Could Rita Afford to Be Educated Today?
How Britain Turned Higher Education from a Public Opportunity into Private Debt
In the 1983 film Educating Rita, a working-class Liverpool hairdresser enrols with the Open University because she wants something more than a qualification.
Rita wants choice.
She wants the confidence to understand the world, form her own opinions and decide what kind of life she will lead. Education is not presented simply as a route to a better salary. It is a means of intellectual liberation.
That was originally the principle behind the Open University.
Harold Wilson first proposed a “University of the Air” in 1963. Jennie Lee subsequently turned that idea into an institution. The Open University received its Royal Charter in 1969 and admitted its first students in 1971.
The founding belief was radical: intelligence was not confined to those who had passed the right examinations, attended the right schools or acquired the right accent by the age of eighteen. University should therefore be capable of reaching people wherever they were.
In its early years, that promise entered people’s homes through the BBC. Open University programmes were broadcast on BBC2, frequently in early-morning or late-night slots. Before video recorders became commonplace, students had to organise their lives around the television schedule. Some got up in the middle of the night or before dawn to watch a lecture before going to work.
Printed materials and experimental equipment arrived through the post. Science education did not consist solely of reading from a screen.
The Open University’s S260 Geology course used polarising microscopes and prepared geological slides so that students could examine minerals and rocks at home. When the course eventually closed and its equipment was sold, I bought one of those microscopes with its accompanying slides. I still own it today.
It is a tangible reminder of what publicly supported distance education once attempted to provide. This was not a cheaper imitation of university, but a genuine university education carried into the student’s home. If a working adult could not reach a university laboratory, the university would find a way to bring the laboratory to them.
That was Harold Wilson’s vision.
The question is what remains of it today.
When Higher Education Was Publicly Funded
It would be dishonest to pretend that British higher education once offered equal access to everyone.
It did not.
Universities were smaller, more selective and heavily shaped by class. Children from private schools and affluent families were disproportionately represented. Many working-class pupils were directed away from academic education long before they could contemplate applying to university.
But for those who secured a place, tuition fees were ordinarily paid by the state. Maintenance grants, although means-tested, helped with living costs. Students could complete a degree without automatically beginning adult life with tens of thousands of pounds recorded against them.
University was understood principally as a public investment.
Nor was it the only respected route into working life. Technical colleges, apprenticeships, professional qualifications and employer training could lead to secure careers without requiring a degree.
That matters because comparisons between generations often ignore what happened outside universities.
My generation did not all attend university. Many of us did not need to. Jobs for which employers now request degrees were previously entered through technical education, professional examinations or training provided at work.
Britain has therefore changed two things simultaneously. It has greatly expanded the number of people attending university, while allowing many alternative routes into secure employment to weaken or disappear.
Did We Widen Access or Make University More Necessary?
The expansion of higher education was real.
The age participation rate was approximately 15 per cent at the end of the 1980s. The number of full-time undergraduates in England subsequently increased dramatically. Polytechnics became universities in 1992, new institutions developed, and higher education reached sections of society previously excluded from it.
That should be recognised as progress.
But expansion is not the same thing as equality.
As more people obtained degrees, employers increasingly used them as a convenient screening mechanism, even for jobs previously open to school-leavers or those with vocational qualifications. The degree became more common, but it also became more necessary.
Financial services provides a familiar example. When I entered the industry, a school-leaver could join a bank, building society or insurance company, receive training, complete professional examinations and progress into responsible and well-paid work. A degree was not the gate through which everyone had to pass.
A degree is still not legally required to become a financial adviser. The regulated qualification is normally at Level 4, below degree level. Yet many structured entry routes into banking, insurance and corporate management are now presented as graduate schemes, while employers frequently use possession of a degree to reduce the number of applications they must consider.
The degree may not be essential to perform the job. It becomes essential to secure the opportunity to demonstrate that you could perform it.
Research by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that 66 per cent of graduates believed their qualifications had been necessary to obtain their jobs, while only 41 per cent believed those qualifications were necessary to do the jobs effectively.
This is credential inflation.
