The day after the day after ….

by Chris Bertram on December 11, 2010

So, the vote to triple university tuition fees in the UK was won by the government, albeit with a reduced majority (21), thousands of young people demonstrated outside Parliament, and the Prince of Wales’s car got bricked as people chanted “off with their heads!” What now? People seem to be anticipating three things: more disorder on the streets as the coalition pushes though its cuts programme; the destruction of the Liberal Democrats; and a massive slump in popularity for the Coalition. Good news for the left then? I’m not so sure.

What the government has done is to shift the cost of financing universities from the state to the individual. Actually scrub that, because it is not fiscally accurate: the taxpayer will still be paying a great deal (though less). But the government will certainly have convinced many middle class families that they are now paying a lot for something that used to cost them a little and recently cost them nothing. And the perception will be that they are paying for that _on top of their taxes_ . Now we see the stupidity of those self-styled egalitarians (you know who you are) who bought (and sold) the line that it is “unfair” that working taxpayers at the lower end of the income distribution should meet part of the cost of tertiary education for the middle class. There are very many social programmes that better-off taxpayers do not personally benefit from, but contribute massively to. Given the perception that they are now paying through the nose for universities, are such people going to stay part of a social alliance favouring the welfare state? Or will they, Ed Miliband’s “squeezed middle”, perhaps egged on by the _Daily Mail_ and the _Daily Telegraph_ , withdraw their support for programmes that benefit the least advantaged? Truly, the cause of social justice has not been well-served here.

Other changes that the Coalition has planned for us are also uncertain in their long-term political impact. The immediate pain of cuts in the public sector (with knock-on job losses in the private sector) will surely cause revulsion, rioting and a swing to the left. So expect lots and lots of local government and by-election victories for Labour. More pessimistically, though, a contracted public sector will also be a contracted Labour voting base in the long term. So once the initial shocks are past, this could all turn out very well for the Tories. And even if it doesn’t, it may shift what is taken as the “given” of British politics further to the right, so that Labour can only compete by not challenging fundamentally the changes the Coalition has made.

Gloomy thoughts. I hope I’m wrong.

{ 83 comments }

1

Paul Sagar 12.11.10 at 10:26 am

As Raymond Geuss pointed out to the Cambridge Occupation a couple of weeks ago: the fees will be £9,000 at first, but before you know it they will be up to £20,000 like in America. This is just the opening of the floodgates.

Oh, and for those CT readers who don’t know: arts and humanities departments in the UK are set to lose something like 80% of their funding from the state and will have to raise the rest from fees alone; institutions like London’s SOAS are looking at 100% loss of state funding in some areas.

Truly, the Liberal Democrats have given us a brave new world of higher education provision.

2

Nick 12.11.10 at 10:47 am

Oh how awful! Fewer rentiers now and fewer rent seekers at the next election. Personally I think your prediction is a little too good to hope for:)

Students from rich families and students who are going to become ridiculously rich in the future should pay through the nose for their Cambridge degree.

3

Walt 12.11.10 at 10:51 am

Nick, we have a excellent mechanism for that very thing. It’s called taxation.

4

Nick 12.11.10 at 10:57 am

Sure and this is what the loans look like. You pay when you are rich. The advantage of fees is that universities won’t be quite as beholden to the state from now on and the potential now is there for competition on price (although I won’t expect to see it for a few years).

5

belle le triste 12.11.10 at 11:05 am

“You pay when you are rich” — wow, very succinct. The market-as-casino installed as sole guarantor of all learning, all culture, all gathered knowledge.

6

Alison P 12.11.10 at 11:15 am

No, loans are not like taxation because kids from rich backgrounds don’t have to take out a loan. So for the rest of their lives they pay less. And because interest is charged, those who pay more slowly end up paying even more and for more of their lives.

7

Charlie 12.11.10 at 11:30 am

I’ve never bought the ‘Labour clientele’ thing, myself.

If you believe that prices are the one true indicator of what ‘the people’ want, then perhaps you’ll be reassured to see more and more students choosing only those degree courses that lead to the well remunerated jobs. This, though, ignores the strong possibility that our society has many well remunerated jobs where nothing much goes on than an exploitation of the contours defined by conventions on property: i.e. whole chunks of the British law and property surveying professions.

Previously, it wasn’t possible for better off parents to do much in the way of buying their children’s education at tertiary level: this legislation gives them something more to buy. Some students, I’d bet, will be leaving university debt free; others will have a hill to climb. Increased tuition fees look set to contribute to the entrenchment of inequality across generations.

Finally, I have to say I didn’t really understand the ‘progessive’ claim in the recent IFS document on tuition fees. The IFS says that the new plans are more progressive than the Browne plan or than the current arrangements. Perhaps I wasn’t thorough in my reading, but I didn’t see any attempt to take account of the most basic fact of all about the changes: the absolute amount of fees to be paid will triple. I don’t see what good it does to make hay out of the fact that some will pay less per month than before if they’ll now be paying it for three times as long.

8

djr 12.11.10 at 11:30 am

@1: Surely the floodgates were opened by Labour back in 1998? Similarly, the Lib Dems were not the first party to decide that pre-election promises on university fees can be discarded whenever convenient.

9

ejh 12.11.10 at 11:31 am

There was a similar argument when the poll tax was brought in: while it was (quite rightly) considered enormously unfair, it was possible that if it established itself, it would be accepted as normal, and that people would respond to it by kicking downwards (“I pay, why shouldn’t they?” ).

The second of these certainly happened to some extent, but I don’t think that the first did, perhaps because the poll tax never quite did get accepted. Possibly because the fight against it never stopped and was never defeated. If it had been, perhaps it would have been different.

10

ejh 12.11.10 at 11:41 am

the fees will be £9,000 at first, but before you know it they will be up to £20,000 like in America. This is just the opening of the floodgates.

Absolutely.

As it happens, I’m precisely the sort of person against whom these changes are directed. I went to Oxford, 1983-6, from a comprehensive school, my mother being a single parent. I did so on a student grant, and fees were not charged. At the end of the course I owed only five hundred pounds.

