It was a measure slipped into George Osborne's so-called emergency budget following the Conservatives' surprise win in the 2015 general election. Little remarked-upon at the time, he simply said that the means-tested grants awarded to the poorest students to help pay for their higher education would be cut by September 2016 because they'd become "unaffordable," claiming that there is a "basic unfairness in asking taxpayers to fund grants for people who are likely to earn a lot more than them."

And now it's come to pass. Students in England from families who have annual incomes of £25,000 or less will have what was already a desperately meagre yearly grant of £3,387 replaced with low-interest loans, representing another crank on the drawbridge the previous generation is pulling up behind them. It has become increasingly hard over the course of the last decade or so for teenagers from poor backgrounds to justify the financial costs of higher education—and increasingly hard not to see this as a deliberate policy by this government to dissuade them from attending.

Austerity has hit many of the poorer parts of Britain disproportionately hard following the great recession in 2008, but education is one of the areas which has been quietly remade in the years since David Cameron came to power in 2010. Tuition fees have been steadily increased by a generation of politicians who were able to get their higher educations for free. Fees were first introduced by Tony Blair in 1998, when they cost £1,000 a year, rising to £3,000 in 2006 after a very narrow vote in the House of Commons and a major Labour rebellion. The Tories, however, have since enthusiastically taken on Blair's mantel, bring in fees of up to £9,000 per year, saddling recent graduates with whopping debts. They also cut education maintenance grants, a £30-a-week grant which was given to keep poorer kids in sixth-form and further education.

Since then, vice-chancellors of elite universities, notably Oxford's, have called for even higher fees. And now this—the death of the grant for the very poorest. It might not seem like a lot of money, but for someone of limited means, taking on an extra £10,000 in debt over the course of three years, low interest or not, is a major decision. Especially in light of a recent report that suggests the weight of student debt following university wipes out nearly all of the earning advantages of attending in the first place. For bright kids who've never seen that much money, whose parents earn less in a year than they'll end up owing with no guarantee of a job, university is beginning to look like an unpleasant option.

This has an immediate and unfortunate knock-on effect on society. When the very poorest—who are more likely to be from ethnic minority and immigrant families—turn their backs on university, we end up with a totally stratified society. This move is giving poor, able students—of whom there are many—an unambiguous message: you are not welcome in England's higher education system. It's a personal tragedy for each individual who is put off from living up to their potential when they judge it too risky to take on this much debt, but it's also a tragedy that the country, which already has so many of its top positions in government, the judiciary, journalism, law, and tech taken up by the wealthy, will only see its public life narrow.

Tech companies claim they are crying out to hire more staff from diverse backgrounds, and point to the failures of an over-stretched school system. One could argue that they don't do enough themselves to seek the talent out, but this decision will only constrict their hiring pool further.

More than half a million students in England received a maintenance grant from the government last year, at a cost of around £1.57 billion a year, or around 0.8 percent of the total cost of the Trident nuclear weapons replacement program (£205 billion over 30 years). Defenders of the cut may argue that the debt is only paid after a student's salary goes over £21,000 per year, but that level hasn't changed in six years, and money is worth significantly less than it was—and the debt total no less real.

The Department for Education has been shamefully silent today on the move, and the government has in general tried to keep it as far off the agenda as it can. In January, Jo Johnson, the universities and science minister, said the grant change “helps balance the need to ensure that affordability is not a barrier to higher education, while ensuring that higher education is funded in a fair and sustainable way.” There is nothing fair about the situation, but it will certainly sustain the status quo.