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Well done, A-level examinees, for surviving perhaps the grisliest two years of education you are likely to face. And welcome to the rest of your lives. More of you have taken hard, academic subjects like maths and the sciences than ever before, and more have scored the very best results. The very slight fall in the pass rate is almost certainly nothing more than the random variation of human experience.
For the 300,000 young people who collected their results at 9.30am on Thursday, it was above all an intensely personal experience. Yet elsewhere, A-level results day has become –save in Scotland, where pupils do not sit the same exams – a day of national educational catharsis, variously treated as a judgment day on schools policy, exam boards, schools and teachers – as much as on individual students.
A-levels are also the entry point to higher education, which this autumn is the subject of yet another radical experiment. Where numbers were once limited and universities faced severe penalties if they over-recruited, from 2015 universities will be able to take as many students as they like. This year, an extra 30,000 places will be added to the overall total; for the first time, there will be more than 500,000 new students. Next year another 30,000 are anticipated, with no imposed limit at all. The entire system of higher education at first degree level will be largely funded by fees. It should be the last instalment in nearly 25 years of change. It may also be the final triumph of university as an instrument of personal and national prosperity.
Yet what might be expected to be a new and long overdue era of settled certainty looks more uncertain than ever. From the perspective of students, being wooed with the promise of free iPads or en suite student accommodation, a degree itself is looking like a double-edged commitment. Now that almost all universities charge the maximum £9,000 a year in tuition fees, student debt is an unavoidably heavy burden. New graduates start their working life owing at least £44,000, and can expect to be paying it off into their 50s. This will affect their ability to get a mortgage, because it will be part of the new risk assessment lenders are required to undertake. Ministers point out that there is still a handsome benefit from having a degree, but that is based on old figures. Nearly half of all recent graduates are so-called gringos – graduates in non-graduate level occupations. And although the proportion in non-graduate jobs is lower for those who left more than five years ago, nearly a third are doing a job that, nominally at least, they might have been doing anyway.
There are tough consequences for the Treasury, not easily finessed. The more slowly debt is repaid, the more is likely to be written off. Last year the student loan book for the first tranche of loans was sold for what on some estimates was less than a tenth on its face value. The extra 60,000 students who are expected when the numbers cap comes off next year was originally intended to be funded by selling the remaining student loan book. That is now in doubt: the business secretary Vince Cable has ruled it out, and Nick Clegg has pledged that the Lib Dems will not support it in the future. Even if there is a Conservative government after 2015, it is uncertain how much it would raise. Last month the Commons business and skills committee warned that such a sale might raise only £1bn. The expansion is expected to cost around £5.5bn.
Meanwhile universities, which have enjoyed the financial security from receiving student fees without having to carry the risk of making the loans that pay them, are in the grip of a different funding crisis. The coalition has effectively removed all teaching funding from most arts subjects. Only medicine, veterinary science and the pure sciences continue to attract the top rate. That means budgets in many universities are painfully constrained, with fresh cuts probable after 2015. Now the force of the market is about to blow through the sector too. It is likely to shake out any institution that has failed to get its sums right.
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