Tuition fees and property prices mean middle-class parents will find it harder and harder to secure their children's future status
Ouch. The cut in child benefit felt tough – nearly £2,000 a year – but the rise in university tuition fees announced yesterday felt very grim. With two children in their teens and another heading that way, suddenly family finances over the next decade looked the worse by a couple of hundred thousand. Funny feeling – a bit like being on one of those theme park rides, you're perched precariously on the top of a very steep decline.
But as I ran through the figures with an incensed eight-year-old – who seems to have decided that David Cameron is out to destroy his life (a conclusion that owes more to a news report about cuts in school funding than any indoctrination by his mother) – I couldn't really muster comparable outrage.
I look back on my university education in the early 80s, fully funded by the state. As the offspring of a very low-income single parent, I was entitled to a full maintenance grant and, of course, there was no mention of tuition fees. But while I swanned around Europe and the world in my long vacations, two siblings (a nurse and an army officer) who never had my opportunity of a university education were paying taxes that were effectively subsidising my education. Looking back, it doesn't seem fair.
The key elements of the new tuition package that are crucial are that repayment shouldn't kick in until one has reached a high enough income level and there should be plenty of bursaries to ensure that the best universities are accessible to the poorest. These are issues worth fighting about, not the middle-class perks of a free passport to higher earnings.
But there is an interesting phenomenon gathering pace. One of the central ambitions of the middle classes has always been to ensure their offspring maintain their middle-class status. Huge amounts of time and money are invested in this project. It's what drives the obsession with education – moving into good catchment areas, paying for private education; it is part of why social mobility has declined – because the middle classes have become more determined and more resourceful than ever in ensuring their children's future. The middle classes assume that they will help their children get ahead in the housing market, they know that class is an intergenerational project and have no interest in concepts such as kids standing on "their own two feet" or paying their own way.
But the point is that this is now getting harder and harder. The essentials of middle-class status – home ownership and education – have and are becoming considerably more expensive. Parents of small children now struggle with huge mortgages – on multiples considerably more than their income – in a way their parents never had to. Parents of teenagers look ahead to escalating university costs and the horror of deposits for homes for their offspring. More than 50% of first-time buyers in London depend on parental deposits to get into the housing market.
"The middle class" is a slippery term: it is often used to define what is more properly a luxury elite lifestyle of country cottages and private education. But that bears no reality to the majority of those who might define themselves as middle class – on incomes of £30,000-£60,000 – such as teachers, university lecturers, managers. One of the strategies of these pressed, pressured middle-class professionals is that their family finances only function with two earners. Even then, the mortgage is a struggle, and their chances of setting the kids up in the future in their own homes (as their parents may have done for them) are dwindling. Hence those exhausted, harassed faces drifting around the supermarket at the weekend with kids in tow.
The economic/status rationale of middle-class family life is crumbling, replaced by the insecurity that some will make it – the brilliant, the exceptionally ambitious – but many won't and will probably be worse off than their parents with higher debts and bigger mortgages on smaller flats with longer commutes. What is slowly falling apart is the fond parental dream that they can try and create easier lives for their children.