Stretch out a policy disaster for long enough, and it becomes a background hum. A grim, depressing constant that you just need to put up with, like rain, or traffic, or Sir John Redwood. So it is with David Cameron’s dramatic raising of student tuition fees, which came into force in 2012. Among political anoraks, I expect it is mainly remembered for what it did to Nick Clegg, which was kill him, because he had promised to veto this, and then didn’t. The poor man, with all his millions in the California sun. I bet he feels awful.
Anyway, this week university bosses began campaigning to have the cap on fees raised from their current £9,250 to something closer to the £24,000 paid by foreign students. Which, I think, may well be the most alarming political suggestion I’ve heard in ages. And it’s not even one of Liz Truss’s.
I remember the fights about fees, back then. I remember the demos, the storming of Conservative HQ at Millbank, the guy who was jailed for bunging a fire extinguisher off the roof. I also remember all those ministers insisting that saddling future generations of graduates with all this debt was actually going to be doing them a big favour.
It’s funny, you write it down like that now, and you do wonder. At the time, though, the idea was that universities would be forced to compete for students, with only the best courses hitting the cap. It would be a market, and pointless Mickey Mouse degrees would fall away. Instead, all institutions immediately charged full whack. Which perversely incentivised nonsense degrees rather than eradicating them, because the exact same fee that went to, say, Cambridge for teaching you mathematics also went to Arsehampton Former Polytechnic for giving you a BA in being a puppeteer. To which one can only say, “oops”.
Then there was the argument that higher fees would stop UK students being overlooked in favour of more profitable foreign ones. In fact, international undergraduates at UK universities have soared. So I guess we should ditch that one, too. Things haven’t been much better from the Treasury’s perspective. At first, the prediction was that only a quarter of students would never earn enough to pay back their debts; a deficit easily made up by everybody else. As things stand, though, three quarters of students are likely to be in this boat, meaning that university still costs the taxpayer a boggling amount, even after more than a decade of a system explicitly designed to ensure it wouldn’t.
I do wonder, though, if the biggest costs of tuition fees have been more covert. Ponder, for example, the impact on the Union. (As in the countries, not a bar.) In Scotland, cunningly, the SNP never introduced them for Scots who stay at home. In that first year, Scottish applicants to English universities fell by 16.4 per cent. They’ve never recovered, and why would they? For one top heavy example, contrast the 805 Scots who applied to Oxford between 2019 and 2021 with the 1,404 Welsh applicants, despite Scotland’s much larger population. No longer can a Scot as easily spend a few years in Nottingham or even Newcastle as in Dundee or Aberdeen before returning home to tell people that some English people don’t actually have horns. Think of the cost of that, a generation on.
More than that, though, think of the political and social cost of the whole damn policy just being a big lie. Because really, tuition fees are not fees at all, but a graduate tax in disguise. And not even a good disguise. We’re talking a fake moustache and a pork pie hat. “What we have introduced is a graduate tax and I really wish we had called it a graduate tax at the time,” said that nice Mr Clegg, when in screaming political freefall a few years later.
Had they been honest enough to call it a graduate tax, though, nobody would have been able to deny just how unfair and regressive this particular incarnation of a graduate tax it was. For one thing, you get a massive discount if you have parents rich enough to pay it all for you, up front. For another, it starts biting when you are young and struggling, perhaps starting a family or seeking to buy a house. For the wealthy, but only the wealthy, it then ceases to be a tax at all.
In a bid to make the numbers add up, the government has extended the term of repayment from 30 years to 40, effectively making it last your working life. They also cut the threshold at which graduates must start paying. If we called it a tax, we’d also have to admit that was a fairly whopping tax rise, targeted only at the young, to pay for something their elders got for free. This isn’t right. You know it, and I know it, and you can bet they do, too. Because it’s not just about the numbers. It’s about a generation who feel they are being done over, and have a point.
