That is where we are with university tuition fees. It never made any sense to individualise the cost of providing the next generation with the skills and abilities that they are going to need if the UK is going to be able to compete globally in the future. It never made any sense to tell young people that there was no problem about starting out in life with £50,000 of debt. It was always unfair to create a hidden extra tax on families so that some would easily be able to help pay off that debt whilst others couldn’t find the odd spare £100,000 to ensure two children started out debt free. It was always unfair to intimidate first generation graduates from poorer families into deciding that they couldn’t afford to go to University.
Faced with the huge unpopularity of these policies with the young Theresa May’s advisers have told her that she is losing the next generation and her party is doomed to long term oblivion if it relies on older voters who will gradually die off and ignores the next generation. So she’s decided that she needs to do something about the problems that she helped create when she was a member of the coalition government that brought them in.
True to her word she is doing something. She’s holding a review.
If you are not entirely impressed I don’t blame you. After all she has held a review into zero hours contracts. And then decided that her big change is that if you are on one then you are allowed to ask your boss for a proper contract. Your boss is allowed by her to say no. In other words nothing has changed. She’s also held a review into what her policy is on the government paying for care costs for the elderly. The outcome of that is every bit as wiffly waffly.
Her review on tuition fees is not intended to look properly into the issue and work out solutions with an open mind. It is intended to give her something to say to voters during the local government elections in May. In the hope that it will detoxify the issue for a few young voters. When the report comes back nothing of significance will change. Because she cannot possibly fix the problem within the parameters she has set.
May is insisting that any changes must not involve existing tax payers subsidising university students. Which is another way of saying that high fees will remain. Debts will remain. Inequality between families will remain. The only thing she can possibly change is to redistribute the pain. One way that the briefings suggested they might do that is to charge science students the full cost of their courses and allow arts students to pay less for their studies. In other words the UK government is seriously considering putting a major financial disincentive in the way of any student thinking of studying the subjects that many consider to be most vital for the success of the country.
It would be a lot more helpful if the review looked seriously into creating proper student bursaries for poorer students. Or addressing the issue of the outrageous rate of interest on student debt. This is currently 6% at a time when savers are lucky if they get 1.5% and inflation is running at 3%. The reason for the high charge is that those who pay up are having to subsidise those who never earn enough to do so. In other words the state is asking the majority of young people who will eventually pay off their debt to subsidise the state for the cost of those who don’t.
But the issue the review really needs to get to grips with is the constantly rising size of the total student debt in the UK. The truth is that the country is failing to fund student education out of current taxation and the government has decided to ignore the problem and simply kick the can down the road by taking the shortfall off the national debt and putting it onto individual student’s debt levels or individual family debt levels. Each year the size of the student debt mountain has got bigger. If a future government decides that it wants to go back to a sensible policy of taxation and subsidy it could pretty easily do that for future graduates. It would be quite expensive but it could be done and ought to be done. What is becoming increasingly impossible is to deal with the accumulated debts of the past ten years. It is not reasonable to allow graduates before 2010 to be relatively debt free and allow graduates after 2020 to be in the same position but to leave people who studied between those years with a mountain of debt. To get out of that problem any government that reversed tuition fees would be faced by a multi-billion dollar nightmare. It will need to repay all contributions and take on the accumulated debt obligations. That is rapidly becoming financially impossible.
Part of the reason for the problem is that there are big issues with university education that few people have even begun to think about properly. The whole concept of doing your training in one go at the start of your career and then being finally qualified is now badly out of date. Change happens so quickly that professional updating and retraining because of changing jobs is now the norm. What is the point of concentrating so many resources on training 40% of young people for three years of full time study during which they can only hold down badly paid part time jobs? Better by far to move to a model that sees day release study throughout most of your working life as the norm. The same amount of tuition money can pay for 3 years of full time studying or it can pay for fifteen years of day release study at whatever stage in your life that you need it. The cost may be the same but the outcomes are likely to be much more relevant to your career needs and long-term interests. I am not suggesting that everyone should be required to study this way. I am suggesting there should be a major rethink about whether we have the right model for higher education.
One of the prime reasons the part time model is not being pushed is the institutional interest of universities. They have become businesses that operate in ways that suit their own institutional needs rather than ways that serve the needs of the public. Many are paying enormous sums to a few very high ranking officers such as the Vice Chancellor and offering remarkably little to the student in exchange for their money. A business studies student pays out £9,000 a year to sit in lectures with over 100 other people and get the odd tutorial. One hundred students generate close on a million pounds a year. It doesn’t cost even close to £100,000 a year to pay the lecturers to teach those one hundred students and the staffing is the biggest expense because the buildings have already been paid for by the taxpayer. Somewhere £900,000 a year is disappearing. Overseas students are being charged even more.
If you study in a further education college you will get 16 hours of teaching, an excellent individualised support system to keep you on track and the government will pay the college close to £4,000 a year to cover the costs. Arrive at university and the cost will double, you get fewer hours of tuition, the class sizes are bigger, the tutorials are fewer and you are expected to cough up over twice the price from out of your own pocket. The differences in cost aren’t about providing you with world class tuition. They are about turning a fast buck.
The whole system of university education needs a radical overhaul to modernise it to make it fit for the future, to focus more heavily on teaching and to cut the management costs. The whole system of paying for university education is in even greater need of overhaul.
Perhaps we could get someone to organise some sort of investigation. We could even call it a review. But please, don’t let Theresa May write its terms of reference!