Hasn't iCU been saying not in this form anyway

I used to be broadly against fees.

Over the past couple of months, particularly with articles such as this:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2367742

I've broadly changed my mind.

Maybe my viwepoint is skewed because i got lucky and got a job in the city, but surely the above article makes sense?

This article in the economist, though saying a lot of things which make sense, misses a very big point. A free market just wouldn't work with education in the way it does with other things. With something like a car it can be said that the cars which cost more to produce are more desirable and people are willing to spend more money on them. With education this is very often not the case, for example engineering is an expensive course, it is already not very popular but engineers are very valuable to society.

The article blindly critisises that the current situation means Universities have to use money from humanities deparments to keep the science departments open, when the sort of free market it is advocating would both increase the need for this to be done and mean it is done in a much more blatant way e.g. using humanities students' tuition fees to subsidise engineers. I wonder how humanities students would feel about that?

Your argument is flawed in the sense that surely market forces in the "real world" will drive market forces in university.

If engineering really is an under supplied field, then surely companies will either fund students to do engineering (c/f Institue of Physics offering phsyics bursaries), or will give much better wages to someone who has a engineering degree over a humantites one.

With the prospect of increased wages, then people will be more willing to the expensive course.

In fact the humantites course obviously have to subsidise

So create a truely free market - either do a £1000 humanties course, or a £10000 engineering one, and then take the more appropriately paid job.

The problem arises if half way through your course, the market for your degree drops, say by everything moving to India, then you have a problem.

But because you are no longer out of pocket up front you haven't really lost in real terms, and if you do get a good job, paying above the base rate, you just knock 9% off your income and keep on going.

At the lower pay levels you won't notice £20 a month or whatever, and at the higher levels, you won't notice £200 a month. (belive me, you won't).

Plus a market will drive a increase in the teaching quality (as long as appropriate rating tables are intorudced to allow comparison), which even at Imperial is pretty shocking at undergraduate level (well a lot of it in my experience anyway).

If I had paid more, I might have been a bit more vocal in complaining about the c**p lecturers, thus improving everyones lot.

I will say though, that if the top fee rate was unlimited, they'd have to adjust (i.e. lower) the general taxation to make up for it.

But in reality, people are not always paid according to how useful their employment is to society. E.g. teachers in private schools get paid more than those in state funded schools, physiotherapist for sports professional paid more than those working for nhs... Private finance is generally throws money in the direction of things that we want, the state, via taxation, is there to make sure that enough money goes in the direction of things we need.

I am interested by "I will say though, that if the top fee rate was unlimited, they'd have to adjust (i.e. lower) the general taxation to make up for it". How would you feel about the opposite effect; increasing general taxation to raise funds to solve the HE crisis and remove any fees? Why (if it is) is one preferable to the other?

What are you after Nia? A huge hike in taxes or mediocre universities?

Their doesn't need to be a hike in taxes. The money is there. We are one of the richest countries in the world. It's about priorities. If higher education is a key priority of this government (the 50 percent target suggests so) then the government should put their (our) money where their mouth is.

Hear hear.

It costs us £1bn per annum just to MAINTAIN obselete nuclear weapons. Let alone all the other subsidies that go to the arms industry via MoD, DESI, "qinetiq", etc etc. And they're talking £180bn just for 1 "eurofighter".

If you ask me, we could have world class Unis for 100% of the population if they finally realised that whether or not we have nuclear weapons, if there's an all-out nuclear war, we'll all be dead anyway, so might as well save ourselves the money!

But no, maintaining this front to the world that we're morally superior and militarily brain-dead is really worth the £2bn+... Apparently

£1 billion sounds like an awful lot of money. But for a Government with a budget of around £400 billion (defence = £27 billion) - it isn't.

It would buy you 27 miles of motorway...

Or 20 miles of railway...

Or 2 months membership of the EU...

Or two hospitals - at a push.

What it certainly wouldn't do is resolve the UK's university funding crisis.

".. And they're talking £180bn just for 1 "eurofighter".

£180 billion for a Eurofighter? Are you sure? Are you saying that the UK alone would be prepared to spend slighter under half of its entire budget on one plane or are you saying that 5 European countries have spent £180 over a decade on the development of the Eurofighter?

If redistributing money is not an option, then I would prefer an increase in income tax to tuition fees because I think it is a fairer means of obtaining the money (those who can afford to pay, pay) and ensuring reasonably fair and equal opportunities.

But how can that possibly make sense?

The repayment rate after graduation is 9% of income. So you would prefer a PERMANENT tax rate of 9% on your income (we can assume it will be more like 3% instead of 9%), rather than 9% repayment of a FINITE amount of essentially free money, that after 25 years is completley written off?

How can that possibly motivate a person to want to excel, therby improving their income and therefore to pay off the loan more quickly?

More to the point, an increase of general taxation is at the whim of the government of the day to pour it down any number of unneccessary holes (e.g. the armed forces, the NHS, etc.). I'd rather know what i'm paying for than have it distorted by politicians.