What, though, are the alternatives? Back in 2019, Jeremy Corbyn promised to make education free and was ridiculed for it, not least because he was basically promising to make everything else free, too. Given our current shortages of everything from doctors to teachers, though, I do wonder if there are some socially vital degrees that should cost students nothing, even if those puppeteers would still need to cough up.
I’m also aware of the arguments against a more straightforward graduate tax, but most of them also seem to be pretty strong arguments against the system we currently have, too. Frankly, though, my best alternative would be “anything else”. It’s easy these days to think it’s only recently we’ve been screwing things up this badly. Not so. This is, and has always been, a dreadful mess. Let’s not make it even worse.
Barely able to rent, unable to buy a house, essential years taken by lockdown, constantly blamed for any societal problems, treated like shit and barely acknowledged by those in power.
Yeah we’re done over
I wonder how many of these, done overs, are driving a round in a nice car, have the latest smart phones, games stations etc.
I’m sorry but the youth of today have no idea. I’d love to be able to send them back to the 70’s for a year or two
The ironic thing is that Millennials and Zoomers more or less grew up being told that if you don’t go to university, your life will effectively be over. I did go to university but I am convinced I did not need to in order to get to where I am. However, doesn’t stop the government taking £85.00 per month out of my salary with an interest rate that won’t drop and is much higher than anything I ever got back from my savings accounts.
In other areas, rents were often very expensive taking up to 40% of my disposable income at times and many were paying more. More often than not, the accommodation was definitely not worth it. I had only one good landlord in five properties I rented before buying a house with my wife recently which wouldn’t have been possible without an uncle of mine dying and leaving the proceeds of his estate to his nieces and nephews.
There’s practically nobody who speaks for anyone under 50 in politics with a vague hope of winning office. Even as someone on the right of the spectrum, I can’t bring myself to vote Tory anymore, they do nothing for my Millennial generation. I don’t trust Labour and they seem too busy appeasing Twitter than reforming the country and the Lib Dems are mostly now pro-NIMBY. Also wasn’t a fan of their Brexit stance where they would just revoke article 50 without a vote. There needs to be a new patriotic movement that can inspire the youth of this country to take action and make it better.
Tbh I am just increasingly of the opinion that we should just scrap tuition fees altogether, corbs was right.
This half baked situation where unis charge max because government will pay max and then do weird things to get the money back (like interest rates that match inflation, interest rates that vary with earnings or extending the loan time). Weird things done to patch up past issues always create an unfair situation.
If you want to do a market solution you need to actually create a market. Go one way or another, not worst of both worlds.
It’s also clear that the quality of these degrees are lacking and unis are doing their best to pack in as many students as possible, which to their eyes are just free cash cows as the government will pay them the £9k (£24k??) no matter what.
The OP is right of course that the system is in effect a grad tax, just a really really badly designed one. A grad tax of say 3% of earnings over £25k for 25 years seems to be about a good ball park for splitting between graduates and the general tax payer.
I genuinely can’t fathom how a course can actually cost £24k per student. Pretty sure primary school (which is far more extensive than uni) costs less than £6k a year per pupil.
‘Also wasn’t a fan of their Brexit stance where they would just revoke article 50 without a vote’
-another one who doesn’t understand how party manifesto mandates work in the UK. Moron.
What’s he complaining about? He never supported the alternative. Oh, what am I saying, he’s free to whinge as much as he likes now that socialism has been soundly defeated.
LMAO the Times have some cheek of all to be complaining about this. Their brand of right wing pro Tory bullshit is the reason we are where we are
[deleted]
No point moaning about it were all in the same boat with a big ol leak that needs plugged.
Unless we start bailing water we’re all fucked. As a young person I agree we didn’t have an easy ride but no sense wasting effort; this crucible that were facing will make us stronger than those that came before us.
God places the heaviest burdens on those who can carry its weight, it was no accident we are alive in this moment.
Now it’s time to do better than what came before and push the aside the spite. You define what good looks like, don’t demand anything less than your potential.
