So, the Government whose aim was to get 50% of young people into higher education presided over a situation where over 100,000 university applicants faced disappointment due to a shortage of places.
We can't just blame the government – the cap imposed on places had a lot to answer for, but the coincidence of a demographic bulge of 18 year olds, and the credit crunch, turned a drama into a crisis for an awful lot of young people this summer.
The risk is that this will become a wider crisis of social mobility. If when the dust settles it is state educated and disadvantaged young people who have been disproportionately squeezed out of this admissions round, then we risk seeing the good work of widening participation in the last 10 years undone, and that really would be a national crisis.
Yet while there are still too many young people who could benefit from HE and don't, there are undoubtedly others who do go, but choose the wrong course at the wrong institution, on the basis of poor advice and ill thought-though decisions.
The real question is: what are the alternatives?
What the 'student place scramble' has exposed is the longer term imbalance in the system. With a service-dominated economy seeing ever more jobs requiring degrees, and no truly respected alternatives to an academic track, young people genuinely can't afford not to go to university (although the much touted graduate earnings premium will be a false hope for many).
So a number of organisations – my own charity The Brightside Trust included www.thebrightsidetrust.org – are working as hard as they can to help disadvantaged young people in particular make up for the national deficit in Information, Advice and Guidance, and 'play the system' the way their more privileged peers have been doing for years.
But when the system is so clearly broken, isn't it time we also started thinking bravely not just about 'sorting out' IAG to help people negotiate the labyrinth, but letting those who really aren't achieving their potential in this context out of the labyrinth and providing some straightforward routes to varied and meaningful goals?
How to do that without perpetuating a 2-tier system is a topic for another day, but in the meantime the Edge Foundation is taking a lead in raising the status of practical and vocational learning and their 6 steps to change manifesto makes interesting reading http://www.edge.co.uk/our-manifesto
Dr Tessa Stone is Chief Executive of The Brightside Trust, and a NET Leading Thinker.
