What should higher education policy look like?
Writing in today’s Guardian, Jonathan Wolff, head of UCL’s philosophy department, reminds us that, while everyone’s talking about secondary schools, there remain unresolved issues in the HE sector, centred around (you guessed it…) funding. He doesn’t pretend to have all the answers  and neither do I. But I think a statement of principles might be in order. A tentative answer to the question: what should a decent, left-liberal higher education policy look like? So, here goes:
1. We should embrace a just system of graduate taxation (predictable hiccups aside)  in the form of the current Higher Education Contributions Scheme (HECS), with repayment entirely conditional on achieving an agreed income level. It should be made clear to prospective applicants that their fees are notional until they achieve that level of earnings  they are not in debt. Yes, tertiary education is partly a public good: we all gain from an educated population, as do corporations from trained-up lumps of human capital. But the main beneficiary from a good education is yourself, so you should expect to pay the share that is a private good. After all, we all benefit from the existence of fuel, but I don’t ask you to fill my car up or pay my bus fare. And unlike health expenditure, it isn’t morally repugnant to ask a direct beneficiary to pay. In fact, the opposite is unacceptable: why should minimum-wage workers pay to educate the children of the rich?
2. There’s a good reason why graduate underemployment and unemployment are rising: many degrees, and much of the expansion since 1997 (though not, I imagine, at UCL), aren’t worth chopping down the trees for. We shouldn’t equate more graduates with a better-educated population: I should know, I used to teach at a New University. This was before Blair’s expansion, and we were scraping the bottom of the barrel then. We should welcome the rationing effect of graduate taxation (after all, we already ration MAs and Ph.Ds uncontroversially). We’re aiming for class-blind excellence, not middle-class welfare. We’re freeing up money that’s being wasted.
3. All undergraduates should be funded through their studies with a reasonable maintenance grant  preferably set at the same level as a proposed Citizen’s Basic Income. As research cited by fellow-Sharpener Meaders suggests, having to take a term-time job makes you one-third less likely to achieve a first or upper-second class degree. Obviously, this burden falls heaviest on poorer students in the current funding situation. This is unacceptable morally, and inefficient economically. The weeding out of ill-equipped students and pointless courses could partly fund this reintroduction of the universal grant.
4. Universities should be free, within agreed limits (wider and higher than at present), to set their own fees, repayable as HECS/graduate taxation. I wouldn’t expect to pay the same for a Fiat as a Maserati  neither should Napier undergraduates subsidise Oxbridge students. As this research paper (pdf) shows, graduates of Russell Group universities can expect a permanent boost of up to 6% in their expected salaries over graduates of “modern” universities, who in turn receive a premium over non-graduates. This should be reflected in fees, if the institutions choose to do so. Once undergraduates are paying for the service they are receiving, they’ll start asking the right questions about teaching quality.
Not sure about this bit:
And unlike health expenditure, it isn’t morally repugnant to ask a direct beneficiary to pay.
Why do you consider that to be morally repugnant? If anything, the private benefit of decent healthcare is far more valuable to the individual than the private benefit of tertiary education.
In fact, the opposite is unacceptable: why should minimum-wage workers pay to educate the children of the rich?
Well, why should minimum-wage workers pay to heal the children of the rich?
Yes, that is phrased very badly (more haste…). What I mean is that it’s morally repugnant to require an individual to pay for his own healthcare, without help from society. The requirement to pay (part of) one’s own tertiary education bill is of a different order. So, in a society where we owe each other duties, it is incumbent on everyone (even the relatively poor) to contribute to healing the sick (even children of the very rich).
…and if taxation is progressive, the minimum wage worker doesn’t pay very much at all to educate the children of the rich, but does get their kids educated mostly at the expense of the richer, which is blindingly obvious but rarely stated by people who use the “dukes-and-dustmen” argument.
J: If anything, that makes my point stronger.
What I mean is that it’s morally repugnant to require an individual to pay for his own healthcare, without help from society.