I was just an ordinary Oxford student, if you understand what I mean, i.e. not quite good enough to attract a scholarship. I don’t think I’d have been the beneficiary of any scholarship largesse which is supposed to make it possible for students from non-wealthy backgrounds to continue applying to the top-rated universities. I would have been expected to go tens of thousands of pounds into debt – unlike many of my contemporaries, whose parents had that money to spare – or fuck off elsewhere.

Apparently, though, I was and am a rent-seeker and a parasite. At one level, I think it helps when the pro-fees people use that kind of language. It shows exactly what they think of the people who rely (and have relied) on state support to get through university. And those people are a very large majority of students and graduates.

11

Phil Ruse 12.11.10 at 11:49 am

@Alison You’re spot on – but rather than have these “rich kids” education paid for by themselves – as would now be the case – you’d like it paid for through general taxation?!

12

Charlie 12.11.10 at 12:06 pm

Phil Ruse, I already do pay for it through my taxes. I have done since I started working fifteen years ago, and I’m very happy to continue. Do you really think taxpayers don’t know what they’re paying for?

13

ejh 12.11.10 at 12:15 pm

Similarly, with the poll tax: it wasn’t at all about making poorer people pay more, dear me no. It was all about helping out the old granny who just happened to live in a large house. As I recall.

Not many people believed that one either, and they tended to develop opinions about people who claimed to believe it.

14

Jim 12.11.10 at 12:50 pm

If you want a really gloomy perspective on longer-run political changes, consider the coalition’s housing policies. The cuts to housing benefit, the complete halt to new social housing supply (which strangely seems to have gone mostly unnoticed), and the introduction of ‘local flexibility’ on responsibilities towards the homeless, will all tend over time to create increasing segregation by income and ultimately by political persuasion. And so local and parliamentary elections across ever larger swathes of the country will become a more or less sure thing for one party or another, and there will be less support for redistribution between areas.

15

Alison P 12.11.10 at 12:58 pm

you’d like it paid for through general taxation?!

Sure, as I would like the roads, the hospitals, the libraries and the fire service to continue to be paid for by general taxation, despite the horrific possibility that a rich person might enjoy them just like I do.

16

Charlie 12.11.10 at 1:31 pm

On the optimistic side – and it’s a heavily qualified optimism, and on the basis of pretty thin historical knowledge – I think the student / sixth former protest has the spirit of the WSPU about it, with the difference that the WSPU seem to have been (much) more violent towards government property and symbols of the state. In the end, though, people recognised the rightness of what the suffragettes were saying. It’s a qualified optimism in part because I think that politically motivated destructive behaviour is born of societal cruelty and the snapshot total picture is therefore a sad one. The existence and activities of the WSPU make you wonder what pre-1914 Britain must have been like. Not much like a Merchant Ivory film, at any rate.

17

John Protevi 12.11.10 at 1:51 pm

18

Pix 12.11.10 at 2:50 pm

“You pay when you are rich”

or when the loan company loses your annual deferment application form, whichever comes first.

19

christian_h 12.11.10 at 3:08 pm

I think (with ejh) this is to gloomy because it assumes the government will succeed in pushing the majority of their cuts through. This is not at all inevitable.

As for “only rich people will have to pay”… what nonsense. It surely is the case that many rich people refuse to acknowledge they are rich, but on what planet does 21k per year (yes I know it’s pounds) make you rich?

20

Natilo Paennim 12.11.10 at 3:13 pm

It’s interesting that here in the US, the rise in tuition and fees tracks the drop in real wages and the rise in economic inequality very closely. In the 1960s, my parents, one of whom was from a working-class/military family, and the other of whom was from a just-barely lower-middle-class family, both went to exclusive colleges mostly on fairly small scholarships. They did take out some loans, but I think together they owed perhaps $3,000 when they graduated in 1970. Not an inconsiderable sum at the time, but not that bad for first-rate educations at private liberal-arts colleges.
When I went back to school in 2002, at a large land-grant university, I was only eligible for a few small government grants and some subsidized loans (despite being an independent adult). I graduated with $18,000 in debt, which many people I talk to consider quite reasonable, comparatively. A friend of mine, who grew up on welfare, is trying to go back to community college right now, but since she was out of work and had to default on her loans for a year or so, it’s now impossible for her to get any other loans, and the bizarre rules of FAFSA mean that she is somehow also ineligible for grants, despite being essentially destitute.
What needs to be clear to UK citizens about this program, is that the intent is not to keep brilliant working class kids out of university. Rather, it’s to make sure that every member of the middle-classes are totally beholden to the state and capital from the moment they become adults. If you have $30,000 in debt (hardly improbable to run up if you go to even a mid-range school) when you’re 21, there’s a lot less room for the kind of independent activity that used to characterize people’s 20s. You will, as it were, mind throwing a brick.
This doesn’t even get into the way the possibility of incurring huge debt as a young adult is held out as a carrot, in terms of laws that make it impossible to get loans and grants if you have any misdemeanor drug conviction. All in all, it’s a much better method of social control than CCTV — it represents a handsome profit for the fiancial industry and guaranteed work for the upper administrators at the colleges.

21

LFC 12.11.10 at 3:17 pm

the Prince of Wales’s car got bricked as people chanted “off with their heads!”

You know people must be angry when they blame not only Parliament, but also a symbolic-figurehead constitutional monarchy, for something Parliament has done. Whatever happened to the Glorious Revolution and the genius of the English/British constitution? Or am I a victim of an inaccurate, propagandistic version of British history that gets fed to (some) Americans?

22

John Protevi 12.11.10 at 3:23 pm

Further to Natilo Paennim @20 (and myself @17), here is Edu-Factory’s “Campaign Against Debt”

23

Anderson 12.11.10 at 3:47 pm

You know people must be angry when they blame not only Parliament, but also a symbolic-figurehead constitutional monarchy, for something Parliament has done.

I believe it’s been a consistently safe assumption that a Windsor’s heart is with the Tories. Who was the last monarch to favor the day’s opposing party? The young Victoria with her crush on Melbourne?

