the death of UK higher education

[tla]

Having heard today's news that public funding for university teaching in the UK is more or less going to stop (79% cut, the remaining pittance to be targeted at 'strategic' fields e.g. clinical medicine, nursing, science, technology and modern languages)...[*]

...and that the proposed way of making up the shortfall is to jack up tuition fees, to

Comments

[sierra_le_oli]

Wow, just wow.

[visage]

How do you even *save* toward a house deposit if you have to live on £1000-1200/month, including rent and council tax and everything else?

That depends a lot on how many people you're supporting and where you live, no?

Raising a family in London and saving towards a house would presumably be nearly impossible on that take-home, but it's also presumably the case that anyone trying to raise a family in London is going to have an income above the median starting salary.

Outside of London, what's the UK's cost of living?

[tla]

I'd have to Google as much as you to answer the cost of living question, but the short answer is that I wasn't even thinking of London. On that take-home in London you could almost certainly not have a flat to yourself and still be able to eat & pay utilities etc., much less raise a family. (Two earners on that income could get a small flat and feed themselves etc., but I've no idea what childcare costs are on top of that.)

[fredrickegerman]

Just think "a lot more than in the US" and you'll be approximately right. That's if you live in the sticks (which don't get much more rural than, say, western Mass).

[rmc28]

I'm not sure where you get £337.94/mo from. Repayment is 9% of what you earn once you are earning > £21,000. So at £2100, that's about £158/month, which reduces the £1368 to £1210 a month. At £38k, you're repaying at £285/month, so getting approx £2058.

I'm still working out what I think about Browne (yes, I know, I'm supposed to hate it, but there are some things in there I don't completely disagree with), but the fee-repayment looks like a graduate tax except with a point at which you stop if you are able to fully repay, and a fairly generous starting point. The money you have borrowed goes immediately to the university when you start, rather than into the general taxation pot several years later, where it may or may not get hypothecated back to the university.

[tla]

Oh! I interpreted this

The current system in which all students are given subsidised rock-bottom interest rates on their loans - criticised by some as an unnecessary expense - would end.

Graduates would start repaying their loans once they earn more than £21,000 - up from the current threshold of £15,000 - at a rate of 9 per cent. At £6,000 fees, students could have to repay £30,000 in fees and living costs.

as referring to the interest rate on the loan, rather than the proportion of their income. I will have to re-run the numbers if that is not in fact the case.

As hinted in my original post, most of my unhappiness about all this comes from the way that job prospects in my field are now shot utterly to hell, rather than the tuition fee issue itself.

[visage]

From the article you linked to:

Students with “higher earnings after graduation” will pay a real rate of interest on the outstanding balance of their fees and cost-of-living loans.

This interest rate “will be equal to the government’s cost of borrowing (inflation plus 2.2 per cent)”, the review says.

Low-income graduates who fail to make it above the earnings threshold would not be charged interest, and their loan balance would rise in line with inflation, while those earning just above the threshold, whose repayments do not cover the interest costs, “will have the rest of the interest rebated to them by government”. The review notes: “Crucially, the lowest 20 per cent of earners on average will pay less than they do today.”

* If you make <£21k, the interest rate on your loans is equal to inflation, and you're not paying them off

[rmc28]

There's an interesting analysis from the IFS here: http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/5307

[tiurin]

What is the approximate total cost- both tuition and room/board- to get a Bachelor's degree in the UK(not sure if your Oxford 42k number is the total, or whether that's a loan on top of an expected cash payment)? Is there a clear cost difference between public and private?

This looks like something that's going to significantly increase income inequality and decrease social mobility. If the total is 42k# total for Oxford though, I think the UK is still better off than the US...for now.