I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again. I am about to make myself very unpopular. But, well, fine girrafes never buttered no unicycles, so here goes – I’m in favour of the Coalition Government’s aim to raise the cap on university tuition fees. For the political background to this, and how the issue is forcing Liberal Democrats, finally, to wake up to the realities of government, I recommend this article from columnist Anne McElvoy.
The financial background, I believe, is, roughly, as follows. At present, the taxpayer (that’s me) underwrites university teaching to the tune of around £7bn per year, and the government would reduce this burden to around £4bn. At present, students at universities pony up to £3,000 per year towards their tuition fees, whereas the real cost is more like £7,000, and rather more for science. The idea is that universities make up the deficit in public subscription by raising the ceiling on tuition fees.
I don’t see what’s wrong with this. Most students will fund their education by loans, which, according to the current plans, will only become repayable if the student gets a job paying more than £21,000 a year. This is quite a hefty wedge - here in Norfolk a good annual wage is around £16,000. Basically, the government will still be underwriting the tuition fees of many students, with those least able to pay benefiting most from this arrangement.
Now, you may well ask, how could I be so callous – hypocritical, even – when my own university education was almost entirely paid for by the state? Others of my generation, motivated by such nostalgia, feel that as we got away Scot scot-free, then so must subsequent generations. This is nonsense. That was then, and this is now, and the past, as the man said, is a different country.
The problem is that the higher-education sector is running at far too high a capacity. When I was an undergraduate, I think there were around 90 universities in the whole of Britain. In my day, the sector was just small enough to allow the state to fund one’s higher education. Now, I believe that there are around 130 universities in England alone. The inflation has been created, in part, by the mantra of the former Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, that 50% of all students should go to university, a diktat that ran counter to employers’ needs or indeed common sense. This inflation needed funding, and so the Labour government was forced to introduce tuition fees (yes, the same Labour party that’s voting against tuition fee rises).
In an ideal world, I’d be for a return to the old system, where there were fewer universities, such that young people with smarts could get decent higher education at the taxpayers’ expense. And that’s a good thing. A country – and all its inhabitants – needs to find a fair and equitable way of educating its bright young people to perform the functions that countries need – lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists. What this taxpayer objects to is paying money so that some finger-pointing spartist can waste time at the University of Nebbish learning about radical feminist golf-course management.
Imposing something more like the real cost of education on students should, I hope, make people entering higher education think more carefully about the courses they plan to undertake. Are they likely to be value for money? Does their university of choice have a good record in training their students for the real world? If some students who otherwise might go to university are put off, and do something more useful instead, this is all to the good – they will probably be happier in the long run, and the dismally high dropout rate from undergraduate courses will, hopefully, fall, as courses will be populated by students with more of a commitment to completing them. Universities, too, will have to make sure that they are up to scratch, as students will be more demanding. It is likely that many courses and departments, and perhaps some universities, will close. Good. Perhaps this long-overdue exercise in fiscal propriety will return the higher education sector to the way it was in my day, when you really could get a good university education for very little, rather than a half-hearted one for vast expense.
Am I some fat cat? Fat, possibly, but likely to get thinner as time progresses. These cuts affect everyone. Many people I know in public services are facing redundancy – people like health professionals and librarians, who perform valuable service to the community in the way that radical feminist golf-course managers never could. Mrs Crox will soon be redundant, the victim of cuts in public contracts to the charity for which she works. This will cause measurable problems here at the Maison Des Girrafes. Most of us, in the disenfranchised middle classes, are working harder and harder for less and less. I’m not saying that just because we’re having a tough time, then nobody else should have any fun. I’m saying that there is a constituency in academic fairyland that really needs to get out more, and take time to understand where the money comes from to fund their indulgences. But before they do, they should take my advice and dress warmly. ‘Cos baby, it’s cold outside.
It may be cold but these proposed measures do not achieve any savings for the taxpayer – as William Cullerne Brown reports.
What also irritates me is the emphasis on the fact that students will be paying back less than under the current system because of the tweaked threshold for repayment. However, it is clear that their total debt at the end of their degrees will be massively inflated (unless I have missed the part where Cleggeron explained how £9000 is actually less that £3400). That is a clear disincentive for students from poorer backgrounds. My kids are already concerned about the likely costs and we are nowhere near the poor category. I appreciate some measures have been put in place to reduce costs for the very poorest but I haven’t seen a clear analysis of how effective those measures will be. And you’ll forgive me if I don’t take the government’s good will on trust.
Oh, and what’s the evidence for the “the dismally high dropout rate from undergraduate courses”? I wouldn’t describe Imperial’s dropout rate in those terms.
Here is something on , admittedly a few years old. And Imperial is hardly the University of Nebbish. And goodness knows how I’ll fund the educations of Crox Minor and Crox Minima. I hope that by then the University of Nebbish will have closed down netting such enormous savings that tution fees can be reduced or scrapped altogether. Or I’ll have to write a bestseller.
note to self – learn how to do html coding.
I’m getting that you rather enjoy making yourself unpopular, Henry!
Re. HTML in comments on your own blog, in WordPress it is actually easier and quicker to put them in later on an “edit” screen. So you can post the comment, then click to “Edit” it, and that gives you a screen where you can put the links in quickly by highlight/select/paste. No HTML required. I usually do this if the comment has more than one or at most a couple of links in it.
On the fees question, I thought SOME fee increase was inevitable, but the hike at a stroke to £ 9K (which is what I predict it will be for Imperial, and I’m guessing also for where I work) is too much, too fast. It is clearly ideological in origin – which I guess is fine if you agree with the ideology. The other point is that it effectively ditches the idea of education as in any way a public good, as discussed (e.g.) by Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books.