Policing demonstrates what can happen when the same thinking enters public policy. England and Wales moved towards a system in which new constables would either possess a degree or complete one while training. Someone without a degree could still join through an apprenticeship, but becoming a graduate was built into the programme.
Critics argued that the system risked excluding people with military service, community knowledge, practical judgement and valuable life experience. The Government eventually reconsidered the policy. Since April 2024, recruits have again been able to qualify through a two-year, non-degree Police Constable Entry Programme.
The decision did not mean that police officers required less rigorous training. It recognised that rigorous professional training does not always need to be converted into a university degree.
In some professions, however, the work itself has changed enough to justify more advanced education. Modern nurses make autonomous judgements, administer sophisticated treatments and assume responsibilities once concentrated more heavily among doctors. Britain had legitimate reasons for making nursing a degree-level profession.
The way it financed that change reveals the wider problem. From 2013, anyone qualifying as a nurse in England was required to complete a degree. Four years later, the Government abolished the NHS bursary that had paid tuition fees and provided maintenance support. Student nurses entered the ordinary loan system despite spending approximately half their training on supervised clinical placements.
Applications from England fell sharply. They later recovered following the introduction of a £5,000 annual training grant and the heightened profile of nursing during the pandemic, but the recovery did not hold. Applications and undergraduate entry subsequently declined again. Abolishing the bursary did not produce an uninterrupted fall in nursing graduates, but it damaged recruitment and left the domestic pipeline fragile.
The NHS increasingly filled the gap through international recruitment. In 2022/23, 57 per cent of new adult-nursing recruits came from overseas. International nurses make an indispensable contribution, but there is something perverse about placing financial obstacles before prospective nurses at home and then recruiting qualified staff from countries that may need them just as urgently.
The Government proposes to expand nursing degrees and apprenticeships while reducing that dependence. The contradiction remains: how do you attract substantially more home-grown nurses while charging them for acquiring skills the country urgently needs? Furthermore, a newly qualified nurse in England begins on approximately £32,000 a year after completing a degree and potentially accumulating tens of thousands of pounds in tuition and maintenance debt.
A young person may now be told that university is optional while discovering that many careers available to previous generations without degrees are effectively closed without one. Even where requiring a degree is professionally justified, the individual may still be expected to incur substantial debt to enter an occupation society urgently needs them to perform.
Britain widened access to institutions called universities while narrowing access to secure careers that did not require university. It then began charging people heavily for entering the route the economy increasingly expected, or formally required, them to take.
From a Public Good to an Individual Purchase
Tuition fees did not suddenly appear in 2012.
Labour introduced means-tested fees of up to £1,000 a year in England in 1998. Variable fees of up to £3,000 followed in 2006, although students could borrow the money rather than paying it before beginning their courses.
The principle had already changed. The individual student was now expected to contribute directly because the graduate was considered to receive a personal financial benefit from obtaining a degree.
The Browne Review was commissioned by the Labour government in November 2009. Its establishment was not a direct response to the financial crash of 2008. It fulfilled a commitment made when variable tuition fees were introduced under the Higher Education Act 2004 and was asked to examine how universities and students should be financed in the future.
The review was chaired by Lord Browne of Madingley, an engineer, Fellow of the Royal Society, president of the Royal Academy of Engineering and former chief executive of BP. The panel included two university vice-chancellors and people from economics, banking, government and education policy, but no student or university staff representative. Its composition reflected a familiar assumption within British public life: achievement at the top of business is treated as evidence of an ability to redesign almost any public institution.
When Browne reported in October 2010, it unsurprisingly proposed a market-based system. Universities would set their own tuition charges without a fixed upper limit. Government teaching grants would be substantially reduced and universities would replace them through higher fees supported by student loans. Graduates would repay only when their income passed a specified threshold, allowing the proposal to be presented as removing financial barriers at the point of entry.
By the time Browne reported, the political environment had changed completely. The financial crisis had left a large budget deficit, Labour had lost office, and the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition had embarked upon austerity. Browne did not cause that austerity, but his market model provided a mechanism through which it could be applied to higher education.
