Reform, yes, but why this? (Higher Education - Free for all or Fee for all?)

Member Name: oxjdc

Product:	Higher Education - Free for all or Fee for all?
Date:	15/08/00 (19 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Raises money

Disadvantages: Discourages people from study

There have been a number of problems, which militate for reform.

1) Higher education has been underfunded - institutions are unable to take students who are eligible for a course because they do not have the money to provide adequate teaching. In many institutions they are already unable to provide adequate teaching for the students who are there.

2) Higher education is massively the preserve of the middle class. Government spending benefits those from the professional classes by a ratio of seven to one more than it does those from "lower" social classes; over half of Oxbridge students are from private schools. The chances of going to university for a child from social classes A and B are 5 in 10. For children from social classes D or E they are barely 5 in 100.

Despite this, higher education is massively more privileged in terms of status and available funding than further education, regarded as a poor relation, yet massively more taken up by mature students looking for a "fresh start" or "second chance", and those from working class backgrounds.

While the fashionable solution among student political groups is to call for an increase in general taxation to pay for extra money to fund higher education, there are a number of problems which make this approach vulnerable to criticism;

A government moving towards the hypothecation of taxes where people see precisely where their money is being spent may be reluctant to pile extra taxes on ordinary people to provide extra benefits for those who are already regarded as being privileged (though polls suggest that most disapprove of point-of-entry tuition fees).

Most importantly, it is hard to make the case that in a society where sick people are turned away from hospitals, people live homeless on the streets, and children who can barely even dream of going to university sit in overcrowded classrooms, that the public would accept higher
education as a major spending priority, and that by the time it came to the top of the list taxes would have gone up so far to pay for other things that any further increases would be economically counter-productive.

Another solution adopted by some is to say that there are too many people in the education system, and that the way to solve the problem is to say that less people should go to university. We do however face the situation in which we have fewer people in continuing education than comparable other industrial countries, and we face skills shortages in the workplace.

However the rather extreme proposition outlined above does, like many such statements, contain a germ of truth. One thing which must be done is to lessen the number of people being pushed by pressures extraneous to themselves into academic-based courses. With the abolition of the old polytechnics this country missed a major opportunity to create a base of technical education to compete with that available in other European countries, and these could be used as a base for transforming the Cinderella system of further education into one of genuine choice for those who wish to train for a career, while continuing education above school level.

This alone is not enough to solve the crisis however, and there has to be an examination of the actions taken by the current administration; namely the issue of fees and the abolition of grants.

Fees and grants

Nothing seems to have elicited such controversy within the student movement as the proposal that fees be introduced for a part of tuition, and that grants for students' living expenses should be abolished. These are seen as abrogating the cherished principle of free education, and barring access to higher education for those from lower-income families.

In reality of course brief soundbites will never be satisfactory to sum up the effect of such a complex and wide-ranging policy. The truth
, as ever, is that the tension is between those trying to defend a failed system, and those trying to impose a crude and ill-thought out replacement.

The issue of fees was first raised by Conservatives in the 1980s; those from the right of the party proposing a system which would in fact, if not (as many may suspect) by design, have barred access to continuing education for the poor. However those on the left of the Conservative party began a debate they did not foresee the implications of by questioning the anti-redistributive effects of funding higher education from general taxation (Kenneth Clark's query as to why the education of an accountant's son should be funded from the taxes of a bus driver).

Grants, equally, are not sustainable in their present form. Application has become the preserve of those with accountants, those in special circumstances advantageous to obtaining them, and those who genuinely could not afford higher education without the help these provide may be forgiven at times for thinking that the grant process was created by the same Conservative administration that established the National Lottery.

However, the present government's decision to impose tuition fees of a thousand pounds a year, the repayment scheme they have introduced, and the blanket abolition of the grant, are neither, in David Blunkett's own words "fair or sustainable". The reform of the system is being botched -it could be used as a springboard for much greater equality and redistribution in higher education. Instead policy is being dictated by the demands of university authorities and the treasury.

Fees, applied in the correct way, could be beneficial. In this controversial statement many of the preconceptions of left and right are challenged.

Many alterations could be made to the present principle of the fee however, and. Here are improvements which I think could be made.

First of all, we
should allow people to earn higher sums of money before they begin to repay their debt - the present figure of 10 to 14 thousand pounds is too low, and no graduate should be expected to contribute anything until they have reached at least the level of the national average income.

Secondly, we could incorporate into the funding formula an analysis of what secondary schooling people attended. We should be much more ready to impose charges on those who have funded their own education by attending private schools at an earlier age than on those who have throughout been reliant on free education.

At the same time, why not remove the cap on repayment for the exceptionally wealthy in jobs which make low social contributions. There is no reason why the currency speculator on a six figure salary should stop at paying back what he has gained - we should ask them also to help those less fortunate.

Equally, we can use some of the extra money which could be raised in this way to reduce repayments demanded from those who go into socially useful jobs, notably those who work in the public sector. This would be a low-cost way of beginning the process of ending the teacher recruitment crisis, and bringing more quality doctors back to the NHS from private practice.

It must be made clear that money raised in fees will be administered by central government for the benefit of the education system, and neither syphoned off by the treasury, nor, importantly, should it go directly to the universities, as this would encourage those with most applications to take students from wealthier backgrounds, in order to attract more funding.

The grants issue is a more complex one, and it is difficult to see how it is to be resolved - loans for all does, whatever the rhetoric, have the effect of deterring those from lower income backgrounds from continuing their education by making the total debt to be expected of them higher than that expected of those
from wealthier backgrounds. However it does have the advantage of abolishing a failed and discredited means-test.

jdcxxx

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