Again, why?
On the argument you cite in the post, you’re just looking at how much of a public vs. private good something is. Healthcare is a mostly private good, in that there are very few obvious externalities (except that a healthier population can do more/better work in some sense…). So on that basis, we should be happier asking people to contribute towards the cost of their healthcare above their tertiary education, in a world of limited resources.
The moral repugnancy is something you tack on to this at the end of that paragraph, without saying why it is morally repugnant to compel people to pay for their own healthcare. I guess that it is an aesthetic consideration (no-one likes to see grannies having to sell a kidney to get that hip replacement…), but that’s no stronger an argument than lamenting the fate of the bright working class genius who could have been the next Einstein were he not sent down t’ pit at 14.
So, in a society where we owe each other duties, it is incumbent on everyone (even the relatively poor) to contribute to healing the sick (even children of the very rich).
Yes, but likewise education. In a society where we owe each other duties (of unspecified magnitude…), it is incumbent on everyone (even the relatively poor) to contribute to educating the educable (even children of the very rich). Arguably moreso than healing the sick, as the benefits of widespread quality education are arguably more beneficial to society than the benefits of widespread quality healthcare, because education benefits all at least to the level to which individuals can be educated, plus the value of having an educated society (crudely, more doctors, etc…), whereas healthcare only benefits those who need it – i.e. it’s nice to have an insurance policy for peace of mind, but keeping the elderly alive longer doesn’t provide society with any direct benefit as such (Christ, that bit sounds heartless. It isn’t meant that way.)
Obviously true, Alex, though you’re misrepresenting me by implying that I’d have the poor paying for their own education. But you’re not explaining why, when it’s easy to identify who graduates are and when (hitting above-average income, say) they can be said to be reaping rewards from tertiary education, they shouldn’t be made to pay for the next generation of poor kids coming behind them, and for the benefits they received. And why kids who made it without using the university system (black cab drivers, say) should.
Andrew: I just think tertiary education (not the rest, note) is of a completely different order to healthcare: the right to life being more fundamental than the right to study at the University of Central England.
J: That would be fine, if public healthcare was restricted to life-saving treatment, but it isn’t. Lots (arguably, most) of it is about quality of life as well. No-one ‘needs’ a hip replacement to survive, just as no-one ‘needs’ to study at UCE.
And why just tertiary education? Why should the McDonalds burger-flipper be forced to pay for Tony Blair’s kids to do their A-levels at the London Oratory?
Sorry – mixing up my objections there a bit. I meant to say: Would you agree that the right to life is more fundamental than the right to study at the London Oratory? So why just tertiary education?
why should minimum-wage workers pay to educate the children of the rich?
That’s an emotively-worded red herring, as I think you’ll see if you try to paraphrase it. I’m not sure if you’re saying “why should people who can afford to pay for non-essential public services get them fully funded out of taxation?”, “why should minimum-wage workers pay into general taxation for non-essential services?” or, er, what.
If you’re saying that (a) people who can afford it should have to pay more for tertiary education than people who can’t and (b) low earners should pay less tax than high earners, I agree entirely; I’m strongly in favour of restoring means-tested student grants and raising the higher rate of income tax. Back to the Seventies, comrades!
(But the graduate tax is a disincentive for students from poorer backgrounds whichever way you slice it – telling people they won’t be in debt won’t make them believe it.)
graduates of Russell Group universities can expect a permanent boost of up to 6% in their expected salaries over graduates of “modern†universities, who in turn receive a premium over non-graduates. This should be reflected in fees, if the institutions choose to do so. Once undergraduates are paying for the service they are receiving, they’ll start asking the right questions about teaching quality.
Um… Even less meritocracy – even more stratification by parental income? Are you entirely sure about this?
Andrew: I’m suggesting that in a civilised society, we have duties towards each other that include ensuring we’re educated and have a decent quality of life. I realise that it’s quite arbitrary where you draw the lines.