If you’re trying to express yourself, symbolic action seems reasonable.

24

Tim Wilkinson 12.11.10 at 3:59 pm

LFC – re: ‘off with their heads’ – no, it is unusual. Hostility to the Royals is generally restricted to opposing their personal privilege (and more indirectly, to the loyalty the monarchy as a concrete institution – rather than the Crown as symbolising the res publica – commands among spooks, soldiers etc. Al Fayed being a particularly zany exception in making it personal).

Am I alone in finding that whole incident rather bizarre, and indeed in a number of ways rather suspect?

25

Tim Wilkinson 12.11.10 at 4:04 pm

Yeah, I suppose as Anderson kind-of says, in the heat of battle (or kettle), going for the PoW (if the news reports are to be believed, the assailants knew a Royal was in the car) may have seemed a salient enough gesture.

26

Charlie 12.11.10 at 4:09 pm

Am I alone in finding that whole incident rather bizarre, and indeed in a number of ways rather suspect?

You might be, I don’t know. I didn’t see the actual bricking, but I did meet the crowd protestors (several hundred of them?) a few minutes earlier, as they started to march up Regent Street. It was obvious that they’d completely escaped the police containment, and that this had panicked the police. They were non-violent towards commuters and bystanders, and in the sort of partly good humoured but truculent mood that results in things getting broken. It was pure luck that they met up with that motorcade.

27

ptl 12.11.10 at 4:12 pm

Am I alone in finding that whole incident rather bizarre, and indeed in a number of ways rather suspect?

I don’t think it’s suspect , I do think it’s being over-hyped (as it were). In the videos I’ve seen, one person’s chanting “off with their heads”, rather boringly. (No hate-filled rage.) Otherwise it fits — so far as I can tell — with a resentment of personal privilege and wealth (Charlie Gilmour’s presence, despite..!).

But I do think the consequent harping on the fact that the royal police “nearly fired”/might have fired/will fire next time a bit suspect.

28

Charlie 12.11.10 at 4:27 pm

But I do think the consequent harping on the fact that the royal police “nearly fired”/might have fired/will fire next time a bit suspect.

Yep. That’s the people in the grip of the authoritarian delusion screaming ‘do something!’ at the police. If the police listen to them, we’ll see deaths. Some parts of the police don’t need much encouragement.

29

bob mcmanus 12.11.10 at 4:50 pm

20: Excellent comment, NP

“What needs to be clear to UK citizens about this program, is that the intent is not to keep brilliant working class kids out of university”

Except maybe for this, although it might not be the primary intent. Social control of the middle class may be primary, but a) these types can be trouble, and b) the aristocracy may not want the competition.

I have been recently looking at Japan (neo-liberalism everywhere!) where the expense of education starts in grade school, b) there are very few scholarships, and c) university credentialism determines social status and political opportunity. Really increases the savings rate/expropriation of the surplus. Watch those Pell grants. Wait.

30

engels 12.11.10 at 4:52 pm

I agree this was stupid. Who in their right mind would be shopping for guillotines on Regent Street two weeks before Christmas?

31

bob mcmanus 12.11.10 at 4:54 pm

I forgot the hereditary aristocracy that is reforming in Japan.

That is where Marx went wrong, forgetting the irrational desire of Capitalists to recreate the hereditary aristocracy. Neo-liberalism is necessary precursor to neo-feudalism.

32

christian_h 12.11.10 at 5:21 pm

I want to join in commending NP’s comment at 20. The usefulness of education debt as a means of social control is considerable. This begins during university itself (by pushing students into “economically useful” courses of study, by the constant threat of losing whatever meagre financial support they do get).

33

Sebastian 12.11.10 at 5:34 pm

I don’t know the structure of how the fees and loans to cover them are going to be dealt with in the UK, but the US structure of government subsidized loans for college is very likely to lead to extremely high college fees for everyone. We talked about it in the comments recently at obsidianwings. If you accept that university degrees have a large component of a positional good (that it derives a large portion from the mere fact of having it when other people don’t), then direct subsidies to students are almost always just going to bid up the price higher and get captured by the university. If this is in the form of a loan, you have just succeeded in raising the price for everyone, and forcing someone who needs a loan to pay even more than they would have before.

34

Lemuel Pitkin 12.11.10 at 5:50 pm

Sebastian makes an important point. There are major supply constraints in higher ed, which means that subsidies are largely captured by incumbents as rents. In other words, aid to only “needy” students may look fairer and mroe efficient than direct support for institutions; but each additional dollar of loans (or grants) tends to push up tuition and fees, while each additional dollar to public institutions tends to push them down.

35

Barry 12.11.10 at 6:12 pm

Very good points about the social control (and rent-extraction); I hadn’t spotted that one.

36

Norwegian Guy 12.11.10 at 6:20 pm

In Norway, public colleges and universities charge no tuition fees, but you still need student loans, since you have to pay for living expenses like housing, food and beer. About 40% of the loan is converted to scholarship contingent on passing the exams.. Still, when I hear about American graduates with student loans in the $20,000 – $30,000 range, it seams comparable with what many Norwegian graduates, including myself, got. Is these figures only covering the direct cost of the education, or do they cover other expenses as well?

37

Lemuel Pitkin 12.11.10 at 6:35 pm

Norwegian Guy,

Student debt averages $25,000 for graduates of private colleges and $17,000 for graduates of public ones. That includes all debt. But that’s primarily for tuition and related costs, since most students in the US work while attending college. Maybe that’s less common in Norway?

38

djr 12.11.10 at 6:36 pm

Norwegian Guy@36 – it’s up to £9000 per year in tuition fees only, the quoted amount doesn’t cover any accommodation, food, beer, etc.

39

Natilo Paennim 12.11.10 at 6:43 pm

29: Thanks, bob. I guess I should clarify: What I meant was that the college funding scheme in the US is not meant to keep working-class geniuses out of college. Nor is it meant to keep out the chancers who are adept at gaming the system. It does present an often unclimbable barrier to your “average” working-class student, who does not have the middle-class wind at their back to overcome mediocre grades and test scores.

