To Think That Students Studying Science Degrees Shouldn't Be Charged Higher Fees?

[LadyLance]

www.theguardian.com/education/2018/feb/18/cutting-tuition-fees-would-backfire-justine-greening-warns-theresa-may

Teresa May wants to make arts/humanities courses cheaper for undergraduates, and not every university course should cost £9250. Her rather interesting position is that the market has not done what she has expected (sorry, the free market has not emerged), so she is going to try and force it into a shape that's more pleasing, and perhaps more appealing to young people.

I don't work for a university, so I don't know how much your average humanities course costs to run. I do know that many (most?) STEM courses with regular labs, expensive equipment and heavy contact hours cost more than £9250 to run. Although these departments can bring in the big money grants, I do think there is a perception that (some?) universities overfill humanities courses in order to subsidise their science departments.

However, I'm worried about the proposals putting people from low income backgrounds or who are the first in their family to go to uni off STEM courses. I'm also wary that the proposals really amount to a real terms cut for universities in terms of funding.

Obviously the current loans system is unsustainable for the government when many graduates in all fields will never pay their loans back in full. Even high earning doctors might go to work abroad, or take career breaks, and so not repay their huge debts. However, I don't think this is the answer.

firesuit the system already has the student loan budget coming out of the overall budget for universities so kind of exists already. HE funding is a dual model: money directly from govt to unis and colleges, plus tuition fees from students but funded upfront by fee loans. when fees went up to 9k, direct funding went down in order to provide loans.

I don't get the impression that many ppl on this thread actually understand how HE is funded - not meant to be a dig at you or pp, but often the media ignores key details.

i won't get into the argument about learning for its own sake rather than to directly increase earnings!

ladylance
Really, the Blair system (which is the system I went to uni under) worked ok. Students had a manageable amount of debt and are/were more likely to pay it back in full (partly as the repayment threshold was sensible £25.000 is stupid) but weren't charged real interest. The government provided some university funding (in acknowledgement that lots of those with degrees do usually benefit society), but there were also quotas on the number of students unis could take for each course.

didn't the higher 9k fees get introduced in 2012 and i don't think there were student number caps per se before then? but the student number caps were per institution not course so i'm not sure if that's what you're referring to

"When they allow someone onto a course where tuition is funded by a loan, the university must insure the loan so that the government will be repaid by the insurer if the loan is not ultimately repaid by the student."

Sounds like an ideal justification for keeping women out of university, and definitely a perfect justification for excluding access students.

If you can have a place on a course that accepts 3 D's then that is not a subject that should be taken at a university.

3Ds is (under the current system) 72 UCAS points. Could you point to the degree currently offered in the UK which is accessible with 72 UCAS points that you would cull? I've picked some often-sneered-at subjects at some post-post-92s and can't find anything asking for anything much less than 100. I've found Bakery and Patisserie Technology at a very, very post-post-92 for 96 points (3Cs). Supposing there is, somewhere, a 3D course. What percentage of students are doing courses like that? 1%?

And are you seriously saying that because there are some low-tariff courses in a particular subject that shows the whole subject is worthless? There are English degrees you can do with 104 UCAS points (BCC). Does that mean that Oxford's English department is only for the unintelligent as well?

@Firesuit The biggest issue with what you suggest is you would need to increase wages for certain underpaid sectors.

A nurse or teacher graduating in the next few years may end up being someone who struggles to pay back their whole loan. Also, what about those who chose to work part time for example, when they have children.

I think it's a good idea! Arts graduates tend to earn less so they should pay less for their degree

Er, they do already. This thread makes it clear that almost no-one understands student finance. In the majority of cases, they fees charged (and the interest rate payable) is meaningless because of the way repayments are calculated.

If the graduate never earns more than £21k pa, they pay precisely zero towards their degree.

Even if they spend their career earning a moderate to above average salary, say between £25-40k pa, they will pay only a small fraction of their student loans back and none of the interest.

It's only the lawyers, bankers, medics and other high earners that face paying back all their student loans and the interest. And this will be even more so when the payment threshold goes up to £25k pa in April.

Full information at:

www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-tuition-fees-changes

The biggest issue with what you suggest is you would need to increase wages for certain underpaid sectors.

I'm fine with that. If the apparent cost of a degree for say a nurse goes up, that's because it was being somehow subsidised from somewhere else, and now it isn't. In other words, it hasn't truly gone up, it's just moved from being a hidden cost possibly being charged to the wrong person, to a transparent cost that falls on the right people. (The nurse initially, but ultimately the employer.)

It strikes me as the wrong way around. Who needs more sociologists and Women's Studies "graduates"?

I understand that these subjects are worth less as well as costing less to provide but this seems a little backwards. Degrees have become undervalued so much through self-defeating policies of Labour's that we do need to do something to bring balance back. Not pricing students out of the market but making it more costly to repay meaning those who benefit most pay more back (high achievers in degrees worth their time) and increasing the academic standards required to get on a course. Cultural Studies at University of Kent. 2 Cs at A Level. Jesus wept!

Sounds like an ideal justification for keeping women out of university, and definitely a perfect justification for excluding access students.

Yes, the point that woman would be considered a worse investment did occur to me. It would be easy to ensure (if it's not already illegal) that the insurance premiums could not take sex into account. But there would still be a potential issue with courses where nearly all students happen to be women. No doubt we can think of ways to address it.

At an individual level, making sex discriminationn illegal for insurance results in cross-subsidy from women to men for car insurance, and from men to women for annuities. So maybe we could do a same at the group level, a percentage surcharge on the insurance costs that relate to men in order to give a percentage discount to women?