Phil: Actually, I’m in favour of a flat rate student grant set at reasonably generous levels (cf. CBI – a living wage), not means-tested. And increases in taxation, though not necessarily income taxation.
Yes to your (b). And, on (a), not quite my thoughts: more, those who have benefited from tertiary education and can now afford to pay more into the pot for future students should do so. And they should pay a little more (a graduate tax) than those who have enriched themselves without using the university system.
Finally, we’ve argued this before, and I just don’t accept that an ex post graduate tax is going to make anyone turn down the opportunity to take up a decent course, especially not at a Russell Group university. The fear of earning more money in the future (and so having to pay graduate tax) isn’t, for me, the main reason poorer kids aren’t attending university in the same numbers as rich kids. The fear of getting into debt in the here-and-now has to be having a more powerful effect. If, on the other hand, graduate taxation stops them doing a crap course and wasting their time for three years, then good. And if it means they cause a whole lot more noise when they’re there about teaching standards, because they’re now paying for it on the back end, then even better still. The students I taught at […] shouldn’t have been there – and they certainly shouldn’t have been being educated by a crap teacher like me.
Oh, it’s not strictly relevant to a discussion of higher ed., but I see another major benefit of graduate taxation. Namely, taking a little pressure off general taxation and allowing education expenditure on early years and primary provision to increase significantly. Most studies I’ve read suggest that the return to an extra quid spent on primary education dwarf returns on other forms of education expansion. For me, it’s a gross breach of an individual’s right to self-determination to send him out into the world unable to read, write or count.
I realise that one doesn’t need the other, which is why I say this isn’t strictly relevant, but it sure helps the realpolitik along.
I’m suggesting that in a civilised society, we have duties towards each other that include ensuring we’re educated and have a decent quality of life.
Quite agree, but:
I realise that it’s quite arbitrary where you draw the lines.
Indeed, but I’d like to find out why you draw the lines where you do. For example, you say:
those who have benefited from tertiary education and can now afford to pay more into the pot for future students should do so.
Now, I would guess that income levels are reasonably well correlated with survival rates from (e.g.) cancer – in that those who get rapid, good treatment for certain types of cancer can go back to earning at their previous level, whereas those debilitated for years by only having access to poorer treatment or no treatment can not. So why not institute a survival fee on people going into remission from cancer, to pay for the running costs of the NHS for those who will come after them? It seems analogous to the graduate tax you are advocating, and yet somehow wrong.
I guess it’s wrong because nobody chooses to get cancer.
Surely the main objection to the graduate tax is that possession of a degree is only one of numerous elements contributing to a higher-than-average income in later life: and moreover it’s the element that should be the last, not the first, to be uniquely taxed (because the tax, and the necessity of borrowing during the student period to pay the fees which are later recovered via the tax, will manifestly deter poorer young people and their parents from going to university at all). Other generators of higher income later include ambition, energy, good health, high IQ, ruthlessness, good family connections, inherited wealth, greed, accent, and most of all luck. Why not tax all of them, too? Answer: we already do, or at any rate we used to, when we had a properly graduated income tax structure. Graduates already pay more tax when they earn more money, like everyone else who earns more money: why pile yet more tax only on graduates? Moreover, by no means all graduates use their degrees to maximise their earnings: many go into relatively low-paid jobs such as teaching, social work, the civil service, and so forth, which may well propel them into the graduate tax bracket without making them specially high earners compared with non-graduates in the same sorts of job.
Higher taxes should pretty obviously be paid by higher earners, whether graduates or not. And they would be, if we had a rational and better graduated income tax structure. The only reason for the government’s dismal failure to reform the tax rates it inherited from the Thatcherites is the fear of being accused of being a high-tax party, that fear being a by-product of reactionary Tory and tabloid propaganda which misrepresents graduated taxation as a kind of theft, thus benefiting the undeserving rich at the expense of the deserving and undeserving poor.