The 2010 Spending Review reduced the higher education resource budget, excluding research, from £7.1 billion to £4.2 billion by 2014/15. Direct teaching grants later fell from approximately £4.8 billion in 2011/12 to £1.3 billion in 2017/18, measured in 2017/18 prices.
Ministers called the arrangement progressive because students paid nothing upfront and lower earners repaid less, or potentially nothing. But the political decision was unmistakable. Higher education was being redefined from a public service financed principally through taxation into a private investment purchased by the individual.
Students did not cause the financial crash, yet those entering English universities from 2012 were required to carry part of the cost of its aftermath. The banks were rescued collectively. Higher education was increasingly financed individually.
The state retained direct funding for research, widening participation and expensive or strategically important subjects. It also continued to provide the loans. But grants appeared immediately as public expenditure, while loans were treated largely as financial assets that would supposedly be repaid. The accounting treatment changed in 2019 when it became impossible to ignore that a substantial proportion would not be recovered. The expense had not disappeared. Part of it had merely been postponed while graduates carried the balances.
Why £9,000 Became the Standard Price
The coalition did not say that every university should charge £9,000.
It rejected Browne’s proposal for completely uncapped fees and instead established a standard threshold of £6,000 and an upper limit of £9,000 from 2012. Universities would be permitted to charge above £6,000 only after meeting additional requirements on widening participation. Ministers described the maximum as applying in “exceptional circumstances”.
It is sometimes remembered as a premium intended for Oxbridge or a handful of prestigious universities. That was never the formal policy. Any institution meeting the conditions could charge more than £6,000, and before long almost all did.
This should not have been surprising. Universities had lost direct teaching support and needed to replace the income. Charging less than competitors risked suggesting that their courses were inferior. Students were shielded from the immediate price by government loans, so there was little conventional pressure to choose a £6,000 course over one costing £9,000.
The Government expected price competition. Instead, £9,000 became the recognised price of a university education.
A later House of Lords investigation found almost no meaningful competition on tuition fees. David Willetts, the minister responsible for the reforms, acknowledged that the income-contingent loan system had not produced the expected price competition.
The supposedly exceptional fee became normal because the system gave universities compelling reasons to charge it and students little immediate reason to resist it.
I Watched It Happen at the Open University
For me, this transformation is not an abstract policy argument.
Around 2008, I studied S283, Planetary Science and the Search for Life, with the Open University. I remember it costing around £400 for the 30-credit Level 2 module.
I cannot produce my invoice nearly twenty years later, so that figure should be understood as my recollection.
The same module code and title, S283, Planetary Science and the Search for Life, is advertised for its final presentation beginning in October 2026. The fee in England is £2,044.
The course material will have evolved, so it would be misleading to claim that every page and assessment remains identical. But it is the same module lineage, carrying the same code, title and 30-credit value.
Something I remember costing around £400 now costs more than £2,000. Even allowing for inflation, it would cost well below £700 today. Instead, its nominal price has increased more than fivefold.
S283 is now being replaced, while the Open University’s current astronomy and planetary science degree is advertised at a total cost of £24,528 in England.
This is particularly revealing because the Open University was created for people excluded from conventional higher education: working adults, parents, carers, disabled students, people in low-paid employment and those who had not followed a traditional academic path. People like Rita.
After the 2012 reforms removed most direct public funding for part-time teaching, participation among part-time and mature undergraduates fell sharply. For many, studying for fun became a thing of the past.
The institution created to open higher education to people like Rita became subject to a financial model that made returning to education substantially more expensive.
When Overseas Students Became the Financial Plan
Once universities became increasingly dependent upon tuition fees, another distortion developed.
Fees for domestic undergraduates were capped. International tuition fees were not.
Overseas students could therefore be charged considerably more, particularly for postgraduate and laboratory-based courses. Their fees increasingly subsidised domestic teaching, research and the wider operations of universities.
By 2024/25, tuition fees from non-UK students generated approximately £12.4 billion, around 23 per cent of the sector’s total income. International students recently represented around 14 per cent of undergraduates and approximately half of postgraduate students.
Read the second half of that last sentence again.
