Voices is the Dorset Echo's weekly youth page - written for young people by young people.

This week Oliver Streather-Paul takes a look at the latest government review of university tuition fees.

Theresa May has attempted to reverse the work of her Conservative predecessors, insisting everyone should be able to access higher education.

She stated a working class boy “has the odds stacked against him”.

Her speech in Derby delivered long-awaited information on her government’s review on university fees and appears to consider slashing fees to £6,000 a year.

Former education secretary Justine Greening and former universities minister Jo Johnson both strongly opposed the reform, with May’s ex-aide claiming that Ms Greening ‘blocked’ the plan to cut fees.

However, new education secretary Damian Hinds stating tuition fees should be proportionate to value as opposed to all fees for all degrees being fixed.

Mr Hinds said fees should be defined by “a combination of three things: the cost to put it on, the benefit to our student and the benefit to our country and our economy”.

Whilst this may incur additional costs to universities, competition could be a possible solution to the hike in university fees over the last decade with the money spent on a degree varying in the equipment needed to provide a degree.

This would lower the prices of degrees such as economics, which have a high intake rate of students and low resource cost as well as high post-graduation employment and salary. For example the London School of Economics is the 11th highest in the UK for salaries after graduation.

However, with the expensive equipment required for degrees such as engineering and the sciences, this review could be a concern.

Jeremy Corbyn still adamantly defends free university tuition, but I personally believe the taxpayer would be subsidising the education of a minority of the population – with taxpayer money possibly being spent on ‘non-degrees’ and huge government subsidies being forced into universities.

Only time will tell how May’s grand plan will unfold.

Fortunately, tuition costs are frozen for the foreseeable future, which does mean they haven’t made degrees more expensive.Yet.

By Oliver Streather-Paul