“slugs thrown in a bucket of salt and rolled down a hill feel done over, they have a point”
What a disappointment, the headline nailed it and then the article comprehensively failed to touch on any of the ways young people are *actually* getting done over.
Tuition fees? That’s our big problem? Seriously? It’s not that we’ll never be able to afford to own a home and will be lucky if we get to retire before we’re 80 – it’s that a loan is costing us 20 quid a month in repayments. Right.
Get out and fucking vote. That was the problem in 2019 when we last had a chance.
Yes, in large part by silly cunts who write for the times
Our generation dosnt own shit. Not even a movie or a song, its all rentals or monthly subscriptions. Soon enough the only viable option for a car would be a lease car and super markets will be limited to a delivery service with a subscription fee.
Author mentions that the raising of tuition fees – again – is the most alarming political decision he has heard in ages? Has the guy been living under a rock?! It’s been 10 years of quietly sweeping away our rights…and now they are pushing for strikes to be illegal. The country is slipping into a fascist regime posing as a democracy. Tuition fees are so far away from the problem.
I’m 31 and it just feels like one shit fuck up has happened after the other and all that’s happened to the economy after fuck ups like that is the wealth gap between the rich and poor is becoming wider. We’re skint.
The current system for tuition fees in the UK is utterly ridiculous and like most things here seems designed from the ground up to sting you at every opportunity. I’d like to see the UK switch to the NZ model for student loans. You pay 0% interest for the lifetime of the loan however you have to pay the entire thing back. But, if you move out of the country then you start paying interest on it.
Just about got on the housing market a few years ago. And….interest rate hikes. Ffs now an expensive house and expensive mortgage
The biggest lie in this whole debate is that tuition fees are necessary at all.
The average graduate earns more money than a non-graduate. This means over their lives they pay more tax. That extra tax more than covers the cost of the education. Educating people is literally an investment that pays a dividend back to the tax man. Better educated people also live healthier lives, placing less pressure on health and social services. The notion that Barry the builder was paying for Tarquin’s degree has always been bullshit.
I’m 30, and fed up to the back teeth of all the once in a lifetime crashes and recessions and other financial bullshittery that seem to be happening constantly.
I would have left school at 16 into a recession, but stayed on for a levels and eventually uni. I left uni into a shite job market and had no chance of ever having a job in my degree field (STEM, which was lauded as the be all and end all). Was lucky to call on my feet into an above average paying job, but it still hasn’t been particularly comfortable despite me being in a position where I’m only supporting myself – fuck knows how young families are supposed to cope.
On top of that, the NHS is crumbling, the retirement age is creeping up and all I see is older people saying us “young’uns” are lazy and ungrateful. The potential next PM thinks UK workers are lazy. The planet is ruined.
No shit, we feel done over.
More than done over
I don’t really understand why he’s against tuition fees going up. He talks about how they’re regressive and unfair and hit the poorest hardest, but raising tuition fees won’t affect the poorer graduates because they will never pay it all back anyway. If you raise the fees then it will only affect the ones who are rich enough to pay it all back, meaning a fairer graduate tax in effect.
The things that hit poorer graduates are when they reduce the threshold for paying it back, or they increase the repayment rate. Changing the size of the debt mountain by raising fees or the interest rate will only affect the rich.
A point?
WTF…..
What planet are Times Journalists living on?
A decade of brutal cuts including massively in education… no hope of getting onto the property ladder…. 50% *never* paying off their student loans due to low pay. And another decade that will result in massive poverty.
They need to get out of Times tower once in a while and into the real world.
Of course we have a point. We’re royally fucked. There’s nothing to look forward to: we can’t afford houses, we can’t even afford energy bills anymore and with that we’ll have to choose between missing a meal or feeling warm.
There’s nothing left for us to do apart from revolt but honestly, I fear it would have to get much worse than this for the British public to finally stand up for themselves.
