I'm not too sure what you mean by local specialist institutions.
I can only think of places like Cranfield (3000 students), London School of Economics (1500 students) and a tiny minority of others that still exist. These operate in highly specialist areas and can cover the costs brought in by Labour (under EU ruling) of some of the employment laws that have now made it so expensive to run small higher education and further education specialist colleges.
In my area I can think of Wimbledon School of Art, Kent Institute, Winchester, Cumbria Institute, Rose Bruford, Camberwell, Central St Martins, Norwich School of Art, Blackpool and the Fylde, Falmouth, London College of Fashion, London College of Printing and Cleveland College of Art & design.
These all now exist as faculties in larger universities. Some have flourished as their names were kept and the larger university looked after the valuable product they had. Others were subsumed and either had to take on vast student numbers or marketing failures killed them off.
Universities cannot be allowed to act like a bank. They should be treated as institutions that should offer every student in Britain an equal and realistic chance of entering and thus cannot be expected to charge responsible rates without government regulation.
Every university aims at what you say - they would laugh at your accusation of acting like a bank. If you investigate further you'll find quite a large number of universities are financially crippled - and this because of fees as well as EU employment laws.
London Metropolitain, Leeds Metropolian, Brighton, University of Cumbria to name a few have huge debts and are on the verge of collapse. They are not
the bottom universities by entry standards - just for financial status.
-- If the government withdrew all fiscal support for polytechnic universities by 2020 and instead allocated this money to expand and subsidize the ever decreasing (and highly useful) foundation year courses, the British government would be able to extend education prospects to thousands of British students who under performed and want to be given another chance
You misunderstand what a good Foundation degree is - some of these are excellent courses with really high employment prospects. They also offer excellent vocational and industry experience which normal degrees cannot match unless they become 4 year sandwhich courses.
Foundation degrees weren't decreasing last time I looked - they were the only type of degree a University could develop if it wanted to offer new courses. There was (and is) no new money for new B.A. courses unless the university can find that money itself.
The Lib-Cons have funny ideas of priority. The likes of they complain (or gleefully boast) that open-door immigration
For about the 900th time - open door immigration is from the EU only and this is a discussion about education - not immigration.
-- Infinite Chaos says people like the idea of free further education but don't want to pay for it. I've often heard that to justify attacking moaners who speak out against things like tax rises. But one reason some people may indeed not want to pay for it is because they feel short-changed. (That and the fact people had become used to too many kids living the Student Grant lifestyle).
And here we have the rub - people want our young to have a great education and the best opportunities but equally read some newspapers that try to depict the young as useless layabouts living a student grant lifestyle. I'm talking about the people (not you RoP) who want education to be free but are not willing to pay for it - one excuse is the fake picture of all students laying in bed till 3 in the afternoon then heading to lecture for an hour or two before the pub and drug flamed parties all night.
-- But in reality it's harder for people with good degrees to get top-flight jobs because of either the foreign competition or that they just flood the marketplace anyway.
The Government should divert certain ring-fenced monies and invest in our own crumbling systems. Build more technical colleges and encourage kids to become tradesmen, then they'll be set for life!--
Firstly, lack of competition led to the self inflicted industrial collapse of the car industry here in the UK. We only have 17 Universities in the World top 200 universities this year - we need competition and we need to provide the best value for money education in the world. Ring fencing and hiding won't help.
What ring fencing I totally agree with is for industrial trades / crafts training - not education - but training. We have many technical colleges now but they operate in Further Education and FE is the worst treated (by any political party) area in our education sector.
Teachers in FE work the longest hours for the least pay in comparison to school (primary or secondary) teachers or university teachers.