The white paper’s seven per cent solution

Now the initial reactions to the government higher education white paper are out, a closer analysis reveals just how serious the government is about bringing market values into the sector.

The 20,000 undergraduate places that are to be removed from the current allocations to mainstream universities and opened up for competition to those charging less than £7,500 a year in fees in 2012-13 amount to about 7 per cent of the total.

This is the main mechanism in the white paper for introducing market disciplines into the sector and the scale and timing of it tells us a lot about how aggressive the government is going to be in imposing its plans.