36: I should point out that my $18K in loans did not include about $5K in credit card debt, and about $6K of gifts from family (mostly from my grandmother’s small estate). Also, it should be noted that I was working 30 hours a week for the 3 years I took to finish my BA, and making an above-average student wage, as an editor at the campus newspaper. I probably could have gotten by with a slightly smaller loan balance had I been significantly more frugal, but not by all that much.

Does it cost much money to apply to university in the UK? I was talking with a young woman recently who is a HS senior at the same school I graduated from, and she was planning to spend over $500 in application fees (this in addition to the SAT and ACT fees of course).

40

djr 12.11.10 at 7:08 pm

Natilo@29 – The admin side of the application system is centralised, the current fee is £21. In the mid-90’s, this allowed you to apply to up to 6 universities (and you weren’t allowed to pay twice to apply to 12), I believe the system is still pretty similar.

Mostly, universities look at A level results, i.e. the standard school leaving exams, although some have started to administer their own tests too, so there’s no additional cost there.

41

Brett Paul Dunbar 12.11.10 at 7:39 pm

In practice for most graduates the loans will be largely equivalent to a graduate tax. You will pay an extra 9% on income above £21,000 per annum which is indexed. Anything not repaid after thirty years is written off. According to More or Less on Radio 4 on the 10th December (at the beginning of the programme which is available on the BBC website) if you earn on average less than about £35,000 (net current value) you will pay back little or nothing, if you earn on average about £50,000 you’ll still pay back less than half the sum borrowed, only if you earn on average about £70,000 will you actually pay back £30,000 even then you won’t pay the interest. According to the IFS about 22% of the lowest earning graduates will pay less than under the current system.

42

Norwegian Guy 12.11.10 at 7:59 pm

Virtually all students work in the summer holidays, and a not insignificant number work part-time during the rest of the year too. And when comparing the debt burdens I didn’t take into account that the cost of living is higher here. But tuition isn’t the only cost students have, so you will get into debt anyway – and increasingly so as the private housing marked has become more and more expansive, especially in the cities.

43

Davis X. Machina 12.11.10 at 8:28 pm

Arts and humanities departments in the UK are set to lose something like 80% of their funding from the state and will have to raise the rest from fees alone;

In thirty years, a country whose elite,will have all basically an MBA or engineering or some other Useful Studies background? Why ever would the Tories want that?

44

piglet 12.11.10 at 8:53 pm

“It’s interesting that here in the US, the rise in tuition and fees tracks the drop in real wages and the rise in economic inequality very closely.”

“What needs to be clear to UK citizens about this program, is that the intent is … to make sure that every member of the middle-classes are totally beholden to the state and capital from the moment they become adults.”

Excellent points. As to the so-called progressive repayment schemes, that is a joke. A 9% surtax on income above £21,000 is not progressive by any standard. It is a huge burden on low-to-middle income earners while not hurting real high incomes at all (since the total amount is capped at what they consider change). I applaud the protesting students. They are not as stupid as their rulers think they are. Let’s hope this is the beginning of the end of the coalition.

45

Davis X. Machina 12.11.10 at 9:07 pm

Let’s hope this is the beginning of the end of the coalition.

I have a feeling that Nick Clegg’s ego is rather like the hard, black smoking lump of Ultimate Evil the firemen miss at the end of Time Bandits

I mean, it looks insignificant…

46

Omega Centauri 12.12.10 at 12:17 am

How common is the loan based brian drain outcome? I’ve heard anecdotal reports about US graduates with large student loan balances, who emigrated to get out from under the loans. This
could be one result, some graduates will find the loan repayment burdensome enough that they shirk it by leaving the country.

47

Charles St. Pierre 12.12.10 at 4:03 am

Complaining about debt? Where did all this debt come from anyway? It didn’t use to be this way. Since 1980, total debt in the US has way more than doubled. The UK is in worse shape.

How did this come about?

When a bank makes a loan, it creates the money to loan out of nothing, just adding numbers on their computer. So the total money supply is just the principal of all the loans that have been made by all the banks.

The banks then charge interest on the loan, on money which they have created out of nothing.
Because of interest, the total money needed to pay off all loans will be greater than all the money loaned, ie greater than the money supply. That is not all borrowers will be able to pay off their loans, simply because there isn’t enough money for them to do so. This leads to an exponential growth of both the money supply and debt. Only with an exponential growth in real consumption, and thus real production, can this be maintained. Since this is ultimately impossible, this spiral has no (nice) ending.

There is simply not enough money to pay off all the debt and the interest. So the banks force the rest of the system into increasing indebtedness to them, in order to pay off the debts they already owe.. They force individuals, companies, and governments to take out more loans or default. They have simply created a shortage of money needed to repay the loans and the interest, in the real economy, while hoarding the rest of that money to themselves.

This simplifies the description. For a more detailed one, see http://anamecon.blogspot.com/2010/11/banks-are-forcing-debt-on-rest-of-us.html See also the references there in, in particular: “Money as Debt”



The financial industry has been doing this for years. That is why individuals, companies, governments and their countries’ real economies, are gradually being ruined. That is why, in the US, for instance, total indebtedness has been climbing to over $50 Trillion, now about equal to all the real assets in the US. Great Britain, and many other countries are in worse shape.
Government austerity is just going to force the paying off of this debt on the private sector. But this debt cannot be paid off. The private sector will be ruined.

The students are protesting their enslavement to the banks. They are right to do so.
The rest of the country should be out there with them.

48

Marc 12.12.10 at 4:45 am

In the states we switched from taxpayers paying for public education (private universities were always relatively expensive) to basically making students pay for essentially all of the costs. The result is that they graduate with enormous debts. And with recent bankruptcy “reform” we’ve ensured that it’s terribly, terribly hard to get out of under such debts. Like many other things in this country, we’ve traded gains for the few against costs for the many. I’d really hope that the US would be a cautionary tale, rather than the inspiration that we appear to be.

