Graduate tax or top-up fee loans? To me there’s barely a hairs breadth between the two policies. Both suffer from cashflow issues, with a person’s education not being “paid back” for decades, and both cause students looking in to their future to ask “Is it really worth the gamble?” The differences that are there are small, with a slight rebalancing of how much individuals pay dependent on income (though they may still end up paying more than they actually costed the system to educate them)
In the current economic climate there are those crying that this is the best situation, that we need to accept these “bold” new changes. Rubbish.
For a start we shouldn’t be making our first change on these matters to start a legacy of students paying for their own education in some kind of inbred American style. Once we start to make HE a commodity where the most successful end up paying more in to the system than they actually took out you must start to get individuals asking why they are subsidising certain degrees, or certain institutions.
But more importantly it might make universities themselves look at where their funding comes from, some may argue the current top-up system could do the same and I wouldn’t disagree, but with a graduate tax the lure of gaining MORE than the course was worth off of your high earning lawyers, doctors, and other top level professions would surely cause the book keepers to ask...shouldn’t we just cut out the music, and art degrees all together? And hell, nursing doesn’t exactly pay much either...
HE is about more than the piece of paper you get at the end, it’s about the learning, it’s about the growing...my personal opinion is the more people that are able to get integrated with other cultures, ideas, political beliefs during those final formative years of teenage life, the better for society. Who says that we can’t be truly bold or radical right now to do help fund just that?
The state already funds a large part of a student’s course; but if we were truly radical shouldn’t we say that society, and business that benefits from successful students, has to take better responsibility for the benefits they’re gaining? I don’t want to sound like students should never pay something, they clearly get a benefit of their own....perhaps some kind of graduate tax would indeed by useful, but not on the scale of paying back the entirety of their educational funding deficit and then some.
It’s a tough time right now, but it’s also a time of massive economic change. If we miss the boat now to take a real leap and change the way HE is funded we’ll miss it for another decade.
How does it work if Graduates return or move abroad, leaving England to fund education for all comers?
ReplyDeleteHow does what work? The graduate tax? It doesn't, unlike the student loan (where the SLC ask you to set up a direct debit to repay your loan when abroad) you simply don't pay thing back while earning outside the UK.
ReplyDeleteThe outside UK situation is interesting though isn't it? Public funding arguments like mine do rest on the majority of graduates actually staying in the UK. I don't believe that anything otherwise does happen, but it's always got to be an element in the picture.