25 comments
Author: Hugo Rifkind
Stretch out a policy disaster for long enough, and it becomes a background hum. A grim, depressing constant that you just need to put up with, like rain, or traffic, or Sir John Redwood. So it is with David Cameron’s dramatic raising of student tuition fees, which came into force in 2012. Among political anoraks, I expect it is mainly remembered for what it did to Nick Clegg, which was kill him, because he had promised to veto this, and then didn’t. The poor man, with all his millions in the California sun. I bet he feels awful.
Anyway, this week university bosses began campaigning to have the cap on fees raised from their current £9,250 to something closer to the £24,000 paid by foreign students. Which, I think, may well be the most alarming political suggestion I’ve heard in ages. And it’s not even one of Liz Truss’s.
I remember the fights about fees, back then. I remember the demos, the storming of Conservative HQ at Millbank, the guy who was jailed for bunging a fire extinguisher off the roof. I also remember all those ministers insisting that saddling future generations of graduates with all this debt was actually going to be doing them a big favour.
It’s funny, you write it down like that now, and you do wonder. At the time, though, the idea was that universities would be forced to compete for students, with only the best courses hitting the cap. It would be a market, and pointless Mickey Mouse degrees would fall away. Instead, all institutions immediately charged full whack. Which perversely incentivised nonsense degrees rather than eradicating them, because the exact same fee that went to, say, Cambridge for teaching you mathematics also went to Arsehampton Former Polytechnic for giving you a BA in being a puppeteer. To which one can only say, “oops”.
Then there was the argument that higher fees would stop UK students being overlooked in favour of more profitable foreign ones. In fact, international undergraduates at UK universities have soared. So I guess we should ditch that one, too. Things haven’t been much better from the Treasury’s perspective. At first, the prediction was that only a quarter of students would never earn enough to pay back their debts; a deficit easily made up by everybody else. As things stand, though, three quarters of students are likely to be in this boat, meaning that university still costs the taxpayer a boggling amount, even after more than a decade of a system explicitly designed to ensure it wouldn’t.
I do wonder, though, if the biggest costs of tuition fees have been more covert. Ponder, for example, the impact on the Union. (As in the countries, not a bar.) In Scotland, cunningly, the SNP never introduced them for Scots who stay at home. In that first year, Scottish applicants to English universities fell by 16.4 per cent. They’ve never recovered, and why would they? For one top heavy example, contrast the 805 Scots who applied to Oxford between 2019 and 2021 with the 1,404 Welsh applicants, despite Scotland’s much larger population. No longer can a Scot as easily spend a few years in Nottingham or even Newcastle as in Dundee or Aberdeen before returning home to tell people that some English people don’t actually have horns. Think of the cost of that, a generation on.
More than that, though, think of the political and social cost of the whole damn policy just being a big lie. Because really, tuition fees are not fees at all, but a graduate tax in disguise. And not even a good disguise. We’re talking a fake moustache and a pork pie hat. “What we have introduced is a graduate tax and I really wish we had called it a graduate tax at the time,” said that nice Mr Clegg, when in screaming political freefall a few years later.
Had they been honest enough to call it a graduate tax, though, nobody would have been able to deny just how unfair and regressive this particular incarnation of a graduate tax it was. For one thing, you get a massive discount if you have parents rich enough to pay it all for you, up front. For another, it starts biting when you are young and struggling, perhaps starting a family or seeking to buy a house. For the wealthy, but only the wealthy, it then ceases to be a tax at all.
In a bid to make the numbers add up, the government has extended the term of repayment from 30 years to 40, effectively making it last your working life. They also cut the threshold at which graduates must start paying. If we called it a tax, we’d also have to admit that was a fairly whopping tax rise, targeted only at the young, to pay for something their elders got for free. This isn’t right. You know it, and I know it, and you can bet they do, too. Because it’s not just about the numbers. It’s about a generation who feel they are being done over, and have a point.