49

Andrew C 12.12.10 at 7:25 am

I like to think of this as a scientific way of maintaining the grip of the upper-classes in a society where technical competence is important. The stupid rich lose their money and are condemned to the middle classes, and are replaced by the very best and brightest of the working class – thus ensuring hybrid vigour when the rough youth mate with the elegant children of the ruling class. Evolution in action.

50

Charlie 12.12.10 at 2:35 pm

I don’t have much interest in royals, but I do remember someone saying something about April 29 next year having been declared a public holiday, on the grounds that it’s the day of the royal wedding. My first reaction to this news was to plan on going to the office as normal, since I find the whole business intensely patronising. But now it occurs to me that there must be at least a few people who don’t attend street protests because they have work commitments. It’s a bit of a way off, but even so, I can’t help envisaging some sort of convergence.

51

engels 12.12.10 at 6:20 pm

52

sg 12.13.10 at 4:15 am

I think the inequality effects of this are overrated. Poor people in Britain in the 90s and early noughties were more than happy to go into very large debt for the dubious future returns of housing. If they can’t be bothered going into much smaller debt for the guaranteed future returns of education, then whose lookout is that?

The tories have said they will look at the “free to those who can afford it” aspect of upfront payment, and they’re also making changes to grants for supporting the cost of living, which are the single biggest determinant of whether a poor kid goes to Oxford. Maybe these changes are – the increase in price aside – an improvement on Labour’s model?

53

Brett Paul Dunbar 12.13.10 at 10:29 am

The new system is substantially more progressive than the existing system. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculate that roughly 22% of the lowest paid graduates will pay less than they do now (due to the increase in the minimum payment threshold). While high earning graduates, rather than paying the same as medium income graduates, will pay more. It is also more progressive than the tax system in general as it is basically an additional income tax. It is slightly regressive at very high wages as it is possible to pay the loan back early and avoid some of the interest. Structuring as a non commercial loan rather than a graduate tax allows repayments to be collected from graduates living abroad, otherwise what we have is a de facto graduate tax. General tax revenue will then be used to pay the Student Loan Company any remaining debt after thirty years, calculated to be between 30% and 50% of the money borrowed. So in fact the cuts to state funding of universities are rather smaller than has been stated. Due to the state guarantee the SLC should be able to borrow at about the same rate as the government effectively the universities are being funded on borrowing rather than from current revenue with an hypothecated graduate tax covering most of the cost of paying the bondholders.

54

Chris Bertram 12.13.10 at 10:42 am

I can see that sg and Brett Paul Dunbar read the post carefully ….

55

sg 12.13.10 at 10:58 am

I’m sorry Chris, when you wrote “what the Government has done is to shift the cost of financing universities to the individual,” I took you to mean “what the Government did…” We’re talking about some inequality-reducing minor adjustments to BLP policy here, right? The basic plan to part-finance the cost of study through a graduate tax is Labour party policy, right?

As I understand it there is no government grant to cover living expenses for students in the UK, right? The single biggest change any government could make to reduce inequality would be to introduce one (like Australia has), so that students can go to the top universities without having to find a job in a country town (well I suppose also the British government could fund high schools properly, and address the cultural anti-intellectualism in the working class, but that would be something one might expect from Labour, not the Tories, no?).

But that was too much for Labour. Would have pissed off their working class base. So instead the tories tinker at the edges.with

56

Phil 12.13.10 at 11:35 am

We’re talking about some inequality-reducing minor adjustments to BLP policy here, right? The basic plan to part-finance the cost of study through a graduate tax is Labour party policy, right?

There’s a big, big difference between a graduate tax – any graduate tax – and the wholesale privatisation of higher education which is being proposed – see here and especially here. (I say ‘proposed’ because it’s not happening until the fat lady’s sung, or the fat lords have nodded it through. Ce n’est qu’un debut, even if it’s a very disappointing one.)

57

Chris Bertram 12.13.10 at 11:49 am

No disagreement from me that NuLab bears a heavy burden of the blame for this, sg.

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Sam C 12.13.10 at 12:25 pm

There are many other issues not touched on above.

Firstly, kids leaving university in debt: if you want people to generally live within their means and not borrow excessively (other than perhaps mortgage loans on bricks-and-mortar), it’s not good that they start their post-education lives with large negative balances. Where’s the incentive to say “no, I can’t afford that, I’ll do without it until I have the funds” when it’s no longer the difference between living within your means with no debt and not?

Secondly, there’s an elephant in the room which I guess this intellectual salon might jib at: what is university education for? Ignore for a moment class issues, but there are lots of kids going to uni who wouldn’t have gone to uni 20 years back. Now that’s a good thing if those kids want to go to uni and benefit from the experience. I do NOT begrudge anybody their higher education and I would prefer it to be state (tax) funded.

But there are lots of kids starting now in jobs at 21yo that they could equally well have started at 18yo on the back of a good secondary education, so I am sure for some there is a Red Queen’s Race going on: to get the same job as 20 years ago, you now have to burn 3 years in university, whether you want to or no. That’s a sort of grade inflation.

As I said, I don’t want to deprive anybody of the university education that they want (assuming they are capable of benefitting from it), but I worry that a lot of kids are continuing with more education when they’d be having more fulfilled lives out in the world of work, possibly coming back to higher education when they had more life experience and knew their minds, their needs and the world better.

Class – yes, that’s worrying. The Old Etonians and their lackeys are running the show again, and they’re clearly looking after their own. I’m inclined to think it’s indifference rather than malice, but we could be moving to some significant social unrest in the next few months, as cuts in housing, health, education, the armed forces, and other areas work through – all because the privileged positions of bankers must be protected.

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piglet 12.13.10 at 7:14 pm

“It is also more progressive than the tax system in general as it is basically an additional income tax.”

This is complete bullshit. Let me repeat myself: A 9% surtax on income above £21,000 is not progressive by any standard. It is a huge burden on low-to-middle income earners while not hurting real high incomes at all (since the total amount is capped at what they consider change). We are talking of a 9 percentage point increase in marginal tax rates for *everybody* except the poor, plus the total tax is capped. We are talking of an amount being charged to students – around 50,000 say – that is totally out of reach for low-income students, a crushing debt burden for the middle class, and not even change for the rich. The argument being bandied about that graduates should be made to pay for the advantage they derive from their education is bogus. By that standard, why should the graduate making a million a year thanks to his/her education pay the same amount than the graduate making 50,000 a year thanks to his/her education?

