Jeevan Vasagar argues (Are degrees the new sub-prime bubble?, 26 April) that there is excessive demand for higher education and that a system where university places are funded according to graduates' success in getting well-paid jobs would regulate it. The first is unproven, the second is educationally and socially dysfunctional. It is certainly true that in Britain there is rising demand for higher education, as there is in virtually every advanced country. But so far at least it has had no impact on the private financial returns: in most subjects a graduate still earns more than non-graduates. In any case it could equally well be argued that the problem is undercapacity due to past underinvestment.
This argument is even stronger when we turn to the broader social benefits. The real danger in the government's new funding regime is that higher education will be seen as a private economic activity to be judged by conventional economic criteria. Restricting public funding to those institutions which for reasons of longevity and status are able to charge more will exacerbate this. An economic market model is no solution to the problems of higher education.
Professor of higher education policy, Liverpool Hope University
• The call by the bishop of Oxford for no more than 10% of admissions to Anglican schools to be based on religious practice is greatly to be welcomed (Polly Toynbee, 23 April). It is a sad irony that so many schools founded with the laudable Christian aim of giving education to the poor have now come to function as enclaves for the affluent. But this is only a first step on a long road. Since the disastrous Education Reform Act of 1988, politicians of all parties have abandoned the ideal of education as a public good which benefits society as a whole. Instead, they have conceived of it as an essentially private, positional good, to be marketised and competed for by parents anxious to promote the welfare of their own children. This explains the popularity of religious schools in an increasingly irreligious society. It also helps to explain why UK educational standards fall well short of the best in international comparisons.
Until politicians summon up the courage to admit that educational resources need to be shared out fairly, rather than fought over, our divisive and hierarchical system will continue to waste talent and quite a lot of middle-class children will continue to find that the Holy Spirit puts most effort into Years 5 and 6.
Michael Pyke
• Never mind C of E schools giving more places to non-Christians, what about the Catholic church? My children were banned from attending the school next door to us, because we were not Catholic, while other Catholic children were bussed in from over 20km away.
Roger Ellis
Shrewsbury