What, though, are the alternatives? Back in 2019, Jeremy Corbyn promised to make education free and was ridiculed for it, not least because he was basically promising to make everything else free, too. Given our current shortages of everything from doctors to teachers, though, I do wonder if there are some socially vital degrees that should cost students nothing, even if those puppeteers would still need to cough up.
I’m also aware of the arguments against a more straightforward graduate tax, but most of them also seem to be pretty strong arguments against the system we currently have, too. Frankly, though, my best alternative would be “anything else”. It’s easy these days to think it’s only recently we’ve been screwing things up this badly. Not so. This is, and has always been, a dreadful mess. Let’s not make it even worse.
Barely able to rent, unable to buy a house, essential years taken by lockdown, constantly blamed for any societal problems, treated like shit and barely acknowledged by those in power.
Yeah we’re done over
I wonder how many of these, done overs, are driving a round in a nice car, have the latest smart phones, games stations etc.
I’m sorry but the youth of today have no idea. I’d love to be able to send them back to the 70’s for a year or two
The ironic thing is that Millennials and Zoomers more or less grew up being told that if you don’t go to university, your life will effectively be over. I did go to university but I am convinced I did not need to in order to get to where I am. However, doesn’t stop the government taking £85.00 per month out of my salary with an interest rate that won’t drop and is much higher than anything I ever got back from my savings accounts.
In other areas, rents were often very expensive taking up to 40% of my disposable income at times and many were paying more. More often than not, the accommodation was definitely not worth it. I had only one good landlord in five properties I rented before buying a house with my wife recently which wouldn’t have been possible without an uncle of mine dying and leaving the proceeds of his estate to his nieces and nephews.
There’s practically nobody who speaks for anyone under 50 in politics with a vague hope of winning office. Even as someone on the right of the spectrum, I can’t bring myself to vote Tory anymore, they do nothing for my Millennial generation. I don’t trust Labour and they seem too busy appeasing Twitter than reforming the country and the Lib Dems are mostly now pro-NIMBY. Also wasn’t a fan of their Brexit stance where they would just revoke article 50 without a vote. There needs to be a new patriotic movement that can inspire the youth of this country to take action and make it better.
Tbh I am just increasingly of the opinion that we should just scrap tuition fees altogether, corbs was right.
This half baked situation where unis charge max because government will pay max and then do weird things to get the money back (like interest rates that match inflation, interest rates that vary with earnings or extending the loan time). Weird things done to patch up past issues always create an unfair situation.
If you want to do a market solution you need to actually create a market. Go one way or another, not worst of both worlds.
It’s also clear that the quality of these degrees are lacking and unis are doing their best to pack in as many students as possible, which to their eyes are just free cash cows as the government will pay them the £9k (£24k??) no matter what.
The OP is right of course that the system is in effect a grad tax, just a really really badly designed one. A grad tax of say 3% of earnings over £25k for 25 years seems to be about a good ball park for splitting between graduates and the general tax payer.
I genuinely can’t fathom how a course can actually cost £24k per student. Pretty sure primary school (which is far more extensive than uni) costs less than £6k a year per pupil.
‘Also wasn’t a fan of their Brexit stance where they would just revoke article 50 without a vote’
-another one who doesn’t understand how party manifesto mandates work in the UK. Moron.
What’s he complaining about? He never supported the alternative. Oh, what am I saying, he’s free to whinge as much as he likes now that socialism has been soundly defeated.
LMAO the Times have some cheek of all to be complaining about this. Their brand of right wing pro Tory bullshit is the reason we are where we are
[deleted]
No point moaning about it were all in the same boat with a big ol leak that needs plugged.
Unless we start bailing water we’re all fucked. As a young person I agree we didn’t have an easy ride but no sense wasting effort; this crucible that were facing will make us stronger than those that came before us.
God places the heaviest burdens on those who can carry its weight, it was no accident we are alive in this moment.
Now it’s time to do better than what came before and push the aside the spite. You define what good looks like, don’t demand anything less than your potential.
