University Fees

[Xenia]

I see that Lord Browne in his report may apparently suggest (Sunday Times today):

• rights for universities to charge fees of up to £10k a year rather than the £3200 or whatever it now is perhaps from 2012

• removal of cheap loans for children of the middle classes (presumably even if their parents are not prepared to help them)

• interest rate susidies on loans going up 2%

• students who go into high paid careers will have to pay back more than they borrowed perhaps capped at 20%

• and one which pleases me - parents will be able to avoid the graduate tax for their children if they pay the fees in advance. None of my older 3 children took out student loans as I paid as I wanted them to be in the same position when I graduated in the days when there were no fees paid by students.

However the report is not yet finished and he may recommend abolishing the cap on tuition fees and let the free market rule which may be wise.

"You may be right but I will say that it is widely believed that A level standards have gone down."

They clearly have. That's why I know profs who didn't get straight As at A Level: it just was so rare, that if you made that a criterion there wouldn't be many profs aged over 40.

"By creating a market where richer kids are able to access the most expensive education more easily I am convinced standards will come down not up. "

So start failing some people. One, er, "surprising" fact is that with larger intakes, the percentage of people getting firsts has risen, as has the percentage of people getting 1sts and 2:1s, and the rate of people being thrown out has if anything dropped. Odd, that.

"If you're bright but not wealthy the difference in fees of say £3k at Uni down the road v. £7k at RG will feel significant and less affluent families will be less able to read the subtleties of each university"

But that's happening now. You and I know the universities that are good, and probably (in our own fields and related ones) the departments that are good. And we know people who can tell us that for most other subjects. If my daughter wanted to do subject X, I'd have her talking to a senior figure from a good department, via middle class net, to scope out her options. People without regular access to HE don't have that, which is why they end up doing crap courses at weak institutions and paying the same for it as tey would to do a good course at a good place that they could have got into.

Why? Because 14 year olds aren't stopped from doing bad GCSEs, and again at 16. You and I know that if you want to keep your options open, English, History and French is acceptable for almost all humanities courses and Maths, Physics and Chemistry for almost all science and engineering courses. There are exceptions, and if you're certain what you want to do, go for it, but those traditional groupings are the safest options. The more people pay for their child's education, the more likely that they are doing one of those sets of A Levels, based on the appropriate GCSEs.

Now, over in Bash Street, how many people have those A Levels? Fees be blowed: with A Levels that they're doing, no where high up the league tables will look at them.

Barbeasty

"The arguement that this pushes people to go and work abroad is defunct, as people working abroad don't repay their loans unless they return to work in the UK"

The fact that people working abroad don't repay their loans is exactly the point. If you are good, when you have graduated (and even more so, after completing a PhD), you have plenty of options for employment outside the UK (and I say this as someone who worked for quite a number of years outside the UK after gaining my PhD). By moving abroad, esp within the EU, you gain considerable tax benefits. For example when I finished my PhD the country I moved to didn't tax the first 30% of my salary for the first 10 years as an incentive for me to move there. If on top of that you get to walk away from loans owed in the UK, it means good graduates with the option of being able to move abroad are more likely to take this up.

"If on top of that you get to walk away from loans owed in the UK, it means good graduates with the option of being able to move abroad are more likely to take this up."

Is that a bad thing? A little corner of a foreign department's coffee room that is forever England, etc?

Barbeasty - I don't understand why someone who has paid their dues beforehand should be slapped with higher taxes.

If someone decides to work for a few years and save.
If someone gets sponsorship from the forces or a large firm.

They don't now 'owe' anything do they?

I simply don't think you can base tax payment on usage. What of those who are regular uses of the NHS? Or those that use state schools? Should they have to repay via higher taxes?

"I don't understand why someone who has paid their dues beforehand should be slapped with higher taxes."

The fees are only a proportion of the cost of the degree, though.

"I simply don't think you can base tax payment on usage. What of those who are regular uses of the NHS? Or those that use state schools? Should they have to repay via higher taxes?"

Ah, the problems of universal taxes funding non-universal services.

Interesting article in the Graun here.

With regards to going abroad, I simply mean that it would be no different from the current system in terms of an incentive and is therefore a disingenuous argument against a slight tax rise.

And as for taxing for the use of a service, this is precisely what happens for the NHS etc. The more I earn the more I pay in income tax and national insurance, this then funds those services.

A graduate tax would be the same principle as paying fees but with a different method of collection, repayments that don't change with inflation but with your income, and based on your ability to pay rather than what your parents were earning at one particular moment.

I have been really struggling to pay private school fees for my two stepdaughters and the younger one has just had to go to a state college for sixth form because I just could not sustain the fees for both of them any more.

