AIBU to think that it would have been fairer to introduce a graduate tax than increase tuition fees

Yet we have more graduates than ever before and employers are still struggling to recruit skilled British people.

We have skills shortage because we have a shrinking young population & a lack of investment by the government & companies themselves in upskilliing staff plus lots of people aren’t interested in the areas with said shortages. It’s not because people are doing Mickey Mouse degrees.

It will encourage the best graduates with the best degrees to move abroad to work

I suppose we have this in the apprenticeship levy though? It’s not well managed though, I haven’t worked for a company that’s managed to spend it since they started paying it

I would prefer to see companies who benefit from employing graduates, who are essentially having their workforce trained at taxpayer expense, pay towards this training. This would include law firms, finance, engineering.

The country needs doctors and therefore pays towards training them. Other companies will only hire graduates but are paying nothing towards it.

It might encourage these companies to explore other training routes as well or actually support academics with placements etc.

I’ve read the whole thread and still don’t under stand what the point of this proposal is? Why do we think it would raise more tax money or be more equitable vs student loan repayment?

it ignores 2 points already identified- that a significant number of students pay fees without a loan, and that significant numbers of students pay back their loan.

Current deduction at its max is 9%. take a person on £130k a year- of course they won’t start their career on that salary, but in this example they hit in 20 years in.
They’ll have paid off an average loan in their 40s. How could you justify deducting 9% (£1k a month?!?) from them for the rest of their working life?! For a 3 year degree they did at 23!

secondly the crap about Micky mouse degrees and reducing the number of people who attend university misses a vital role universities play in our society- the social mobility they provides - research shows at a population level this benefit applies to to ALL graduates from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

all people demonstrate when they say this is they’re an uniformed snob who thinks the poor should stay in their lane.

I think a lot of people got sucked into that Thatcherite, loadsa money ethos that greed is good and it’s only got worse. Sadly it’s getting passed down the generations with people complaining about the amount of tax they pay, begrudging others whose circumstances are dire and generally failing to see that if we improve society it benefits everyone. I’m very happy to be nearer the end of my life than the beginning. I dread to think where it’s going to end.

Yes, I cannot help thinking your generation was duped into ruining the lives of future generations. The long term objective of politicians who wanted to push things like cheap privatisations and right to buy in the 1980s-90s and then more recently triple lock pensions was not utopia but a return to a class ridden society where working class upstarts couldn't compete with "their people" for jobs, wealth or opportunities. They've nearly completed their objective now and even the bloody Labour Party has helped them. Older voters naively went along with this, I suspect, either because of short term thinking or because they thought they could shield their own children from it.

The only thought that sustains me is that without even the mirage of meritocracy left, this whole bloody show is going to come crashing down sooner rather than later.

There are some degrees that are known to deliver better ‘value’ than others. If you go to university and don’t put the effort in, drop out or choose a degree for passion then you do so knowing the cost.

Each university goer makes a number of choices, on attendance, effort and course type. I could never support a ‘tax’ that removes the burden of accountability for those choices.

Bribe is exactly the right word. Same deal as right to buy, from which coincidentally my generation also benefited. I remember being furious when fees were introduced, it’s classic pulling up the ladder.

Invest is probably not the right word. Bribe is probably a better one.

The last government made a conscious choice to indiscriminately spend more on pensioners whilst charging students more.
People really resent investing any tax payer money on educating the young who will be future tax payers and workers running the country. Look at the cuts that were made to state education. The preference is to invest in pensioners.

The rise in tuition fees offsets the NI employer contributions for universities. How coincidental these things are you'd have to decide for yourself, but it helps reduce the number of universities going to the wall.

I agree with what you've said.
Higher education was originally expanded because we needed more graduates. I'm not sure what wrong.

How would a graduate tax work in practice? Are you thinking % tax for the rest of their working lives, the same % for all graduates? If so that's incredibly unfair. Why should someone doing a humanities degree for 3 years with 6hrs contact time a week who lived at home, be paying back the same as a doctor/vet who studied for 7 years in student accommodation in London? Under the current system one would have debt of £52,875, the other £155,729, if they both ended up earning the same amount why should they both be taxed the same, for one to hugely subsidise the other?

I already think it's unfair they're charged the same tuition fees but at least they're only charged what they received.

What about people who do two and a half years and then drop out? They aren't graduates so do they not have to pay back anything at all under a graduate tax, not even their maintenance loans?

People moan about 'mickey mouse' degrees but there's never any agreement about exactly what they are, and what people don't like to admit is that those degrees, with fewer contact hours and often usually less expensive facilities, hugely subsidise the more 'scientific' degrees.