The only way in which education funding could be progressive is by tax funding. Why do they need to invent complicated loan and repayment schemes with huge bureaucratic apparatuses going along with them instead of just using progressive taxation? It would make a little bit of sense of it were actually reducing the deficit but not even that is apparently the case.

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piglet 12.13.10 at 7:20 pm

“As I understand it there is no government grant to cover living expenses for students in the UK, right?”

Is that right? I don’t know but makes me wonder how anybody without rich parents ever got to study in the UK.

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ajay 12.13.10 at 7:36 pm

60: it’s pretty much correct with the exception of things like research council scholarships. The way it used to work (up to 1997 or so) was that the government paid your tuition fees completely and also (sometimes) gave you a grant, whose size or existence depended on family income, for living expenses.
Then that got replaced with a system where the government paid most of your tuition fees. You had to pay most of the fees, and you paid your own living expenses as well. To help with this, you got a student loan at artificially low interest rates.
How non-rich people have coped: some combination of 1) live at home while studying 2) the grant 3) the loan 4) sponsorship – for example from HM Forces 5) getting jobs.

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ajay 12.13.10 at 7:36 pm

You had to pay most of the fees

should be “part of the fees”.

63

piglet 12.13.10 at 7:59 pm

I’m amazed how well off German students still are in comparison. The introduction of tuition fees has been slow, currently some states charge EUR 500 per semester and pressure is strong to get them abolished. Low-income students get up to 648 Euro per month cost of living support (BAföG) half of which is paid as a grant and half as zero-interest loan. That is not much to be sure but I could manage (back in my time) with summer work without getting into any other debt. Up to the earl;y 80s, BAföG was all grant. Then the neoliberals converted it into 100% loan. Meantime they backpedaled and settled on 50-50.

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piglet 12.13.10 at 8:01 pm

“without getting into any other debt” – not that any bank would have given me a loan. Students didn’t get credit cards at the time, I don’t know whether that has changed. I think Germans still are not big on credit cards.

65

PaulB 12.13.10 at 11:05 pm

Charles St. Pierre: “When a bank makes a loan, it creates the money to loan out of nothing, just adding numbers on their computer.” That is wrong. If banks had this power, how could they ever get into financial difficulty? ( Central Banks can create money out of nothing: it’s called ‘Quantitative Easing’.)

Davis X. Machina: “In thirty years, a country whose elite,will have all basically an MBA or engineering or some other Useful Studies background? Why ever would the Tories want that?” I’ve not found any detail on how funding of Science/Engineering/Medicine will work, but my impression is that government grants to universities will be used to cover the extra cost of teaching those subjects, with the tuition fees charged to students being the same for all subjects.

I’ve also not seen full details on what the repayments will be. But if the marginal tax rate is to be an additional 9% starting at 21k, with a maximum annual repayment of 1k per year (a total payment in cash terms of 30k over 30 years) then that in effect creates a new tax band 9% higher than what would otherwise prevail for earnings between 21k and and about 32k. Which no one would enjoy paying, but would no one would be reduced to poverty by.

I’m trying to imagine myself as an 18-year-old: would I expect to earn more than 21k even without a university degree, and so be put off going by to university by the potential repayments?

66

sg 12.13.10 at 11:37 pm

piglet, ajay et al. It’s my opinion (based on my own experience and what I understand of Australia’s experience of graduate tax) that the single biggest barrier to entering uni for poor people is this living expenses thing. I faced moving from the country to the city to study with very little money (about $250 in savings I recall) and the idea of doing so without a very readily available income source at the other end was kind of scary. The loan for the fees? Irrelevant. I think this would be even worse if you were looking at moving to somewhere like Oxford or Cambridge, where jobs must surely be quite hard to find (country towns and all).

Focusing on fees misses this crucial point – free university without living expenses is just as challenging to a very poor 18 year old as a university with very high cost fees and a loan system. And inequality in university entrance achievement in the UK is much more related to high school infrastructure and working class culture than it is to what the elite universities are doing.

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piglet 12.14.10 at 5:46 am

sg, sure the living expenses need to be taken care of (see 63). What I can’t understand however is the argument that saddling poor students with fees in addition to the difficult financial situation they already face doesn’t make things worse. Of course it does. The loan for the fees is not irrelevant if it is on top of all the other loans and the end result is a mountain of debt.

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sg 12.14.10 at 5:59 am

it’s true piglet that less or no debt is better, and that debt for fees plus living expenses will be more discouraging of further education than just one (or neither). But poor people have been happily / willingly shouldering debt for far more nebulous gains than an education provides, and so I don’t think that it is as powerful a determinant as people think. Culture and secondary schooling are just as important determinants of progress and they get ignored in the rush to brick Charlie over what is really just tampering with the existing system.

FWIW, I shouldered a tax impost after I left university on what, in Australia, would be a similar wage to the 21k quoted above (I think my payments were a little lower, but whatever). In fact, at one point my pre-tax income was higher than a younger mate’s (due to my better education and longer career), but my post-tax income lower due to his parents having paid off his loan at the start of his university education. But my resentment and anger at that state of affairs are muted because a) I get to do the job I enjoy, and b) he also gets a house bought for him, while I’m renting from my own money, and I consider that a far, far more serious inequality in the long and short term. The world is not fair! And it is inequality b) which creates the most serious barriers to university entrance, not inequality a).

[I do understand we can fight to change both, however]

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ajay 12.14.10 at 9:32 am

“When a bank makes a loan, it creates the money to loan out of nothing, just adding numbers on their computer.” That is wrong. If banks had this power, how could they ever get into financial difficulty?

Fractional reserve banking.

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ajay 12.14.10 at 9:34 am

Focusing on fees misses this crucial point – free university without living expenses is just as challenging to a very poor 18 year old as a university with very high cost fees and a loan system.