I was holding on to the idea that once they get to university (one next year, the other the year after) the fees will go right down. I have a baby now and would want him to go to private school, especially given that I have worked my the last few years off to send my stepchildren to private school, it seems very unfair that my own child will now not be able to go to private school. This is what will be the case if the university fees go up so much.

Tokyo - beautifully put and the article link is great.

But here's the truth. If you fail students (1) it affects your student league table ratings that focus on the number of 2:1s (if you look at who does well in this it's often not what I at least would have guessed) and (2) if you fail international students, they go home irritated, tell their schools, no more pupils from that school apply to your Dept and you lose a wedge of money. Marketing is everything.

I do fail people every year but really because they haven't got the faintest or write two or three lines in the exam. Also it's getting horrid at work. Our new director of teaching and learning is combining our module evaluation scores (which are anonymously filled in and this year we haven't been allowed to see) with our results and if these two sets of 'data' are both poor he will haul us over the coals. Apparently I'm fine and certainly my results have jumped. I'd like to think it's because of my stellar teaching and fair examining but, but, but ...

Also on fees - does anyone know how much an arts/social science degree actually costs?

150 contact hours (I'm being generous) + library + IT facilities + student services + student union building + playing fields etc. etc. We have about 200 home students a year = £1.4m. Students are only there part of the year and at least half my job is classed as research and I (being female!) do a fair bit of teaching proportionately. I wonder what the figures are ...

on fees v. tax - the idea would be that there are no upfront costs. But if paying them upfront means no interest then there are effectively two prices (1) for the rich with no interest and (2) for everyone else with interest. So in theory dude you might be able to send your son private but it will cost you

fair? surely not. It will be an easy way to get some cash up front but it can't be fair.

Isn't one with the tax that if it ends up being more than the cost of the degree rich students will vote with their feet and go to the U.S. instead? Personally, I don't see that as a great loss in terms of students since other people would then take up their places instead (although what percentage should go to Uni). They want a market of course that doesn't allow us to compare a RG with an Ivy League. When the price is the same, the politicians get nervous ...

Hope this doesn't derail this very interesting thread, but tokyo, you asked;

"who are these people who could/should have gone to university in the 1980s, but didn't?"

Me, me, me! And several of my friends. We didn't go in the 80s/early 90s because our secondary education was abysmal. We left school with no qualifications, so university wasn't an option.

"But if paying them upfront means no interest then there are effectively two prices (1) for the rich with no interest and (2) for everyone else with interest."

But the same's true of houses and cars and electric guitars: they're much cheaper bought for cash than on finance. No one outside the SWP is proposing providing them out of general taxation.

I suspect most of us have an intuitive sense that puts education with health, to be provided by the state out of general taxation, and not with cars, bought individually out of whatever resources you can raise. But I think making that case is a task for some deeper analysis than "it's obvious, isn't it?" For example, one social policy benefit for public transport is to provide transport for people who cannot afford even to borrow the money for a car (there are other reasons it's provided, but that's at effect). But buses are almost never as good a way to travel as taxis, and we don't offer taxis as subsidised social benefits. Making the case for a level provision of education, of equivalent quality for all, needs a real clarity of purpose.

Prediction: it won't be long until one university, probably somewhere like Warwick or Exeter, waves two fingers to government funding and joins Buckingham in the private sector. They can then charge what they want for a premium service, a la BUPA or Eton. It's a business model.

"our secondary education was abysmal. We left school with no qualifications,"

Was that solely the school's fault? Or are the problems more deeply seated, structural issues?

I see the view is that going to university for sheer intellectual enjoyment and learning is out?

My degree didn't equip me to do any job but I thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a lot.

Then I got a job and worked my way up.

If this goes ahead the number of kids going to university will plummet and we'll be back in the 1950's where only the elite (financially or academically) went to university.

It also means no public servant will have a degree unless their parents bankroll them.

The choice will be: get a degree, emerge with debt, gamble on getting a top paying job (of the finite number available), if you don't get a well paid job then buying a house is not an option for you.

Social mobility anyone?

Oh, and of course, being disabled my chances of a £100k+ job are minimal so that's me buggered.

Luckily I went to uni on a full grant and got an ok job after that and managed to buy a house. I doubt I could have done that aged 22 if I'd had £30k of debt.

Also, some poeple are not motivated by money, some people don't want to work 12 hour days, some people actually would like to retire (or will be forced to, like me).

However, if you have lots of money an never retire, you will do ok.

So the rest of the population who are not alpha types (97% of us) can bugger off like the serfs we are.

At least the Tories are homest about despising most of the population.

miggsie

actually i seem this improving social mobility - those with parents who work hard and earn a decent living won't be able to afford to go to uni - so they will go down the social ladder. those with parents that don't work , and don't have to pay so much will be more likely to go to uni and go up the ladder.

but surely having an appropriately educated workforce should be a priority, rather than just moving people up and down the social scale?