The graduate tax is pure prejudice married to cowardice.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
I guess it’s wrong because nobody chooses to get cancer.
Yes, that’s probably it. Nobody in their right mind chooses UCE, either… ;)
Brian, while I share your feelings about tax in general, I completely disagree about graduate taxation. The only case I see for unrestricted access to HE courses is if you believe we have a claimable right against others to enforce full payment towards a degree, whatever your level of intelligence or ability. I don’t. And I don’t accept that graduate taxation deters poorer students from taking up places on good courses, if at the same time the maintenance grant is reinstated at the level of a living wage, as I suggest. Graduate taxation isn’t a loan. Plus, if it rations take-up on useless courses, for me that’s a benefit. Most of those courses are a cruel con-trick, a sop to the consience of the middle classes: “university entrance is up, so we must be doing noble things for the proles”.
(Also, it’s a side-issue, but I don’t agree that teachers (factor in the holidays) and civil servants (factor in the pension) are relatively low wage earners. And I’ve never met one of either who earns less than me, even without those extra benefits counted.)
Just two minor points. (1) The HE chapters in Alison Wolf’s “Does Education Matter” are pretty informative. (2) Talk of a “means test”: whose means – the student’s or the parents’?
Jarndyce, thanks: I didn’t expect you to agree! For my part, I’m not arguing for ‘unrestricted access to HE courses’, and I think you’re probably right about the desirability of getting rid of the more nonsensical courses that have sprung up like weeds: I just don’t think a graduate tax is a fair or even efficient way of limiting access to higher education to those capable of benefiting from it, or of weeding out the mickey mouse courses. I also agree that we should get rid ofthe artifical and harmful system under which the graduate tax is represented as repayment of a loan that some (but by no means all) students are forced to take out to pay their higher education fees, but we are stuck with that and I have no doubt that it represents a significant deterrent in many families’ minds to allowing a hard-up teenager from a hard-up family to apply to go to university. I agree that the deterrent effect would be reduced — but in my view not wholly removed — by abandoning the loan system, and instituting sensible and defensible selection procedures for entry to higher education. I still see no justification for singling out graduates for a penal super-tax on top of income tax, putting them at a serious disadvantage compared with other citizens on identical incomes, a system wholly at variance with the encouragement of able young people to apply for university entrance regardless of their means. The whole of society benefits from a well educated population, including higher education for those who qualify for it, and the whole of society should pay for it, just as it does for primary and secondary education (for precisely the same reasons).
On the relatively low incomes of civil servants, just two points: since the abandonment of the system of ‘fair comparison’ with the private sector as a yardstick for civil service salaries, the public services have fallen disastrously behind their private sector analogues at almost every level, leaving junior civil servants in particular on dangerously low incomes (at the top levels it was always accepted that civil servants’ salaries and pensions would never match those of their analogues in business and the City). The value of civil service pensions is actuarially factored into the calculation of salaries, so any superiority of public service pensions over those of private sector analogues is offset by pro tanto reductions in income during the pensioner’s working life. In any case, the once-superior value of the public service pension depended on two factors that no longer apply: inflation-proofing (not significant in an age of low inflation: and more than offset by the absence of any link to average earnings), and life-long job security (nowadays no more on offer for civil servants than for anyone else, and in some areas less so). We are already seeing the malign effects of low pay and job insecurity on the quality of the public service intake, with potentially disastrous consequences on the quality of public administration, some of them already apparent. There’s always a price to be paid for false economies.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
If university level education leads to higher wages won’t the people that got it already be paying more to the government to pay for it than the people that did not? Why the need for a special tax?
Thanks for that, Brian. On the civil service stuff: I didn’t know any of that. Always good to be set right.
