This
is only doable because the Conservatives have made students pay for their
education through tuition fees. Students are, by definition, still in education
and therefore unable to pay for education, making this an intrinsically
regressive and socially unjust policy. If apprenticeships are worth funding, so
is higher education, with all the externalities that I mentioned back then.
The more students who study anything defined as higher education, the
less money there is for any one person. This policy will therefore help
low-grade courses displace talented students on demanding degrees, including
degrees that the Conservatives regard as worthwhile, such as engineering and
mathematics.
I have been persuaded that a wide range of degrees is actually useful
and beneficial to society, but that doesn’t matter here; the Conservative
policy directly conflicts with their own stated preferences.
If we lifted the cap on university places and funded only the top few
universities, such as by making Russell Group university places free, that
would be good. Talented individuals from any background could get a high-level
education, with merit deciding who got the funding.
It’s a shame the Liberal Democrats got such a bad reputation about
tuition fees, when it was a Conservative part of a coalition deal. The
Conservatives slyly escaped any repercussions for it when it was mostly their
responsibility. This new policy will help ensure that another generation of
young people gets heavily into debt. Student loans are no longer cheap debt at
low interest rates; the students will
pay dearly for the privilege of education. A large
proportion of the additional students won’t be people converting their life
prospects from meaningless, low-paid drudgery to being well-paid high-flyers.
The correlations between educational attainment and pay are not (necessarily)
causations, as any statistician will agree. I don’t have to rely on logic to
make this point either: the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
has issued a report noting that most graduates
are not in ‘graduate jobs’, and that our conveyor belt of degrees is not
leading to more high-skilled jobs. This is not a supply issue.
People who come from wealthy backgrounds tend to do well in life, and
also tend to do well in education. Education is a sorting/signalling method,
and we have underemployment in this country not because people need masters
degrees to serve coffee but because there is not enough demand for their
supposedly higher skills. Conservative thought shows a remarkable ability to
believe that the markets/business can and will solve everything… except when
they’re not solving things, in which case it must be because of some other
limiting factor. We do not have a population with too few degrees holding back
productivity. We have too few jobs that pay degree-holders well.
The extra degrees aren’t even likely to be high-quality ones. This
policy will encourage impressionable young people to take on expensive debt in
pursuit of an aspiration that this won’t help them achieve. It’s selling false
hope and it’s wrong.
The cost of student loans
is high; it has been estimated to be 43p for
every £1 loaned. However, the effective state subsidy is much higher for
low-paid graduates, which lifting the cap is likely to produce. At that point
it’s more like 93%, or £36k per person. Further effects, such as not expecting
such generous earnings growth, could increase the % level further. It’s hard to
forecast student enrolments, but there are data about student numbers, which are already increasing. If this policy
change only creates another 30,000 students a year (compared to the millions in
higher education) it will still cost the government £1 bn a year. More students
will increase that figure further.
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