But Miggsie - you speak as if we all have the unassailable right to study at uni. We don't. At least half the population are excluded by dint of not being sufficiently clever.

It's not the same as healthcare or roads or the welfare state where evryone can use those services...

"we'll be back in the 1950's where only the elite (financially or academically) went to university."

My mother's father drove a bus.

My father's father worked in a warehouse.

Both had state educations, interrupted by their respective cities being bombed and, in my father's case, being evacuated.

They both went to university in the 1950s on the back of the 1944 act.

We had a few great teachers but as a whole the school was dreadful, tokyo. It didn't even occur to me to go to university - I think the school shares some of the blame here, but then it didn't occur to my family that I might want to go, either. Degrees were something other people did. Thanks to the expansion of HE, had I been born 20 years later, it wouldn't have occured to me not to go.

However, I think teaching has improved and attitudes towards school have changed (it wasn't such a big deal to leave school with no qualifications in the 1980s, for example).

Although I accept that there are still some pretty poor schools around, I honestly don't think my old school would have got away with being quite so crap had Ofsted existed back then.

Bugger, that last post didn't make sense. I'll try again.

My school was crap - I blame them for my not going to university in the 80s/90s.

Schools are, as a rule, far better now.

Exams are probably easier - but teaching is better, too.

I am tired. Sorry!

Litchick I don't think we have an unassaible right to HE, but I do believe that it should be available for as many people as possible.

Why do middle class parents feel that they should pay for their kids to go to university? I don't understand it.

Sure, you don't want them to be saddled with debt...but then you're hardly teaching them to be independent. University's an investment, in time and money so it should be their decision to go and their decision to pay. Otherwise they'll just take it as "3-5 more years mucking about, thanks Dad."

So...stop moaning that you're all going to have to pay for your DSs and DDs to go to 'uni'...It's not as though they'll be able to find a job afterwards anyway.

We will pay for ds to go to uni if he wants as neither of us paid - dh sponsored by the RN, and I had a grant based on dh's income as he put me through my degree. I do not want my son to come out with shedloads of debt.

It may be that he goes to uni near us, Exeter or Plymouth so living at home may be an option, but if we have got the money and can pay up front, why shouldn't we?

I don't think the main decider of who goes to university should be what socio-economic group your parents are in.

If you are capable of doing a degree and contributing to society through your skills, lack of money should not be the reason you are unable to do it.

Otherwise we will get a rigidly stratified society where the haves continue to have and those who aspire to better themselves have little opportunity to do so.

"I don't think the main decider of who goes to university should be what socio-economic group your parents are in."

(( Milliband is on stage now, talking about his families being hidden during the war, and then being hidden by Catholic patriots. Which is a related point, isn't it? You arrive fleeing the holocaust, not speaking English, "paid his way moving furniture in the day and studying at night at a technical college", and your son's leader of the Labour party. ))

But it's staggeringly naive to believe that applicants differ only by the size of their parents' payslip. It's tragic that people are kept out by lack of parental aspiration, but you can't fix that with money and access, you also need to fix the aspiration.

Just a couple of points, for what they're worth. Someone said we don't have an unassailable right to study at uni because some of us are not sufficiently clever, and that it's not the same as healthcare or the welfare state where everyone can use those services. But those services run by employing graduates. And we all have the right to live in a society where we can use services for which a large number of graduates are required. Plus, in a democracy, it is only right and fair that a graduates are produced from all walks of life - unless we want politicians, judges, policy makers, etc, all from one class?

Secondly, tokyo and others have been asking who all these people were who couldn't go to university in the 80s, etc, or suggesting that in the 50s poorer people could go (based on their own experiences rather than on the statistics). The fact is that since the massive expansion of the universities in the 1990s, which makes the 1960s expansion look pathetic, far more students from far lower down the socioeconomic scale have gone to university. The generation above mine in a very run-down area of Kent just did not go to university - even many of those who went to the local grammar school. My parents, my DH's parents, and everybody they know, simply didn't have it as an option. It's certainly not that they spawned children with much higher IQs. On the contrary, they are intelligent people who brought up children in supportive environments. But they are hairdressers, aerobics instructors, train drivers, postmen, electricians, and so on. Hard working intelligent people who, had they been the age of their children, may have had the option of university. That is a sociological fact. [I've been to academic talks on this but don't have the studies to link to. They do exist though].

Yes, we all need doctors.
And most tax payers, I think, would accept that we should subsidise their triaining to some extent.

But Media Sudies? Creative Writing? Tourism?

Can we really ask a factory worker on the minimum wage to subsidise someone studying these subjects for three years?