Quotas: Short term solution?

I plan to use my blog to record any pieces of information and research which may prove helpful to my project.
In listening out for potentially useful pieces of information which will help add depth to my project, I came across one particularly unsettling headline earlier this week:

"Universities in England could be stripped of the power to charge tuition fees of more than £6,000 a year if they fail to admit sufficient numbers of students from poorer backgrounds.”

This may sound as if I am opposing a measure which will help students from less affluent backgrounds into further education and am therefore being discriminatory. This is not the case. I am merely wishing to comment upon the government's handling of the education system. For me, introducing quotas is like cutting off the top of a dandelion. In other words, does not solve the problem at its roots. Obviously, I need to conduct further research into the system to back up these thought as at the moment they are only really normative statements. I would say, with the information I currently possess, that introducing quotas could damage the university system even further. It will deny good students from independent schools places at the top institutions. Where did this view that many people hold that everyone who attends public schools is 'rich' and everyone who attends state schools are 'poor' come from? The line is definitely not that clear cut or black and white. The government should focus on improving the state school system to provide a more equal footing for all prospective university candidates in the first place.

An article by Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph on Sunday I believe gives some really well thought out if slightly controversial statements which I found myself agreeing with. He believes that the quota system is just a way for the government to mask the problem.

'If this government did not maintain its doctrinaire, bigoted and ignorant prejudice against selective schools, the state system would produce many more students capable of thriving in the best institutions.' 

As I said before, this distinction between private and state schools seems to have become so set in stone and I don't think it is as simple as that. Fighting the war on the university battlefield will only result in unnecessary casualties. As Heffer says, 'it is not a great university's job to facilitate social mobility.' I feel that the quota system enforces a kind of positive discrimination in our society. Why should the government be 'sabotaging the life chance of gifted young people whose only crime was to have parents who made sacrifices to educate them privately'?

From an economic point of view, diluting the university system will surely see the country suffer in the long run? As Heffer puts it, 'we depend on these institutions for our future both as an economy and as a civilisation.' I would like to explore the theory that education is the framework upon which a country is built.

Simon Heffer. (2011). How to destroy our Universities. The Telegraph