International students are not responsible for this dependence. They come to Britain to study, contribute economically and academically, and often pay very large sums for doing so. The problem lies in a funding system that encourages universities to treat their recruitment as a financial necessity.
Universities have become vulnerable to changes in visa policy and overseas demand, while the Office for Students has warned against overoptimistic recruitment forecasts. This produces a political contradiction. Overseas students are treated as an essential export industry when universities need their fees and as an immigration problem when governments want to reduce migration figures.
They are welcomed as income and attacked as numbers.
A country confident that higher education is a public good would finance its universities accordingly. Britain instead constructed a system in which institutions compete internationally for fee-paying students to compensate for inadequate domestic funding.
That is not a sustainable educational settlement. It is a business model.
Is Higher Education a Scam?
I have increasingly come to regard higher education as a scam in many respects.
That requires explanation.
The education itself is real. Lecturers teach, researchers produce knowledge and students work hard. University can transform a person’s understanding, confidence and prospects. Degrees continue, on average, to produce positive financial returns, but averages conceal enormous variation. Recent Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates suggest that around 20 per cent of female graduates and 30 per cent of male graduates may receive a negative lifetime financial return from their undergraduate degrees.
The promise is much less reliable than the sales pitch.
Young people are told that a degree is the route to opportunity while jobs that once provided opportunity without one have disappeared. They borrow tens of thousands of pounds without knowing whether their particular course will produce the promised return.
Universities advertise experiences and prospects. Employers demand credentials. Government describes the resulting debt as an individual investment. The system depends upon maintaining belief in the promise, even though the student carries much of the risk if the promised return never arrives.
That is where the system becomes scam-like.
It is not necessarily selling a false education. It is selling certainty where none exists.
The degree is real. The promise surrounding it may have been oversold.
Even after accepting the debt, many students discover that maintenance support does not allow them to afford the complete university experience. That is another part of the story, and one I will address separately.
Education Is Also Democratic Protection
Rita wants more from education than a qualification or a better salary. She wants the confidence and intellectual independence to understand the world and decide for herself what she thinks about it.
That matters beyond the individual student.
Education does not determine intelligence, and possessing a degree does not make anyone immune to manipulation. But education can provide sustained practice in examining evidence, checking sources and distinguishing a complicated explanation from a convenient slogan.
Large international studies have found an association between lower educational attainment and greater susceptibility to misinformation. But the relationship is neither universal nor straightforward.
The same educational division is visible in British politics. YouGov found substantial differences in the way graduates and non-graduates voted in the 2016 referendum. In the 2024 general election, Reform UK received 23 per cent of the vote among people educated to GCSE level or below, compared with 8 per cent among graduates.
Those figures do not prove that voting Leave or Reform means somebody was deceived, nor that people without degrees are unintelligent. People vote because of economic insecurity, cultural identity, immigration, distrust and justified anger at being ignored. The figures do, however, reveal an educational division that political movements can exploit.
Communities that have lost secure employment, technical education and faith in established institutions are frequently offered simple explanations for complicated problems. Genuine grievances can then be redirected towards immigrants, experts, universities or whichever enemy is politically useful.
The consequences can be seen inside the NHS. Figures obtained by the Royal College of Nursing recorded more than 21,000 incidents of racist abuse or discrimination against nursing staff between 2022 and 2025, an increase of 78 per cent. In 2025 alone, 6,812 incidents were reported.
Internationally educated nurses are particularly exposed. A Nursing and Midwifery Council survey found that 53 per cent of internationally educated professionals had experienced discrimination, compared with 35 per cent of those educated in the UK.
As noted above, Britain recruits nurses from overseas because the NHS cannot function without them, while political rhetoric encourages some people to regard those same nurses as outsiders. Genuine anger about deteriorating services is redirected towards the people holding those services together.
Higher education therefore cannot be valued solely by calculating the additional salary earned by a graduate. Society also benefits when citizens possess the confidence and tools to question authority, evaluate evidence and recognise an emotionally satisfying falsehood. We all benefit from a population that is harder to mislead.