On graduate taxation, I guess we’re not going to agree. I don’t see it as penal – merely paying back some of what you’ve used once you’ve seen the benefits of it. A compulsory alumnus donation, if you like, to secure the continuation and improvement of British higher education. I suspect some of the problems associated with the current system looking like a loan is that richer parents are able to pay it up front, thereby replicating the class system within higher ed. I understand why government likes that option financially – but I think it may be very harmful indeed in its effects. On rationing the supply of useless courses, we’ll have to agree to differ. I think graduate taxation is precisely the way to do that. I’m all for equal, favourable access for poorer kids to HE, but equal access to useless courses is not something that’s going to have any impact on social mobility, or the life chances of the individual. Obviously, the rich will still be able to afford useless courses – but, so what? Let them waste their time and their parents’ money.
(Primary and secondary education, btw, I place in a different category altogether. That we have a duty to each other in civilised societies to educate to a certain level.)
Chris: I think I answered that above in the thread. Thanks.
As a recent-ish graduate of a Russell Group university, who was there pre-tuition fees (but as the grant tranformed into the loan), with a sister who is more recent graduate of a Russell Group university paying tuition fees and loaned up to the max – whatever system has got to be better than the godawful ‘ever-more-loans’ road we now seem to be going down. If there is one thing more likely to put off students from poorer backgrounds it is the certain knowledge of hefty debt.
And recent TV adverts showing student loan vultures, purporting to reassure students that they won’t have to pay anything back until they are earning the earth shattering amount of £10k, really aren’t helping.
University courses typically last for three years. Isn’t it an amazing coincidence that the amount of time it takes to learn a worthwhile amount of stuff in any field is the same? Of course, it isn’t a coincidence, university courses last the length they do because it’s for the convenienceof the people running the system.
Now consider the model of higher education where people go to university for 3 years then have a lifetime of working. In today’s fast-changing ttevhnology, that doesn’t make sense (for science and technology subjects in any case).
Perhaps it would be better if university courses were more modular, e.g. someone might go to university for 1 year, work for 5 years, go to university for 6 months, work for 10 years, and continue that way throughout their working life.
There’s already a university where (almost) everyone pays (and always has done) at a rate of about 25% of the real cost (rest from HEFCE), everyone gets in, and you can take as long as you like over it. Seems to work OK.
MAs are ‘rationed’? When was that, Jarndyce?
n the relatively low incomes of civil servants, just two points: since the abandonment of the system of ‘fair comparison’ with the private sector as a yardstick for civil service salaries, the public services have fallen disastrously behind their private sector analogues at almost every level, leaving junior civil servants in particular on dangerously low incomes (at the top levels it was always accepted that civil servants’ salaries and pensions would never match those of their analogues in business and the City).
Brian, I’m really sorry, but this is rubbish; certainly in Scotland anyway (Scotsman article).
SALARY increases in the public sector under Labour are outstripping those in private business, prompting warnings that Scotland’s economy will suffer as a result.
Figures from the Scottish Executive show that, between 1999 and 2004, average wages in the public sector rose from £19,670 to £23,650, up 20 per cent. Over the same period, salaries in the private sector rose by only 18 per cent, and the average wage still lags behind at £20,000.
When I was employed as a graphic designer, I started on £12,500 and 6 years later I was on £19,000. A teacher friend of mine started on £19,000; her partner is a copper and he started on £21,000. To claim that public sector salaries are “dangerously low” is, I’m afraid, just wrong.
Sure, most public sector jobs have salary ceilings, but these are still higher than many people in the private sector will ever earn. And what is a “dangerously low income” for civil servants, exactly? Will they explode when their income drops below a certain point?
As for this graduate tax, it’s a silly idea. At least with a loan, you can eventually pay it off and be free, as it were. Is this graduate tax levied for the person’s entire working life? Or can they ever repay their debt?
If university level education leads to higher wages won’t the people that got it already be paying more to the government to pay for it than the people that did not? Why the need for a special tax?
Well, exactly. The special tax is to level the playing field, so that you can employ more civil servants (or stop the existing ones imploding) so that they can spend yet more time and effort taking money from those who have earned it and giving it to those who have not.
DK
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