Politics has often obscured economics in the raucous debate on tuition fees, perhaps rightly so given the plausible case that to model education as a good at all is a flawed approach to the issue. But if opponents of the increase wanted to fight fire with fire the field of information economics provides an argument that undermines a major part of the coalition’s case. The argument is an application of a classic paper by Michael Spence, in which he investigates the role of signalling in alleviating the problems resulting from asymmetric information in the labour market. Spence’s model has two types of workers – Alphas and Betas – and Alphas have a much higher productivity. Workers know their type but firms can’t tell. The result is that the real wage is simply set at the average productivity. Now suppose workers are given the option of going to university, and that Alphas will get a degree if they attend but Betas will fail. Alphas can signal their type to firms with a degre ...