University funding

[onebyone]

If Lord Browne's plans go into effect, it seems likely that the four-year degree I took from Oxford will soon cost 24k at the very least, and perhaps more like 40k, in student debt for fees. What actually happened was that I graduated 10 years ago with 5k in student debt, none of which was because of tuition fees

Comments

[frax]

Rightly or wrongly this level of fee would have put me off going to Oxford. My parents were "well off" only to the extent that I didn't qualify for any extra help and they were able to pay my battles bills each year (on the understanding that if I wanted to get married in the future they wouldn't be able to afford to help with that). They occasionally bought me a food shop. They gave me what they could and for 3 years I lived on £10 a week (including money for text books, clothes etc). I still came out with £30k of debt (a large chunk of which was due to the year at law school

[onebyone]

I agree that competitive interest rates potentially make a huge difference. At the moment, interest rates are low and inflation is high, so from the POV of the lenders it's a good time to sneak a change through. "Competitive interest rates" without context doesn't really mean much - inflation is 3%, the student loan rate is 1.5%, the LIBOR is below 1%, and unsecured personal loans are anything from 7% up. I don't know if Browne has a detailed system in mind

[onebyone]

at 18 you think

Which is not to imply that I don't think the same thing at 32...

[frax]

Ref your second para

[ar_boblad]

Exactly 2 things made my student debt palatable to the 18 year old me. First was the repayment threshold, if I'm not in a decent job the debt won't hurt me. Second was the inflation linked interest rates, if it takes a long time to pay off it's still the same debt, in real terms.

Change either of those and it goes from being a practical means of support to a gamble. Change them both on my current level of student debt, 10 years on, and I'd be bankrupt.

[undyingking]

I got my degree for absolutely nuppence, in fact they even paid me a grant to do it. But that was in the days when it was thought the economy needed about 10% graduates, not the current 50% or whatever it is.

I still don't really understand why people object so strenuously to a graduate tax. I think the proposition "the nation pays your fees, and then if you graduate and get a job paying over X per annum, then you'll pay an extra Y pence income tax" is a lot less offputting than the loan proposition. But I suppose if it's ideologically unacceptable to admit that the loan proposition is at all offputting, that argument may be impossible to apply.

And, wrt your closing point, in that scenario I would set X at about the median income for non-graduates: so it is clear that your degree is likely profiting you.

[onebyone]

I'm not all that bothered by the graduate tax either. It introduces an open-ended obligation: if you earn enough, then you pay the tax you would have paid anyway, *plus* what would have been your fees, *plus* even more. But firstly, why shouldn't those who've benefited from state-supported higher education, and are very high earners perhaps as a direct result, contribute more to it than just what's deemed to be their own fees? If they don't like that, they could always go to a US university instead, and pay their way, and it would be more than UK fees. Secondly, if someone is deterred from going to university because they think they can make an absolute fuck-ton of money without going, I'm less bothered about them being deterred. They clearly have a pretty good plan without university. It's people deterred because they think they'll make hardly any money even if they do go, that I'm worried about

[frax]

Don't we have an extra problem for professional careers that require a degree and/or professional training but are exceptionally poorly paid for what they do but may still break the £21k at some point, like Teachers and Nurses. Is there are argument that careers which are for the public good should have their fees waived completely?

[frax]

I am thinking of people who may spend their whole careers being paid less than if they had done something equally skilled (or even less skilled) but better valued by the market.

[dr_bob]

There are some other things noted in the report that cover some of the concerns mentioned here. Notably the HEFCE et al replacement channelling additional funds into strategic degrees (Nursing was mentioned) which *should* allow the Universities to commensurately reduce the fees. Also, the interest rate for debt repayment is tiered with income, so higher earners pay a higher interest rate on their debts, which results in them paying back more to service/repay their debt. So a 21k earner would pay back less than a 40 k earner.

Also, I expect that Oxbridge will be charge higher fees, but then the wealthier colleges will offer fee rebates to attract the best students, so there will likely be a complicated array of fee repayment strategies in effect there, meaning that no-one will pay the same fees for their educations. Places like Imperial, however, will probably hammer the students for all they're worth, and put the money into research, rather than teaching.

[onebyone]

I guess we'll have to wait and see on some of those. The current system is that fees are "up to" the maximum, but I'm not aware that many universities charge less than the cap.

If I were a university, and I had some money to put into student funding, I suspect I'd probably prefer to put it into maintenance grants over than fees grants, especially for universities whose students face high rents. Being hard up while you're a student is an even more obvious deterrent than the threat of future debt, and losing a student you already have is worse than deterring a student you never hear about.

Which might mean, of course, that the government should do the same. Load students with massive debt, use the repayments on that debt to pay poor kids to go to university, and hope that the short-term benefit outweighs their fear of the possible long term cost.

[bateleur]

The details don't matter, because they won't ever be examined by the people this seriously screws: bright students whose parents didn't go to university.

The target schools programme always struggled enough as things stand. This will set the whole thing back decades. Now we'll end up with bogus statistics like "percentage of year group graduating with a first degree" where in reality social mobility drops by 50%+.

Ugh.

[onebyone]

bright students whose parents didn't go to university

Because they're more debt-averse, or because they're less university-prone to start with and so any kind of deterrent will work?

[bateleur]

Closer to the latter.

People who have to make risky decisions are likely to seek advice from people they trust. In the case of students, that mostly means parents and peers.