The humble and the elite

Your leader (December 3) supporting variable fees in higher education is remarkable for its lack of insight. The government wants to concentrate research in a few elite universities, which will undoubtedly charge higher fees, while the rest will make do with the cheaper and humbler task of teaching and applied knowledge transfer. It all smacks of the class-ridden system of education in 19th-century Britain. The main form of "higher" education that working-class men and women had access to then was the scientifically useful knowledge offered in mechanics' institutes. The majority of our students should not just be offered the chance to become educated fustian cutters, but given the widest range of choice, financed by progressive taxation.
June Purvis
Portsmouth

Flat-raters are hardly flat-earthers. Saying that the old polytechnics should work with fewer teaching resources than Oxbridge is like saying that inner-city schools work ing with under-privileged children don't need as much support as public schools. The so-called best universities have a reputation built on research, not on teaching, which is what the fee argument is about. These universities already take about 85% of the research funds. Surely you are not suggesting they should also have the lion's share of teaching funds?
Prof MI Page
Huddersfield

I have worked both in Ivy League and non-League universities in the US. There was no marked difference in the quality of undergraduate education on offer. The difference was in the superior networking possibilities provided in the Ivy League: in effect a branding for the student.

With variable fees, a bright UK school-leaver who does not want to pay extra for Oxbridge branding will become an undergraduate in one of the new universities where he or she will probably meet some bright young academics at the start of their careers: to their mutual benefit and to the benefit of that university. Others, who set a higher value on the branding, will pay for it. This time Blair has got it right.
David Chambers
London

If the effect of top-up fees will be to starve subjects like philosophy, how come Harvard and Princeton have the best departments of philosophy in the world?
Alan Ryan
New College, Oxford

Your article (Rebels united in opposition but divided over alternatives, December 4) was flawed with regard to the Lib Dem proposals for funding universities. Our position is that existing tuition fees would be scrapped (cost £450m); the student grant for the least affluent 35% would be increased to £2,000, awarded on the same basis as proposed by the government (additional cost £300m); and approximately £1bn would be immediately provided to universities to meet their urgent needs.Our expenditure would be met by levying a 50p rate of tax on incomes over £100,000, which would generate some £4.5bn.

Nowhere do we advocate students studying close to home, though inevitably this will be the case if differential fees are introduced.
Phil Willis MP
Liberal Democrat education spokesman

The debate about "top-up" fees centres on young people and their needs. Yet the government has voiced a commitment to "lifelong" learning. It is almost as though anyone who is older, particularly if he or she has a family or a mortgage, is too far out of the picture to merit any consideration.
Heather McMillan
Birchwood, Cheshire