I hope I made clear my view that in an ideal world, one shouldn’t have tuition fees at all. If that’s ideological, then that’s my ideology. But we’re not in an ideal world. We’re in a world that’s been royally screwed by Tony Blair, in which we can’t just scrap fees. We have to recover some of the money squandered and set the system to rights. In the end we’ll have a better system that’ll cost less and please everyone.
I think the 1992 changes which turned many first-class polytechnics into second-class universities formed part of the problem too. And that was a Conservative government’s mistake, so somewhat to my chagrin I find I can’t blame the situation entirely on Tony Blair.
(S)
Fair enough, Henry, but it is NEVER going to go back to that (i.e. to free HE). What the Tories are doing is in effect forcing the American HE system on Britain, near enough overnight. There will be no reversing this change once it is imposed.
Now, while I agree with you that we have too many students in academic HE in the UK, and that much of the post-92 Poly–> Uni shift was a major strategic error, re-establishing any kind of stability after this will take years and years, and there will be a lot of blood on the carpet. One has only to look at what is happening at Imperial (or discussed here) to see the chaos that is going to ensue even at the more protected top end of the UK University sector. Do you think, for instance, that anyone will be left to teach, or to study, paleontology?
What’s more, I can do self-indulgent at least as much as these spotty oiks. Because of the ridiculous fees protest in London, Mrs Gee is currently stuck in traffic and will miss all her bus connections home. Me and Mrs Gee already pay £££ to indulge finger-pointing spartist militant feminist golf-course designers from the University of Crap, without the need for any further inconvenience. I hope that the vote in parliament is carried and these loons will have to go out and get a McJob instead. And another thing – I’m very pleased that humanities funding has been slashed. About time too. Even when I was a student, a standard joke ran as follows:
Q: what question are you most likely to be asked by an arts graduate?
A: ‘Do you want fries with that?’
Do you think, for instance, that anyone will be left to teach, or to study, paleontology?
Palaeontology has always been a marginal subject. I got into graduate school in the late 1980s, when the situation was bad and getting worse. You could get into graduate school – but you had to have (1) a first-class degree from a good university (2) luck.
As much fun as it would be to shout “I WILL NOT SHARE A NETWORK WITH THIS DAMN TORY!!!!!” and storm out before we’ve even started, I have to say that I agree with your central argument – that there are too many students doing too many useless degrees, who would be better off getting vocational training, or just learning on the job. I know so many people who now have jobs that have nothing at all to do with their undergraduate degree, and it seems like such a waste of time for them (and money – three years of extra earnings would make a big difference in some cases).
However, I also know people here in Canada who are financially crippled by their student loans – and fees here aren’t anywhere near as high as in the USA. This is especially true for academics who did PhDs and then started paying back their loans while on a postdoc pittance.
I don’t think such a sudden, massive fees hike is the answer. Not without giving people viable non-university alternatives to move into, i.e. giving them a carrot rather than a stick to persuade them that they don’t need a degree in media studies in order to be a middle manager in a big corporation.
Someone like my Dad, a very bright coal-miner’s son whose widowed mother never could have supported his studies, who became the first person in his village to ever go to grammar school and then University, who did so on a full grant, would in all likelihood be royally screwed under the system that just got voted in today. I can just see him screaming at the TV as I write this…
(I think violent protesters are scumbags who harm their cause in the long run, btw. Oh, and my department when I was an undergrad had a sign on the paper towel dispenser in the bathroom that read “sociology degrees, please take one”.)
Two words you mentioned. ‘Grammar school’. Things that allowed bright people of humble backgrounds to get on, and scrapped by Labour as elitist. Social mobility under Tony Blair was the lowest for a generation. What Blair tried to do was substitute the fake social zombieism of degrees of nothingness for the real social mobility conferred by grammar schools.
Good point, but I don’t think it negates the rest of my argument
The rest of the argument tells me we should do things about postdoc pittances rather than the loan system… Which allows people credit until such time as they have the salaries to pay them back without crippling themselves .
I think violent protesters are scumbags who harm their cause in the long run, btw
Just seen the pictures on the TV. I assume that the NUS and the UCU will be sent the bill for cleaning up.
As an American, I confess I’m perplexed by the concept of not paying for university – in today’s money, I estimate my family shelled out £200,000-£300,000 for me to attend Oberlin College for four years (for all you Brits, ‘college’ means ‘uni’ in Yank). My family was rather poor but I got through on scholarships, loans and work-study (meaning I had to work 20 hr/week for the College); my Dad also remortgaged the house, I believe. But there is no question that this benefited me tremendously. I earned well and eventually paid off the loans a long time ago (they could be deferred all the way through graduate school).
What’s a little unfair about tripling fees straight away is that people just preparing to enter uni have not prepared financially. In the States, parents start college savings funds when their child is born. In the present situation, people will have been caught completely off-guard. I think it would have been fairer to ease the new policy in over a few years so as not to hit next year’s freshers quite so hard.
There’s a bit of a hidden assumption somewhere in here, Henry: that charging more money will get rid of the shit degree courses (are we allowed to cuss here?).
I’m all in favour of intellectual elitism in universities. More high quality teaching for the (fewer) brightest students. Unfortunately, I know of no evidence* that charging people to attend the highest education systems (1) will lead to the further education of only the brightest, or (2) will result in only the ‘best’ courses being saved.
What if radical feminist golf-course management is cheaper to run than Medicine? Which course do you think the corporate honchos running universities will vote to keep?
*I haven’t particularly looked for the evidence either, so please enlighten me if you have any.
A couple more interesting views on the issue of the fees increases: one from the editorial pages of the New York Times; and another from a blog, pointing out the large difference between the way the Chancellor and the exchequer have treated banking and higher education – both industries which are seen as vital to the national economy.