English Certificate Preparation

You are going to read four short texts in which commentators give their views on free university tuition. For questions 1–4, choose from the commentators A–D. The commentators may be chosen more than once.

SHOULD UNIVERSITY TUITION BE FREE? A — Professor Hale Free tuition, I firmly believe, would open the doors of our universities to talented students from poorer homes who are currently deterred by the fear of debt. But what excites me most is the benefit to society as a whole. A country that educates its brightest young people, regardless of their means, reaps the rewards for generations — in innovation, in productivity, in a richer public life. The money spent is not a cost but an investment that repays itself many times over. Those who fixate on the price tag miss the far larger economic prize. I have little patience, I confess, with the argument that graduates should shoulder the cost alone; the whole nation gains, so the whole nation should pay. B — Dr Bennett I must sound a note of caution about the fashionable claim that scrapping fees would transform access for the disadvantaged. When one looks at countries that have made university free, the proportion of poorer students has often barely shifted; the real barriers, it turns out, lie much earlier, in schooling and family expectation. I am not against free tuition in principle, but I dislike seeing it sold on a promise the evidence does not support. Nor am I persuaded by the grand talk of society's returns, which is easy to assert and hard to measure. Before we commit vast sums, we should be honest about how little we actually know regarding who would truly benefit. C — Ms Doyle That free tuition would help poorer students get through the door, I do not doubt. My concern is that fees are not really the problem, or at least not the whole of it. A student from a struggling family may pay nothing for their course and still be unable to afford rent, food and books while they study. Abolishing fees while ignoring the crippling cost of simply living as a student would be to fix the wrong thing. What these young people need above all is proper maintenance support — money to live on — and until we provide that, tinkering with tuition fees will change far less than its champions imagine. D — Mr Fletcher I accept that free tuition might help more able students from poor backgrounds to attend, and that is a genuine good. Yet one question troubles me more than any other, and it is one its supporters too readily brush aside. Is it fair to ask the many who never go to university — often themselves on modest incomes — to pay, through their taxes, for the education of those who will go on to earn considerably more? A degree remains, on average, a route to higher lifetime earnings. To have the plumber subsidise the future lawyer strikes me as a hard thing to justify, however we dress it up. Fairness, not access, is where this debate should begin.

Part 6 · Exercise 2 — Should university tuition be free?

Part 6 · Cross-text multiple matching