And who was it as Higher Education Minister who helped drive this legislation allowing for variable fees through Parliament? Ed Miliband’s new generation Shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson.

Why don’t Labour simply abolish student fees altogether?

They could pay for this by using the same magical money tree they’ll use to pay off the debt whilst maintaining current spending levels.

Agreed John. Labour should compel 100% of school leavers to attend university and fund their tuition and living costs all the way up to postgraduate level.

Meanwhile here’s David Blunkett, making exactly the same mistake as his leader:

David Blunkett, a former education secretary in Tony Blair’s government, was even more scathing, saying: “This is a complete betrayal by the Liberal Democrats of everything that they have ever said on higher education and of the platform they stood on at the general election.

“It is my strong belief that reverting to a real rate of interest transforms the student finance system into a market-driven approach which will distort what is available by allowing the better-off to access more favourable terms – for example, by remortgaging their property or arranging for beneficial terms outside the student loan framework. These moves are not available to less well-off students and their families.

“This is a short-sighted, unimaginative and short-term government with the vision of a bat and the antennae of a mollusc.” [emphasis added]

…and in Blunkett’s case, an opposition with the memory of a goldfish: what does he think the better-off were doing when fees were introduced in the first place?

While I oppose tuition fees (university education should be free, and the three years of building up loans is more than enough of a burden on the poor already) I’m not sure I want Ed to oppose fees now.

Obviously it would be transparent populism – but more worrying than that, it would probably lead him to make the case for a graduate tax. And that is even less fair than fees.

At least with fees you borrow money and eventually pay that off. With a graduate tax you don’t stop paying once it had reached £20k of contributions.

Redpesto

In defence of blunkett (oh my word I never imagined I’d write those words) he is railing against the hike in interest on student loans.

And that is a whole different matter – and one that is far far more important than fees.

Imagine a loan of £20k at 7% (a very low rate of interest for a personal loan)

That equates to 1400 a year interest.

Importantly – if you start repaying at £15,000 – at the 9% rate – you’d have to be earning £30,500 the year you leave uni – just to stop the ammount you owe from going up.

Raise the repayment point to £22k – and you’d have to earn £37,500 a year the year you leave uni to just keep your debt down at £20k.

In effect – doing that would mean most people never pay off their student loan.

So what you end up with is a graduate tax – only paid by the poor, not the rich, that pushes up their effective income tax rate by 9% for the whole of their lives.

And clearly that’s just a sick joke.

Okay, I’ve only had time to look at this summary of the report’s recommendations. For all the talk of proposals to ensure better access for students from poorer backgrounds, the principle is clear: let the market rip – no cap on fees and ‘[n]o cap on numbers of students at university – popular universities allowed to expand, while others may be forced to contract’ – precisely what New Labour wanted in the first place.

PS: The one good idea mentioned in the summary is having part-time students on the same fees scheme as full-time students – though the risk is of a ‘two-tier’ system between full-time and part-time students. I suspect some post-92 universities will seek to maximise local part-time numbers to make up any loss in full-time ones (which will probably have a knock-on effect on FE colleges as well).

I think this is an obvious bear trap, far more so for Labour than the LibDems. This was our review and the proposals are a logical extension of our policy in government. If we’re honest we must recognise that this is pretty much what would have been proposed had we been re-elected in May. We will have a hard time being taken seriously if we oppose this. We’ve promised constructive opposition. This is the first test.

@margin4error – I see your point, but the difficulty is that the issue of how fast to pay off the debt was there from the beginning, and there have been those who have argued that students should be charged interest on what they owe. The coalition has established only the poor ever ‘game the system’, so I think Blunkett’s going to have a hard time getting any traction on this issue. (Cable’s having enough difficulty selling some form of tiered interest rates as it is.)

Redpesto

Those that have argued students should be charged interest on what they owe may exist, but they are utterly utterly wrong.

And I guess that’s why we call them Tories (or lib dems in some cases)

I think there is room for debate here – but only if people are honest about what they see the purpose of universities being. The Browne review clearly sees them as autonomous institutions which exist to provide teaching and research and should ideally not be constrained in this by government interference (this is actually in accordance with free market views, but I doubt was actually inspired by them). But there is an alternative view, that universities are another arm of the state, designed to provide training and skills for people and also to undertake valuable research. This is perhaps the view encapsulated by some continental countries or the US state unversity system. Perhaps there is something Mr Milliband could argue about there?

