Theodore Dalrymple believes the U.K.'s austerity measures were unavoidable. He largely blames the "impossible political promises" of government:
British young people have been subjected to a gross deception, which, if they recognized it, would make them far angrier than the [student] demonstrators [opposing British spending cuts] were. The previous government decreed that 50 percent of British youth should attend university, irrespective of students’ educational attainment or of the economy’s capacity to make use of so many graduates. In so doing, it doubled state expenditure on education in only eight years. This centralized planning had a predictable effect: the standard of university teaching and education fell significantly, as did the value of the average degree.
While the number of graduates expanded, employers complained that young Britons were increasingly unable to write a simple sentence properly or do basic arithmetic. For the students, however, the connotation of university education lagged behind its denotation: in other words, though education declined in quality, students felt entitled to the same advantages that had accrued to graduates back when education was better.
The Dish 