Well, yes, but free university without living expenses but with a loan system is much less challenging than a university with very high cost fees and a loan system. You’re proposing a dichotomy that I don’t think actually exists; no one’s suggesting abolishing student loans in exchange for abolishing tuition fees. (Are they?)

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Myles 12.14.10 at 9:48 am

I like to think of this as a scientific way of maintaining the grip of the upper-classes in a society where technical competence is important. The stupid rich lose their money and are condemned to the middle classes, and are replaced by the very best and brightest of the working class – thus ensuring hybrid vigour when the rough youth mate with the elegant children of the ruling class. Evolution in action.

Possibly, although I don’t actually think this is conscious as much as it is a sort of a gut reflex as to the proper order of things, etc., on the part of Conservatives and so on.

Who was the last monarch to favor the day’s opposing party? The young Victoria with her crush on Melbourne?

I believe Ramsay MacDonald was heavily favoured by the monarch of the time (can’t remember by whom), and wasn’t Jim Callaghan well-liked by the Queen as well, I think? George VI and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon desperately wanted Chamberlain to succeed in preventing war, but that’s not so much a Conservative position as it was a contemporarily universal one. Victoria didn’t like Gladstone, but that had little to do with his political views, and much to do with his tendency, as it were, to address her as though she were a public audience.

The Windsors are basically a caricature of the block-headed countryside-bound aristocrat, so trying to tease out their political allegiances is tricky at best. Sometimes you just have to regard the whole thing as a giant edifice to self-sabotage (for example, when the Lords voted thrice against proportional representation for E.U. elections, the result of which was a doubling in the number of Conservative MEP’s.

The student fees……

It’s pretty unfair, of course, but that’s not really surprising. The system of free tertiary education was a part of the post-war, Attleean bargain, and the unraveling of that bargain was a process that began a long time ago. I am not sure, actually, how committed the Lib Dems are to their free tuition pledge anyways; it’s pretty apparent that it feels more like, per the memorable words of Monsieur IOZ (I think? Correct me if otherwise), a “magical performative,” as it were, not much an act of will as an unpersuasive attempt to convince oneself of having such an act of will. Which is a long way of saying that the Lib Dems, I think, quite honestly believed, or tried to believe, that they believe in free tuition, but actually, not quite, they didn’t really (I am speaking of the Lib Dem leadership, not voters, of course). I don’t think they were being consciously dishonest; they just weren’t being consciously honest with themselves.

After all, believing in having free tuition given optimal conditions, growing economy, budget surplus, etc., is not believing in having free tuition. It’s actually an excuse for not really believing in free tuition. Of course, pledging to vote against any rise in fees and then voting for a trebling of fees is another matter, but I suspect that the Lib Dems had more agency here than the protesting students would like to admit; they are pretty simply less bound by pledges to voters than to the rather more constitutionally fundamental responsibility to provide a functioning parliament and, as it were, government. The wishes of constituents do not take precedence over the British constitution.

It would be nice, on some level, to have free universities, but in the real world (again), there are no such thing as well-funded, good free universities for everybody. The French actually have superlative free universities, the grandes ecoles; but I doubt the enarchy was the vision the Lib Dems, or indeed anybody else, had in mind. The rest of the French tertiary system is hardly worth mentioning; the universities actually encourage the lecturers to fail as many students as possible (or so I have been informed by one of the lecturers), as there are more people than spaces, and the universities are contractually obliged to actually admit more students than spaces, on a permanent basis (the bloggers here, being academics, know much more than I do about this, so I’ll pre-emptively retract and apologize for any description of the French university system which is deemed inaccurate). Oxbridge/Imperial/LSE/UCL/KCL/etc., for example, were horribly underfunded compared to their American peers, and are still comparatively underfunded today.

Which isn’t to say I applaud the move. The motivating instinct, no doubt, is pretty nasty, as it were. And one does have a healthy suspicion of “never letting a crisis go to waste” as opposed to “we seriously, seriously, seriously couldn’t find the money any other way except to raise tuition by 200%.” But then the United Kingdom does have a predominantly Conservative government, and Conservatives are not obliged to govern like social democrats (insert horrible joke about Liberal Democrats). Nor Nick Clegg, actually, who never masked the fact that he is a Liberal and not a Democrat, at least a democrat in so far as it is distinct from being a liberal.

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Myles 12.14.10 at 11:43 am

I’m amazed how well off German students still are in comparison. The introduction of tuition fees has been slow, currently some states charge EUR 500 per semester and pressure is strong to get them abolished.

The problem is, you don’t get much more than 500 euros’ worth of education from German universities every semester (I wantonly exaggerate; maybe more like 5000 euros’ worth, but either way it’s not really an university education as John Henry Newman would have recognized it). Or, as the verbally challenged 43rd president of the U.S. liked to say, the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Canada’s universities charge around 4000-6000 dollars a year, and the quality is more than fine as far as it is judged against the (dismal) average European standard. Scholarships, which are given out quite freely, can reduce a good student’s costs to about zero.

I can’t find the data about the relative funding levels, but I am actually curious as to the following questions: a) whether the systems of Canada and Europe are much different in levels of per capita funding by the government b) whether private extra-tuition contributions (donations, so forth) make any substantive difference in Canada’s case c) whether differences of apportionment within institutions make a large difference in undergraduate education between the different jurisdictions. Of course, the individual attention in Canada’s universities, except for the smaller, less-known ones, are non-existent, so that has to be taken into consideration. If Prof Bertram or anyone else could enlighten me it would be great.

One of the things that puzzle me is that historically Oxbridge has been privileged in per capita funding. Yet it nonetheless seems perpetually underfunded, even compared to some much lesser U.S. systems. I suppose the fact that the teaching is much more intensive and personalized makes it much more expensive, and so given the poverty = [when expenditures > revenue] logic, it seems cash-strapped when it is really not. Again, I am unable to locate the relevant data, but if anyone could bring me up to speed it would be great.

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PaulB 12.14.10 at 1:11 pm

ajay (69): The link you kindly provide plainly contradicts the proposition that a fractional-reserve bank can create the money to make a loan “out of nothing, just adding numbers on their computer”. We could debate this further on a thread it’s relevant to, when one arises.