“slugs thrown in a bucket of salt and rolled down a hill feel done over, they have a point”
What a disappointment, the headline nailed it and then the article comprehensively failed to touch on any of the ways young people are *actually* getting done over.
Tuition fees? That’s our big problem? Seriously? It’s not that we’ll never be able to afford to own a home and will be lucky if we get to retire before we’re 80 – it’s that a loan is costing us 20 quid a month in repayments. Right.
Get out and fucking vote. That was the problem in 2019 when we last had a chance.
Yes, in large part by silly cunts who write for the times
Our generation dosnt own shit. Not even a movie or a song, its all rentals or monthly subscriptions. Soon enough the only viable option for a car would be a lease car and super markets will be limited to a delivery service with a subscription fee.
Author mentions that the raising of tuition fees – again – is the most alarming political decision he has heard in ages? Has the guy been living under a rock?! It’s been 10 years of quietly sweeping away our rights…and now they are pushing for strikes to be illegal. The country is slipping into a fascist regime posing as a democracy. Tuition fees are so far away from the problem.
I’m 31 and it just feels like one shit fuck up has happened after the other and all that’s happened to the economy after fuck ups like that is the wealth gap between the rich and poor is becoming wider. We’re skint.
The current system for tuition fees in the UK is utterly ridiculous and like most things here seems designed from the ground up to sting you at every opportunity. I’d like to see the UK switch to the NZ model for student loans. You pay 0% interest for the lifetime of the loan however you have to pay the entire thing back. But, if you move out of the country then you start paying interest on it.
Just about got on the housing market a few years ago. And….interest rate hikes. Ffs now an expensive house and expensive mortgage
The biggest lie in this whole debate is that tuition fees are necessary at all.
The average graduate earns more money than a non-graduate. This means over their lives they pay more tax. That extra tax more than covers the cost of the education. Educating people is literally an investment that pays a dividend back to the tax man. Better educated people also live healthier lives, placing less pressure on health and social services. The notion that Barry the builder was paying for Tarquin’s degree has always been bullshit.
I’m 30, and fed up to the back teeth of all the once in a lifetime crashes and recessions and other financial bullshittery that seem to be happening constantly.
I would have left school at 16 into a recession, but stayed on for a levels and eventually uni. I left uni into a shite job market and had no chance of ever having a job in my degree field (STEM, which was lauded as the be all and end all). Was lucky to call on my feet into an above average paying job, but it still hasn’t been particularly comfortable despite me being in a position where I’m only supporting myself – fuck knows how young families are supposed to cope.
On top of that, the NHS is crumbling, the retirement age is creeping up and all I see is older people saying us “young’uns” are lazy and ungrateful. The potential next PM thinks UK workers are lazy. The planet is ruined.
No shit, we feel done over.
More than done over
I don’t really understand why he’s against tuition fees going up. He talks about how they’re regressive and unfair and hit the poorest hardest, but raising tuition fees won’t affect the poorer graduates because they will never pay it all back anyway. If you raise the fees then it will only affect the ones who are rich enough to pay it all back, meaning a fairer graduate tax in effect.
The things that hit poorer graduates are when they reduce the threshold for paying it back, or they increase the repayment rate. Changing the size of the debt mountain by raising fees or the interest rate will only affect the rich.
A point?
WTF…..
What planet are Times Journalists living on?
A decade of brutal cuts including massively in education… no hope of getting onto the property ladder…. 50% *never* paying off their student loans due to low pay. And another decade that will result in massive poverty.
They need to get out of Times tower once in a while and into the real world.
Of course we have a point. We’re royally fucked. There’s nothing to look forward to: we can’t afford houses, we can’t even afford energy bills anymore and with that we’ll have to choose between missing a meal or feeling warm.
There’s nothing left for us to do apart from revolt but honestly, I fear it would have to get much worse than this for the British public to finally stand up for themselves.