I don't get the impression that many ppl on this thread actually understand how HE is funded - not meant to be a dig at you or pp, but often the media ignores key details.

You're right that I don't know much about it. The issue I have with the current system is that it seems to be in the Universities interest to sign up as many students to every course as possible and (for most courses at most universities) I guess they have insufficient incentive to measure or care about the quality of what they are offering.

I believe that universities are better-placed than the average student to know whether a course represents good value, so some of the burden for assessing this should pass to them. At the moment it's the student who decides, and the government who pays if they get it wrong.

HE funding is a dual model: money directly from govt to unis and colleges, plus tuition fees from students but funded upfront by fee loans. when fees went up to 9k, direct funding went down in order to provide loans.

I didn't really understand this, but I don't think there's anything in there that would cause a University to think they should either offer more Economics places and fewer Arts & Design ones, or charge less for the latter, to reduce the overall taxpayer subsidy caused by loans written off.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-41693230

If we really want people to pay according to the benefits of their degree, a simple graduate income tax would do the trick with funding provided directly from government. The current loan system is really a form of graduate tax, but a badly designed and regressive one where high earners pay a much smaller proportion of their income than lower earners. A straight tax of X% of all income over £Y for life (or a fixed period) would be fairer to everyone.

daisydo There were uni by uni quotas, which ultimately capped the number of students by university.

I am wary of any sort of clawback system that might penalise unis for taking students from groups who might earn less (female/disabled students).

The problem with the current loan system is that a lot of people on good wages in valuable professions (e.g. teachers, nurses, research scientists in some fields) may never pay their loan back, especially if they take time out to have children or go part time.

Currently some universities fill funding gaps by overfilling some courses that are cheaper to run, or taking on lots of international students. Neither of these are ideal and it seems like these proposals will just make things worse =/

It is a graduate tax...it's just that they aren't allowed to call it that.

The single biggest issue with the current system is that the loans provided for living costs do not cover the amount needed to live. In most cases it doesn't even cover the cost of accommodation. There is an expected parental contribution which is not made explicit. I've spoken to people who have told me that the amount they have to give to their child to top-up their loans is more than they were paying when they were in full time childcare.
Now i know people will talk about student being adults, choosing to go to uni etc and parents are under no obligation to help but the current system assesses you on your household income, which in most cases is parental income. This is the part that needs some serious consideration.

A straight tax of X% of all income over £Y for life (or a fixed period) would be fairer to everyone.

Yes! Let's make the life-time benefit of having rich parents even higher!

Current UK university costs, tuition plus living expenses, are less than the price of the fancier London day schools and certainly less than any serious HMC boarding school. If people pre-pay the fees then the effective return on that pre-payment is greater if it's an alternative to an uncapped repayment. For people who privately educate their children, they are routinely pre-paying the fees and living costs anyway, because they believe (wrongly, in my view, but it's a pretty finely balanced decision) that under the current model that makes sense, and it's just "another three or four years" of outgoings they had already budgeted for. It wouldn't be a finely balanced decision if the loan repayments replaced by a lifetime tax.

And before you say "ah, we wouldn't allow pre-payment", think through the implications of that.

The whole thing is completely and utterly ridiculous. Higher education is a social good and should be funded by tax, paid for by all. I have no patience with the argument made that people who haven't personally been shouldn't have to pay for people who have. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who makes that argument should be sent, when ill, to a hospital full of completely unqualified doctors and nurses, where they can ruminate at their leisure on the idea that the gain to society from an educated populace is exclusively personal.

Now i know people will talk about student being adults, choosing to go to uni etc and parents are under no obligation to help but the current system assesses you on your household income, which in most cases is parental income.

And has done since the 1950s. One of the great myths of our time is that everyone going to university in the chosen golden age got a full grant. They didn't: it was assessed on household income. The minimum grant in 1986 was £0. The minimum loan now is £3k-ish.

I wonder what the world would look like if education was treated as a right, rather than a commodity ?

I'd also be curious to know if there's any research or stats to back up my suspicion that changes like this will simply work to prevent girls entering and taking full advantage of higher education ?

They didn't: it was assessed on household income

Which was great if your parent(s) actually gave you any money at all ... there was no obligation on them to do so, so well off parents could - and did - stop their kids going to university. And it was more often than not girls (again) that suffered. Especially if they came from a background where female education was actively discouraged.

Also, as with all means tests, the process was pretty blunt, so you had parents being assessed as being "wealthy", when in real life they were hand-to-mouth.

I have a vague memory that children of divorced parents also suffered if one parent (usually the father) refused to fill in the forms (which again, they had no obligation to do).

Also, as with all means tests, the process was pretty blunt

I got a minimum grant. Both of my parents are teachers.

And it was more often than not girls (again) that suffered.

"Student funding and its impact on the demographics of graduates, 1945-2015" would be a very good PhD for someone working around some or all of Education, History and Sociology.

No insurance company would touch that with a barge pole.

"Student funding and its impact on the demographics of graduates, 1945-2015" would be a very good PhD for someone working around some or all of Education, History and Sociology.

You won't get any money from a Tory for that. Now if it were an Economics or Political Economics paper ....

@DGRossetti the impact of higher education being treated as a commodity is huge ...and the majority of it isn't positive

In an ideal world everyone would be educated to the maximum possible level, we dont live in that world.
There isn't enough graduate level jobs, so what is the benefit in spending lots of tax payers money on an education that wont be used.

Graduates are not happy doing jobs that they feel are below what they are worth. We then have to import cheap labour to do non-graduate jobs.

So lets restrict University to the academically able, say 120 UCAS points and above. Everyone else can take apprenticeships, learn trades etc.