Really shocked at myself for thinking this (tuition fees)

I think that a graduate tax makes infinitely more sense.

If you go back 20 years to when I went to university, the system of free university education and maintenance grants was patently a massive subsidy to the middle and upper classes. Only 15% of school leavers went to university/polytechnics, and they were overwhelmingly from richer families. If you went to uni, you had a very high chance of earning a good salary afterwards.

Things have changed massively - with 50% of young people going on to uni, there is no way that they can all earn high salaries as a result.

So, either the repayment levels are set high enough that many people don't pay back much of their loans (and have a debt burden hanging over them forever), or you are taking a substantial amount of money from people on average or lower incomes, whilst those earning lots can pay their loans off quickly.

A graduate tax that only kicked in once you earned above the average full time wage (and was guaranteed not to take you below average earnings) would

a) make money for the treasury (since those earning lots would pay on all their income)
b) be fairer, as there would be no way that those with richer parents could avoid it
c) not hit those on lower earnings.

I agree there is the potential for some people to avoid paying by leaving the country, but there could be a mechanism for your education to be charged for directly if you left the UK within X years of graduating.

Of course, there is also the question of whether it makes sense for 50% of school leavers to go on to higher education in its current form, but that might be for a different thread :)

I should say, 9k across the board would be excessive. But that's not what is being suggested....

I agree that £9k is very excessive, and the fact that Welsh and Scottish students will receive a greater subsidy is very unfair, and I think will cause trouble in the future.

But to ask lawyers/bankers to pay £27k for their degrees, given their greater earning power, doesn't seem outrageously unfair to me. I can't help but think that it will be degrees that give access to those sorts of careers are the only ones that will charge the upper rate.

Mid-ranking universities offering degrees that are useful for say, the leisure industry (sports management, tourism?), won't have a market willing to pay £9k per year. Unless people really have taken leave of their senses.

Both house price inflation and extortionate tuition fees are wrong. Don't know what your point is, Alpine.

Alfa, I gather we will have the highest tuition fees of any Western developed nation - at least that's what they said on Radio 4 news so I'm inclined to believe it.

Tuition fees were a bad idea but tripling them is ludicrous. Don't see any of the MPs who got free tertiary education offering to pay back the costs of their degrees...

Have you been protesting the rising "out of control" house prices for the last 15 years? Or is educational debt different to mortgage debt?

But people also go to university for their own personal benefit, even if what they end up doing has a wider social benefit too - so some sort of tuition fees is surely appropriate?

Even under the new proposals, courses and institutions will be subsidised. But if you go for a 'popular' course - which market forces will, I strongly suspect, dictate will be the ones that charge the full 9k but also lead to lucrative employment - you pay more.

And the 'public benefit' argument around education for education's sake is undermined by the number of non-academic degrees now being studied - all well and good, but I just don't believe that people with 3 Cs at A level studying business management at university add much value to the overall culture of the nation. Good luck to them, and I'm sure they will pick up decent employment as a result. But I'm not sure there's much of an argument for that sort of education being paid for entirely by the State (other taxpayers).

The government, and the baby-boomer generation, has a very self-centred attitude - what's in it for me, why should I pay for it?

They seem to think that higher education is only good for making more money at your job, when actually it is very beneficial to society as a whole.

Doctors, lawyers, artists, etc - universities are very goof for society's development, so society has a vested interest in enough people going to uni.