Harold Wilson’s vision was not simply about helping Rita earn more money. It was about extending knowledge, confidence and intellectual independence beyond the class that had traditionally possessed them. Turning that opportunity into an expensive private purchase has consequences not only for social mobility, but for democracy itself.
What Would Widening Access Really Mean?
Widening access cannot mean persuading more young people to accept larger debts while alternative routes into employment continue to disappear.
It would mean restoring education as a public responsibility.
That does not necessarily mean recreating every part of the system that existed fifty years ago. Higher education has expanded enormously, and financing it entirely through the arrangements of the 1970s would present genuine economic and political difficulties, particularly in a country where governments remain reluctant to raise taxation and many voters resist paying more.
But a different settlement is possible.
Graduates are not the only beneficiaries of education. Employers benefit from skilled workers, communities from informed citizens, and the economy from research, innovation and professional expertise. Those public benefits justify public investment.
A serious widening-access programme would restore meaningful teaching support, particularly for part-time and modular education. It would rebuild technical colleges, vocational qualifications, apprenticeships and employer training so that university ceased to be the compulsory gateway to secure work.
It would provide maintenance support that reflected the actual cost of living.
It would also confront the fiction that every course should carry the same maximum price. A student training to become a nurse and a student studying Esports and Livestreaming can each face a headline tuition fee of £9,790 a year, although eligible nursing students can receive an additional NHS training grant. One course prepares someone to enter a profession facing chronic national shortages. The other prepares graduates for a narrow commercial industry built around competitive video gaming.
That does not make the study of esports worthless, nor does salary provide the only measure of educational value. But treating courses with radically different costs, outcomes and public purposes as if they should automatically command the same maximum fee is not fairness. It is the absence of a coherent funding policy.
A reformed system would require much greater transparency about outcomes without allowing politicians to declare entire areas of learning worthless. It would also create a sustainable funding model that did not require universities to treat international students as financial rescue packages.
Most importantly, it would offer people genuine choices.
University, technical education, employment and adult study should be different routes through life, not rungs on a single ladder from failure to success.
Could Rita Still Walk Through the Door?
If Rita approached the Open University today, the language surrounding her would be very different.
She would be encouraged to think about employability, graduate earnings, transferable skills and return on investment. She might be told not to worry about the headline fee because repayments would depend upon her income.
But Rita’s purpose in seeking education was not primarily financial.
She wanted to understand literature, culture and herself. She wanted to participate in conversations from which she had previously felt excluded. She wanted the power to make choices she had not known existed.
A funding system built around individual financial return struggles to recognise that value. It asks whether Rita will earn enough to justify the cost.
Wilson’s Open University began with a different question: what might Rita become if education were finally placed within her reach?
Rita could still enrol with the Open University today. The technology would astonish the students who once got up before dawn to watch BBC2. Lectures, tutorials, libraries and discussions can now be carried through a laptop or phone. Distance education can reach further than Harold Wilson could have imagined.
But access is not measured simply by whether a website accepts an application.
It is measured by whether a working adult believes the cost is bearable, whether study can fit around employment and caring responsibilities, and whether education still feels like a public invitation rather than a commercial transaction.
The door remains open.
The price of walking through it has changed.
Harold Wilson’s Britain attempted to carry a university education into the home of a working-class hairdresser. Modern Britain asks her to calculate whether intellectual liberation offers an adequate financial return.
That is not widening access.
It is financing Rita.
Somewhere between the BBC2 lectures, the geological microscope and the £2,044 module, Britain lost sight of what the Open University was created to do: carry education into the homes of people whom conventional universities had left outside.
I find that profoundly sad.
References
Sources and Notes: Could Rita Afford to Be Educated Today?
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About the author
Paul Clark is the author of The GOOD Book: A Behavioural Operating System for Escaping Debt and Rebuilding Control and the creator of The GOOD Method. If you enjoyed this article, explore more of his writing in GOOD Thoughts, listen to The GOOD Conversation podcast, or join the GOOD Community to receive new articles, podcast episodes, resources and forthcoming videos by email. If there is a subject you would like Paul to investigate or write about, get in touch.