London Briefing: The business of university funding is attracting as much attention in the UK as it is in Ireland, writes Chris Johns

Here, where fees are set at a nominal £1,100 a year (€1,500), the government wants to raise the maximum payable by the student to £3,000 (€4,140).

This has had the predictable effect of further politicising an already controversial debate.

Spotting an opportunity to be populist, the Tory party has promptly abandoned previous pledges to allow universities to fund themselves in any way that they see fit, and has promised to reverse any increase in fees that the current government introduces.

The next time any politician bemoans electoral cynicism and popular disenchantment with politics, refer him back to this debate.

University funding is in crisis because the Labour government has forced an expansion of higher education - with a target participation rate of 50 per cent - without a commensurate increase in cash to cover the costs of teaching all these extra young adults.

Of course, not all universities are badly affected. It is said that the three richest UK institutions are the Queen, the Church of England and Trinity College, Cambridge.

The Tories have spotted a potentially populist cause - subsidising the middle classes - because many of the people who will have to pay the extra fees will be those (parents) who now are paying significantly higher taxes, thanks to Gordon Brown's recent hikes in so-called stealth taxes and national insurance contributions. Some political theorists believe the best way to get elected is to offer the middle classes subsidies. Forget all that stuff about equality, redistribution, fairness or even simple efficiency.

In this entire debate, nobody has asked why we need this vast, done-on-the-cheap expansion of higher education. Education is, apparently, something that we simply cannot have too much of. Nobody stops to ask what it is for, because it is self-evidently true that the purpose of education is, well, what?

Most people will talk in terms of access to "good jobs" or speak vaguely about "opening up opportunities". Education is seen as a ticket to somewhere else, usually expressed in terms of a job, often a high-paying one. Fewer and fewer people think about education as something worth doing for its own sake.

Even Education Secretary Charles Clarke in decrying the study of medieval history, has suggested that the point of all this learning is to make more money. If true, then nobody should have any scruples about making people pay for their education - and pay the full cost, not the piffling sum the government suggests and the Tory party rejects.

If we take this robust utilitarian approach to the business of learning, we need to ask whether the taxpayer is getting value for money, not whether people should be asked to contribute to something that will so automatically boost their earning power. And it strikes me that we taxpayers are getting ripped off.

It is not at all obvious that state-funded expansion of higher education produces automatic benefits. There have been several post-war initiatives to get the participation rate up and it is not obvious that any of them have had wider economic benefits. Britain's growth rate has lagged other countries with similar or worse education systems.

If it cannot be proved that the economy benefits from expanding higher learning - rather than merely asserting that it is obviously true - then the taxpayer should not be asked to subsidise universities any more.

There are much better uses for the money.

The cash would be much better spent on getting children ready for university - spend it on the schools. For an awful lot of young adults, opening up opportunities for learning at 18 is simply too late. Industry would happily take more school-leavers who can simply read and add up rather than graduates in European Studies. When I went to college, the participation rate was around 10 per cent - and an awful lot of those people had no business being at university. Their schooling had simply let them down.

Drop-out rates, while not as high as they are today, were alarming.

The British middle classes have totally lost the plot when it comes to education. I know people who pay £20,000 (€27,600) per child in school fees (and that is not a boarding school). We have a collective folk memory that education represents an escape from poverty, a ticket to the professions or a job running the Empire.

Well, despite what the poverty lobby says, nobody is poor in Britain today. At least not in the terms that our grandparents would have understood.

The professions are a much-devalued shadow of themselves and there are few colonies left to administer.

Start at the beginning. Get the schools right.