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Brett Paul Dunbar 12.14.10 at 1:30 pm

Piglet you are quite simply wrong. An income tax, which in practice the loan repayments are, is a progressive tax by definition, those who earn more pay more. Low income graduates will actually pay little or nothing. If you earn less than £21,000 (about two thirds the median wage, which is a fairly decent starting salary) you pay nothing. For every extra £1000 you earn above this you pay £90 per annum. According to More or Less if you take into account that a person’s pay tends to increase faster than average wages as they gain seniority it works out that even on a career average of about £50,000, substantially above the median, you still only pay back about half. To actually pay off the full cost of the original loan over thirty years you need to earn about £70,000 more than double the median wage, even then the interest is effectively written off. The system becomes mildly regressive at an even higher level, however it is less regressive than the existing system, as repayments start at a higher level and the total which can be paid is higher so the peak is at a much higher salary. Currently middle income and high income graduates pay about the same in future high income graduates will pay more than middle income graduates very high income graduates will pay less than high income graduates but still more than middle income graduates, while a larger group of low income graduates will pay nothing, between 20-25% of the lowest income graduates will pay less. The result is that payments are more closely related to earnings. The tax system as a whole isn’t all that progressive as a substantial part of the revenue is raised from things like VAT which are not progressive taxes.

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Charlie 12.14.10 at 1:53 pm

very high income graduates will pay less than high income graduates

I think this is what Piglet is getting at, though. Tuition fees as another datapoint for the ‘squeezed middle’ argument. A welfare state for the 1st through 9th deciles, to be funded by the 1st through 9th deciles. It might even be progressive in there.

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Charlie 12.14.10 at 2:04 pm

An income tax, which in practice the loan repayments are, is a progressive tax by definition.

Also, I think this might be an idiosyncratic definition. You could, after all, have an income tax regime where the rate dropped for higher earners. A better way to think of this issue – to my mind at least – is that if tuition fees remove some progressivity from current arrangements, then tuition fees can be seen as regressive. This ignores complications such as adding progressivity in one place but removing it elsewhere. But this is far from my specialism. Would anyone with the relevant expertise like to draw some graphs?

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ajay 12.14.10 at 2:29 pm

73: “The practice of fractional reserve banking expands the money supply (cash and demand deposits) beyond what it would otherwise be. Due to the prevalence of fractional reserve banking, the broad money supply of most countries is a multiple larger than the amount of base money created by the country’s central bank”. RTBA.

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Brett Paul Dunbar 12.14.10 at 3:18 pm

As I understand it a progressive tax is one where the wealthy pay a higher proportion of income than the poor, an income tax with a personal allowance actually meets this definition. There are effectively two rates 0% for the first £21,000 and 9% above £21,000. If you earn £22,000 then you pay £90 if you earn £44,000 you pay £2070 a rather higher proportion of your income.

Piglet was being rather inaccurate when he claimed that middle income graduates will pay more than high income graduates, they won’t. High income graduates will pay more than very high income graduates, middle income graduates (those earning around the median wage) will not even come close to paying off the full value of the loan before it is written off.

The student loan isn’t treated as a debt if you are trying to get a loan, the repayments are linked purely to income and are not related to the amount owed so it is treated as tax. A commercial loan as used in the USA has repayments linked to the amount of the debt rather than the income of the borrower.

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Barry 12.14.10 at 9:54 pm

“…middle income graduates (those earning around the median wage) will not even come close to paying off the full value of the loan before it is written off.”

To believe that is to believe that a right-wing government, when privatizing some aspect of the government, decided to make a steeply progressive payment schedule.

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Brett Paul Dunbar 12.14.10 at 11:01 pm

Barry when you analyse the figures that is what comes out. If you earn about the median wage you don’t pay very much. Statistics programme More or Less on Radio 4 on Friday had an item about it, according to that if your average career pay is £35,000 (net current value) then you actually pay very little. £35,000 is somewhat above the median wage. Even on a £50,000 NCV salary you would only pay about half off. Net current value accounts somewhat crudely for the way that individual pay increases faster than average pay as you become more senior over the course of your career.

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Wrye 12.15.10 at 4:36 am

The Canadian experience with government student loans, while nearly not as bad as the American, is hardly a unreserved recommendation of loans. The ideas that scholarships can bridge the gap for most students, or that university education is a guarantee of higher earnings (or even employment) both of which have surfaced in this thread, are risible and get repeated so often in our newspapers that I suspect people’s motives. The only guarantee is that unless your parents are well off *and* are inclined to support you, you will have debt. Whether you finish your education or not, whether the program is any good or not, whether your field is expanding or contracting, none of these things change the fact that you will have debt. Exceptionally bureaucratic, inflexible debt. The government measures intended to ease the impact of that debt on lower-income earners are flawed, limited, and prone to failure at critical times. The idea that the UK will be able to avoid the well-worn and well-known pitfalls of government student loan schemes seems either pie-in-the-sky optimistic or advanced in bad faith, take your pick.

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maidhc 12.15.10 at 11:03 am

Some of the discussion neglects the difference in the US between state universities and private universities. Private universities in the US have a certain social status and a price tag to match. But state universities provide a decent education at a lower price tag than what is being proposed in the UK. For example, California State has raised tuition to what is reported to be about $7000 per academic year. That doesn’t include living expenses, textbooks, etc. But in California you can do the first two years in community college, which is still very low-cost, although it may be hard to get into classes because of demand.

This is a lot below the new UK fees which are said to be the equivalent of about $14000 a year.

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Brett Paul Dunbar 12.15.10 at 12:51 pm

With a commercial debt the amount that must be repaid is linked to the outstanding balance, for example with a mortgage, which is a debt of comparable size. The student loan repayments are determined only by the graduate’s income above £21,000 per annum which is indexed, there is no liability to pay beyond that. This means that low income graduates may end up paying nothing at all. For most except very high earners it is a graduate tax payable for thirty years, with the outstanding balance written off.

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