At the moment though, there is a myth that this is only about funding. It is not – the universities’ very relationship with the state is being debated (I think Browne recognises this) but the danger is that on focussing on funding and taxes, we have an important debate by proxy.

margin4error:

Redpesto

Those that have argued students should be charged interest on what they owe may exist, but they are utterly utterly wrong.

And I guess that’s why we call them Tories (or lib dems in some cases)

Agreed.

watchman:

At the moment though, there is a myth that this is only about funding. It is not – the universities’ very relationship with the state is being debated (I think Browne recognises this) but the danger is that on focussing on funding and taxes, we have an important debate by proxy.

True – but the ‘debate’ about the nature/purpose of universities seems to boil down to who gets the wads of research cash and who gets dumped with ‘teaching-only’ status in a graduate factory. Unfortunately, Browne has indicated that the market mechanism will be the way to sort this out, rather than anything as coherent as a government policy.

Jimmy -

“This was our review and the proposals are a logical extension of our policy in government. If we’re honest we must recognise that this is pretty much what would have been proposed had we been re-elected in May. We will have a hard time being taken seriously if we oppose this. ”

This seems precisely wrong to me. Ed M has spent four months talking about the importance of change, turning the page on New Labour, learning from our mistakes in Government etc. – not to mention about the merits of a graduate tax. The very last thing he can afford to do now, if he wants Labour to be taken seriously, is to backtrack to New Labour’s position on this.

(That doesn’t mean he should try to make out New Labour were always opposed to tuition fees and would never have accepted Browne’s recommendations – obviously if he tried that he really *couldn’t* be taken seriously! He needs to be upfront about this being a change in direction for the party, but that fits his narrative quite nicely.)

We’ve been down this road before. We drew comfort in the 80s from poll after poll telling us that people were happy to pay higher taxes for better public services. It took us a long time to realise that the public tends not to answer questions like that truthfully. Besides there are so many glaring holes in the graduate tax concept I seriously doubt a workable model could be implemented.

redpesto,

True – but the ‘debate’ about the nature/purpose of universities seems to boil down to who gets the wads of research cash and who gets dumped with ‘teaching-only’ status in a graduate factory. Unfortunately, Browne has indicated that the market mechanism will be the way to sort this out, rather than anything as coherent as a government policy.

Well, I’m not a great fan of government policy as a solution to complex problems – if there is no simple solution (simple solutions include defence, welfare, NHS etc), government will not do it well as a rule. And the universities are an example of this.

I think the problem with your answer (and perhaps more widely) is a perceived lower status of teaching over research in universities. Now universities should research, and are well-placed to compete for research funding, but to assume this is their proper calling is to rather ignore how they are set up. I would suggest that teaching is in fact the basic activity for universities, and this should be emphasised – and therefore the aim should be for universities to provide the best teaching possible. At the moment the problem is that many do not, and some of the research-intensive universities explicitly denigate teaching. Whilst government controls funding and numbers and research is held up as a key activity (and this is a key point – through the funding bodies, government literally controlled numbers at universities and fined those that took in more students than they were allowed!) students will have no choice but to accept poorer university programmes, because there is not enough space on good programmes and therefore no incentive for poor programmes to improve.

This is not to say the Browne review is the answer (I personally quite like it, but that is besides the point here), but simply to say that there are key questions about university status that have not been answered, and one of these is function.

I’m with Jimmy on this

The grauduate tax seems to be the only thing worse than fees.

After all – are we saying that an average working class kids who go to uni should pay 9% of their incomes on repayments of their student loan, and another, as yet unknown % in graduate tax – all on top of their income tax and national insurance.

Because I’m not sure some one on £25k a year should be losing 40p in every pound there earned. (20% income tax + 11% NI payments + 9% student loan repayment)

And a graduate tax would make it worse.

Jimmy -

“We drew comfort in the 80s from poll after poll telling us that people were happy to pay higher taxes for better public services. It took us a long time to realise that the public tends not to answer questions like that truthfully.”

Yeah, but this is a different sort of question: not “Would you rather have X, or just keep your money in your pocket?”, but “GIven that you want X and we’re going to insist you pay for it, how would you like to do it?”

We know that many people secretly prefer to keep their money in their pocket than shell out for good services; it’s not so obvious that many people (both students and their parents) would prefer to shell out via tuition fees rather than via a graduate tax (or general taxation, for that matter).