An eng lit or history degree = a few hours of lecturers a week, maybe the odd tutorial if they are lucky. Nowhere near enough books in the library so they usually have to buy their own texts. No practicals, no small group work, no expensive labs, no placements, no insurance....costs the uni, what, a tenth of a science type degree to provide but charged the same fees per year.

People stop doing "mickey mouse" degrees = universities will go bankrupt even faster.

At least they bother enough to study.

I think it is worth crunching the numbers here. There are currently around 1.75m undergraduate students in the UK. Were the Government to fund their education instead, the cost would be around £17bn per annum. Arguably a few more people would also go to university if it was free so potentially you might be looking at a total cost of £20bn.

This might sound a lot but a lot of graduates easily pay back the cost of their education in higher taxes over their working lives. The cost could also be contained if the government limited the numbers of places in each course to reflect what the economy actually needed plus some headroom in the availability of less vocational degrees such as the arts or modern languages. Fewer people would go but those who miss out could get a decent professional qualification instead of a dubious and expensive degree from an ex-Poly that employers don't respect (in fact, the ex-Polies could become Polytechnics again and do something useful like they did in the old days).

Also, for context, £20bn is less than a fifth of the cost of the state pension. In fact, because of the triple lock the cost of the state pension has risen so fast that we could in fact have kept it at 2010 levels in real terms and funded higher education for those who wanted it. The last government made a conscious choice to indiscriminately spend more on pensioners whilst charging students more.

Surely that would be really hard and costly to put a system in place for this? It would have to be limited to those starting university in future rather than those in uni right now and those already graduated. How would that be possible to identify in the HMRC system?

I don't really think it is being dealt with properly at all because people aren't looking in the right places. Take the Bar Professional Training Course for example. It sounds solid and worthy doesn't it?

Unfortunately, it's also very expensive and the course providers have more than 3 times as many places as there are going to be vacancies for pupil barristers every year. 1,800 students for around 550 places and the course is useless if you don't practice as a barrister. It's even worse if you look at it over a four year period (as people keep looking for those 550 places a year). In that time, 7,200 people will take the course for 2,200 jobs. These courses cost around £15k so it's around £75m spent on these courses by people who will never secure pupillage in this time period. It's a disgrace.

People pick on courses that sound flaky but actually give students a broad education and serve the market who just "want a degree." Whether it's wise to spend £28k on it is another question but the individual can go in with eyes wide open. However, courses that are very specific and there are too many places, that's where the real problems lie.

DS is doing a degree apprenticeship and loves it. I definitely think that good quality apprenticeships are the way to go.

The current model is that the government pays (through the tuition and maintenance loans) and then, provided they can afford it (by some definition), the students pay them back over the next 30/40 years.

So one way of thinking about the wealthy families is that they come along and say "it's okay, government, I'll pay for this one". Since the government doesn't get back all it pays out, it's in their (and hence our) interests to allow that as an option.

If it was a graduate tax, with no means of avoiding it, then why would any parent stump up the fees themselves? They'd just put the money into a deposit when the child gets to buying a house instead. Or they'd get the child to look at US universities - presumably a graduate tax would only apply to UK degrees.

The current student finance arrangements have gone back to using an interest rate which is just the inflation rate. That does mean that the interest shouldn't be punitive as it has been on some of the previous "plans".

As you can already look up the outcomes and earning of graduates from courses and funding can be withdrawn it sounds like the issue is already being dealt with.

Mickdy Mouse degrees are generally courses that have a high drop out rate, coupled with low employment rates. (Poor student experience and poor outcomes) this is monitored and courses can have funding withdrawn.

Increasingly people also mean courses that lead to jobs that would have earned very similar or the same without degree. So not just employability, but earning potentional. Especially if the learning needed for the job would be better delivered by apprentiship.

People have their pet subjects that fall into this based on nothing but prejudice though.

But I do think students do need to be aware that thier course has a high drop out rate and people don't get jobs after. And if tax payers are loaning the money on the hope it gets paid back it's OK for them to say is this course good enough or is there a better way for this.

@Etincelle I don't think there are Mickey Mouse subjects, that's a bit of a myth. But there are too many people admitted to some courses with no prospect of work in the field afterwards because it is so niche. For example, you can do various courses to work in the film industry at some universities but the reality is that it's a miracle if just one of the cohort finds work in the sector.

I also think some degrees with respectable titles are done badly at some universities and employers know it.

Good Lord what does this say about solicitors?

A closed shop for the upper middle classes, who then go on to demand outrageous fees from the public for doing next to nothing, because they think they deserve a certain lifestyle.

(As you can detect, I do not have a high opinion of solicitors)