In his article “Is abolishing tuition fees regressive? It depends how it’s done” (Opinion, 17 August), Lord Adonis says: “My political sense is that if the universities and/or the government move swiftly to cut fee levels year-on-year – alongside some bloated overheads, notably the pay of vice-chancellors and other top staff – it might just be possible to continue with fees at around the pre-2012 level of £3,000.”

As someone who consistently opposed the tripling of tuition fees and the withdrawal of government grants, I am sad to see Adonis not only stooping so low as to accuse universities of forming a cartel on fees, but also losing his sense of numbers and, therefore, rational policy.

At this university, reducing all salaries to a maximum of £150,000, as suggested by Adonis, would “save” less than £20 per student a year. I daresay much the same is true in many sister universities.

Taking this £20 “saving” and then cutting fees by 5 per cent each year, year-on-year, it would take 23 years to get back to an annual tuition fee of £3,000, by which time every university in the country would have gone out of operation, unless government grants were restored at the same rate.

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In practice, the policy advocated by Adonis would quickly leave the field free for private for-profit corporations such as the Apollo Education Group, which runs the University of Phoenix. This would be a quite dreadful development, which would really harm the futures of tomorrow’s students while doing nothing but increasing inequality. Incidentally, Gregory Cappelli, Apollo’s chief executive, received $2,671,038 compensation in 2016 (£2 million).

David Green
Vice-chancellor and chief executive
University of Worcester

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