Helen Gourlay on why the numbers don’t add up for students or universities. And Yassin El-Moudden says turning students into consumers has warped tertiary education economics

Re university fees, the numbers don’t add up, and never did ( Editorial, 4 November ). Assumptions by George Osborne and colleagues of high graduate earnings, based on times when far fewer people went to university, were unrealistic. The current “solution” is no better. If fees have not changed since 2017 and inflation since 2017 is 29% then tuition fees rising by several hundred pounds next year still leaves universities with massive cuts in funding.

There are few (if any) angles from which it makes sense. Graduates who work as key workers, eg nurses, are unlikely to earn enough to pay off their loans. If fees are to be thought of as a graduate tax, why would a just society ask those doing a service to society (such as nurses) to pay more tax? And, if it’s a graduate tax, why are we not taxing all graduates, rather than only taxing young people – those who went to university after New Labour introduced fees?