Keir Starmer said “university tuition fees are not working well”, but he refused to repeat his promise to abolish them, in answer to a question after his New Year speech on Thursday. In the speech itself, he said: “We won’t be able to spend our way out of their mess. It’s not as simple as that.”
He is right. The promise to abolish tuition fees, which he said he would “stand by” during the 2020 Labour leadership election, is not the simple matter of social justice that it seems.
This was made clearer by the publication on Friday of figures for Scottish universities, showing that the gap between students from affluent and deprived areas gaining places has widened over the past four years. The SNP government in Scotland abolished tuition fees when it came to power 16 years ago, but it has failed to produce the greater equality of opportunity that its supporters hoped.
The bottom line is that university education is expensive, and if the students themselves don’t pay for it out of their earnings after graduation, as students in England and Wales do, the money has to come from somewhere else. That means the Scottish government has raided other parts of the education budget to pay for universities, and it also means that it has imposed a cap on the number of students that can go to university.
This means that some students who want to go to university in Scotland, and who would be able to in the rest of the UK, cannot do so. What is worse, though, is that the Scottish system does not even result in more students from poor areas going to university.
What is striking about the tuition fee system in the rest of the UK is that it has not deterred students from poorer backgrounds from going to university, neither when it was introduced nor when fees were raised from £3,000 a year to £9,000. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the evidence suggests that students see the fees and loan system as a form of graduate tax rather than a normal debt.
Given how expensive it would be to abolish tuition fees, and given that abolition would mostly benefit students who, whatever their background, go on to better-paid jobs on average, Starmer is quite right to put his promise on hold.
He wants to abolish and reform them and he’s made that much very clear but he’s unsure if it’s possible with the countries current finances (and won’t know till he’s in power) and doesn’t want to over promise and under deliver because it just becomes another attack avenue for the goverment, media and their supporters.
I genuinely appreciate the realistic view he gives on the UK at present and I can appreciate that he’s trying to build and maintain a reputation for fiscal prudence after years and years of magic money tree and unwarranted blame for the 2008 fiscal crisis being levied against Labour.
Do I love his stance on a lot of policy and social issues? No. Do i think its frustrating at times to listen to as a more left leaning labour voter? Yes, but I understand he’s trying to win an election and that he has to win over the right leaning centralists in England if he wants to become prime minister.
I’m mean obviously you wouldn’t want the party of the working classes to do something akin to socialism would you? These poor types need to pull themselves up by their bootstrap the bunch of free loaders.
Out of curiosity where does he stand on the bedroom tax?
Anecdotally, I couldn’t have gone to university if it wasn’t for free tuition.
I grew up in poverty in a council estate in Edinburgh, and there would have been no way for me to go to uni if I had to pay £9’000 a year. Thanks to free university and educational allowances, I was able to get a job that paid my mum’s gas bill for the past few years, save up to do a master’s degree and move onto a much better job. If I’d been in debt, I would have had to get the first paying job I could, I would never have had the freedom to do any of that.
Other countries manage to fund all of education well, without charging students.
I may be wrong, but I believe some of the nordic/scandinavian countries actually provide a stipend to university students.
But we can’t look at adopting their systems, because capitalism is in control here…
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Keir Starmer said “university tuition fees are not working well”, but he refused to repeat his promise to abolish them, in answer to a question after his New Year speech on Thursday. In the speech itself, he said: “We won’t be able to spend our way out of their mess. It’s not as simple as that.”
He is right. The promise to abolish tuition fees, which he said he would “stand by” during the 2020 Labour leadership election, is not the simple matter of social justice that it seems.
This was made clearer by the publication on Friday of figures for Scottish universities, showing that the gap between students from affluent and deprived areas gaining places has widened over the past four years. The SNP government in Scotland abolished tuition fees when it came to power 16 years ago, but it has failed to produce the greater equality of opportunity that its supporters hoped.
The bottom line is that university education is expensive, and if the students themselves don’t pay for it out of their earnings after graduation, as students in England and Wales do, the money has to come from somewhere else. That means the Scottish government has raided other parts of the education budget to pay for universities, and it also means that it has imposed a cap on the number of students that can go to university.
This means that some students who want to go to university in Scotland, and who would be able to in the rest of the UK, cannot do so. What is worse, though, is that the Scottish system does not even result in more students from poor areas going to university.
What is striking about the tuition fee system in the rest of the UK is that it has not deterred students from poorer backgrounds from going to university, neither when it was introduced nor when fees were raised from £3,000 a year to £9,000. This may seem counter-intuitive, but the evidence suggests that students see the fees and loan system as a form of graduate tax rather than a normal debt.
Given how expensive it would be to abolish tuition fees, and given that abolition would mostly benefit students who, whatever their background, go on to better-paid jobs on average, Starmer is quite right to put his promise on hold.
He wants to abolish and reform them and he’s made that much very clear but he’s unsure if it’s possible with the countries current finances (and won’t know till he’s in power) and doesn’t want to over promise and under deliver because it just becomes another attack avenue for the goverment, media and their supporters.
I genuinely appreciate the realistic view he gives on the UK at present and I can appreciate that he’s trying to build and maintain a reputation for fiscal prudence after years and years of magic money tree and unwarranted blame for the 2008 fiscal crisis being levied against Labour.
Do I love his stance on a lot of policy and social issues? No. Do i think its frustrating at times to listen to as a more left leaning labour voter? Yes, but I understand he’s trying to win an election and that he has to win over the right leaning centralists in England if he wants to become prime minister.
I’m mean obviously you wouldn’t want the party of the working classes to do something akin to socialism would you? These poor types need to pull themselves up by their bootstrap the bunch of free loaders.
Out of curiosity where does he stand on the bedroom tax?
Anecdotally, I couldn’t have gone to university if it wasn’t for free tuition.
I grew up in poverty in a council estate in Edinburgh, and there would have been no way for me to go to uni if I had to pay £9’000 a year. Thanks to free university and educational allowances, I was able to get a job that paid my mum’s gas bill for the past few years, save up to do a master’s degree and move onto a much better job. If I’d been in debt, I would have had to get the first paying job I could, I would never have had the freedom to do any of that.
Other countries manage to fund all of education well, without charging students.
I may be wrong, but I believe some of the nordic/scandinavian countries actually provide a stipend to university students.
But we can’t look at adopting their systems, because capitalism is in control here…