. “At a time of economic crisis, when many hard working families are struggling to support their offspring through university, I am astonished that the CBI should be making such offensive recommendations,” he said. “Students are already leaving university with record levels of debt, while graduate job prospects are at an all time low. Instead of recommending that students are fleeced even more than they already are, the CBI should start looking at how they might put something back into the system themselves.”
NUS also criticised the “hypocrisy” of the CBI’s suggestion that the Government’s widening participation agenda should be relaxed.
Wes Streeting said “When the fat cats at the CBI recommend that we abandon targets for widening participation from poorer students, they are talking about restricting the opportunities of other people’s children rather than their own. This is gross hypocrisy.
“They claim that ‘the UK compares pretty well with other countries’, but this simply does not stand up to scrutiny. Only last week, an OECD report showed that we are tumbling down the international league table of graduation rates, and send a smaller proportion of school leavers to university than the Slovak republic, Ireland or Portugal.”