Such a move would damage the levelling-up agenda, dampen economic growth locally and nationally, and weaken the UK’s soft power abroad.
Foreign labour is an alternative to ministers facing up to how successive governments have gummed up domestic training and recruitment of medical staff.
The public sector has just swallowed another semi-autonomous set of institutions with little protest or controversy.
The measures would signal that we are a national community, membership of which brings particular rights and also obligations. It sounds pretty Conservative to me.
Risk and income sharing agreements allow institutions and students to become partners and shift losses on poor-value courses away from taxpayers.
These may take time to bear fruit, but must reassure the markets now that the growth path in expenditure will be measurably lower. Such measures must involve doing less, as well as doing things differently.
People need a sense of hope and optimism about their prospects. And one of the best ways for the new Prime Minister to deliver that credibly is indeed to show how they will grow the innovations which will make life better.
The Telegraph’s report this week that universities are tilting against applicants from “advantaged” backgrounds undermines ministers’ efforts to restore post-Covid sanity to pupils’ grades.
The number of young people into higher education keeps on rising and has gone over 50 per cent. It is nothing to do with any target.
Getting more A* students to Oxbridge or building more technical colleges is not equal to the task of poor quality degrees, cancel culture, and pointless student debt.
It has real democratic authority including with the Lords which might not be so inhibited from voting down new measures which didn’t feature in that manifesto.
The vast majority of students will not go to Oxbridge, or on Love Island. The Minister for Higher Education is their champion.
The situation will fester, which will pose major challenges for statecraft, and for the stability both of Ukraine and of surrounding areas.
What turns young people away from the Conservatives isn’t more education. It’s the retreat of the property-owning democracy.
We need to give more time and resource to those bringing up children. Such parents need a much better package from the state to look after a baby in the first year of its life.