The former university access tsar has said the government’s reported proposals to bar entry to students with lower school grades are “crude” and “regressive”. He believes ministers are poised to go ahead with reducing the number of degree places for young people. Chris Millward finished his four-year term as the first director for fair access and participation at the government’s Office for Students before Christmas and is now a professor at the University of Birmingham. He says limiting the number of university students just as the number of 18-year-olds in the population is rising would be socially divisive. “For 20 years, governments of all parties have broadly supported the growth of higher education [HE] participation, but the rhetoric is now very different. The government is saying that it wants more people to go into FE [further education] and work, rather than HE.” Millward says if the government goes ahead with cutting access to university, it should expect considerable resistance from parents and young people, who see getting a degree as the best way of improving their life chances. Record numbers of students started university during the pandemic, and universities say they have received high numbers of applications again for the coming academic year. “The question is: is any minister really willing to stand up when A-level results come out and say ‘sorry, there isn’t room for you to go to university’?” He argues that the government cannot “crudely cap the HE side of the equation and expect that to change demand” but must improve alternative options for students in further education first, as well as making sure they can move on to university afterwards if they want to. “If you don’t do that, it’s going to be very divisive,” he said. This warning on future plans, coming from someone who has been at the heart of the government machine, has been received with gloom by universities. The government has never publicly said it intends to cut student numbers, despite ministers attacking Tony Blair’s “absurd mantra” that half of all young people should go to university. Millward’s intervention is the strongest hint so far that the proposals are a serious prospect. This month Millward wrote about his lessons from the OfS role in a paper for the Centre for Global Higher Education, based at Oxford University. He said reducing access to degrees would be “a bad outcome for all of us working in higher education”. Insiders say ministers know that announcing a formal cap on student numbers could alienate voters and they are much more likely to squeeze the sector “by the back door”. The government is widely expected to announce plans for a new minimum entry threshold to study at university, using GCSE or A-level grades to restrict access to student loans, with the aim of pushing those who no longer qualify into further education colleges instead. Millward is adamant that this will unfairly shut doors for the poorest young people. “You shouldn’t stop certain students accessing student loans because that penalises the individual in a pretty crude, regressive way,” he said. “We all know there is a strong correlation between your social background and your school grades and that has only become stronger during the pandemic.” University chiefs think it is most likely that in future loans will only be given to students who have at least a level 4 (the equivalent of an old grade C) in maths and English at GCSE. An analysis of Department for Education (DfE) GCSE results data conducted by the Million Plus group of modern universities before Christmas showed that under this plan 48% of all disadvantaged students in England would be ineligible for a student loan. The proposal to limit loans is thought to be driven by the Treasury. Financial pressure has been ratcheted up by the prime minister’s flagship Lifelong Learning Entitlement – a new entitlement to take out loans for four years of flexible higher learning including short courses from 2025 –which is expected to make unpaid student loan debt mushroom even further. University vice-chancellors and social mobility experts are deeply concerned about the prospect. Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, said: “Reducing numbers of degree places tends to hit poorer students disproportionately.” He said that while it was “absolutely right” to improve opportunities for young people who do not go to university, “that should not be at the expense of the hard won successes in enrolling greater numbers of poorer pupils into higher education”. Alistair Jarvis, the chief executive of the vice-chancellors’ group Universities UK, said: “Reducing the number of students going into HE would cause real damage. The future economy is likely to be highly skilled, so cutting numbers when we need more highly skilled people and not fewer doesn’t make sense. People want their children and grandchildren to go to university. I don’t see any signs that they are reconsidering that. It is a life-changing experience.” Prof Dave Phoenix, the vice-chancellor of London South Bank University and a former chair of the Million Plus group of modern universities, said: “If we want a knowledge-based economy, all the evidence suggests we need more people qualified to degree level not fewer.” A senior higher-education figure close to the government, who asked not to be named, said the Treasury believed it would only be feasible to add the prime minister’s new “lifelong” loans on to the existing student loan debt if the DfE offered fewer loans to 18-year-olds “to compensate”. But he added: “None of the options are easy and all of them are extremely contentious.” A cut to tuition fees, mooted last year as one option, is now thought less likely. Ministers are also expected to change the terms of repayments. In a surprise announcement on Friday they scrapped plans to raise the repayment threshold by 4.6%. Universities have been braced for the government’s response to the Augar review of post-18 education – which reported in 2019 – for months. Jarvis said: “After two years of uncertainty with the pandemic, there is a real frustration amongst vice-chancellors that they don’t know what is coming.” A spokesperson for the DfE said no decisions had yet been made about minimum grade requirements. “This is a government that has boosted aspirations and grown opportunities for disadvantaged people across the country, and last year a record proportion of disadvantaged students have started university as a result,” he said. “We are committed to continuing to level up opportunity so every young person can fulfil their potential.”