Finance isn't the only incentive for people to excel. I think better things come out of situations where this is not the main incentive.

I'm not really thinking about the sum of money that I personally might pay. If anything, if I end up paying more then I would regard that as a positive thing because it means somebody who is less well off than I is benefitting from that.

I assume you didn't really mean to refer to the NHS as unnecessary.

Gus:

It wouldn't need to be a 9% on income, because you wouldn't be paying for the cost of borrowing.

The big issue is that the Government can afford to pay for high quality education, the problem is that it is perversely funding a large "third tier" though few people will acknowledge them as such.

These instiutions are teaching subjects in a full time degree structure that in most of the rest of the world are taught as part time or on-the-job courses that cost less to teach. Yet the government funding formulas allocate more money to teaching these courses than degrees like chemistry with hugely expensive consumables and capital costs etc.

The argument for this is that the intake for these instiutions have lower A-level grades than Russel Group universitites, and so need better teaching to pull them up, and this requires more funding.

What is more, consider the gearing effect on a degree course now: 10-15K comes from the government, 3K comes from the student. For a 1% increase above and beyond the average facilities of an institution (i.e. the basic teaching grants), one would need to raise the amount of money raised from tuition fees by 3-5%, only most universities are already giving away about 15% of the increased fees (i.e. £500). From this we are supposed to have a market?

On top of that, before a market has even been established the Government is already regulating and distorting it by telling students that a degree, any degree, even a degree in surfing and marine biology, is going to improve their employability.

If we are really wanting to set up a market we should scrap the block teaching grants and offer national scholarships on the basis of achievement at A-level, ditch the caps on tuition fees and expand the student loan system.

This would have the added benefit of creating an insentive to keep the number of A's at A-level low to keep the costs of the national scholarships down.

I don't necesarily think this would be a good. But if it's a market you want, you ought to realise that this isn't going to create a very effective market, it's just going to distort the gradaute labour market.

Seb:

If you create a proper market in variable fees, then students will be drawn to courses that employers value, and no employer values a degree in surfing or whatever.

Hence the employment market will drive people to the higher price courses (they will be higher priced because of the demand).

Conversly the market can be used to encourage take up in subjects of need. e.g. lowering the fee for medical students.

SO you could have Law (oversubscribed) subscribing medicine/engineering (under subscribed) and then the in future the balance would be redressed the other way if law becomes the need.

The point is all the loser universities will all disolve/adapt to become vocational colleges (hmmm i suggest the name 'polytechnic'), and hence the meritocracy the labour rebels fear will come to pass.

Now you can argue, as the Torygraph did, that a bad bill with good intentions (which this is) is still a bad bill.

But once it gets into law it will be easier to raise the cap (although not now for a long while unfortunately), as Sykes seems to think. I'm not sure thats a bad thing.

And hurrah for Robert Jackson (Con, Wantage) who defied the oppurtunistic leadership of the Tory party, and actually voted with his concious.

(And yes i certainly did mean my comment about the NUS, at least in its present form)

"If you create a proper market in variable fees, then students will be drawn to courses that employers value, and no employer values a degree in surfing or whatever."

Well, your rather brushing over two things.

Firstly, where is the feedback? How do we know what employers will value in four years time in a diversified system we have now? Degrees used to be universaly valued when they were scarce. Now they are valued on the basis of passing fads. Physics used to be highly valued by traders, I remember the careers talks at my old school where all these various HR types from banks etc. turned up to tell people that if they wanted to do trading, then Physics was the thing: Numerate and problem solving.

Since then, they have changed there minds and quite a few of my friends are having serious problems getting through inital screening interviews due to having done "the wrong degree".

Asking an 18 year old to make a detailed career decision is a little tough. It's doable, but not in the environment where 45-50% of people are going into higher education.

Then there is the fact that in order to keep these wonderful universities going we need accademics. A 2:2 vs. a 1 isn't going to make that much difference to an employer, but it does in terms of PhD's and so forth. The insentive created by outstanding debt is that universities are going to be put into direct competition with big business for recruitment. Whereas before, people genuinely intersted in a career in accademia would have no problem other than accepting poor pay, now have to worry about outstanding debt.

The fundemental point though is that you are not creating a market here. The very reason for this new funding system is that the government is burdening universities with sticks and carrots to boost the number of graduates. Come what may, there will be more graduates, and universities will only be allowed to charge more if they do their best to promote higher education in general and make their access/participation targets.

If you want to create a proper market, the first thing you do is you scrap this bill and start again.

Another point is that the pressures of the market (were it to be effective) would decrease the insentive of universities to provide high quality courses that result in people qualified for accademia rather than qualified for business. Chemists in universities are badly paid, there is not a huge market for highly paid industrial Chemists, students won't do Chemistry, they will do a different course instead. As the number of students going into Chemistry decrease, the financial viability of the department decreases and like Kings chemistry department, it gets axed.

In the end, the insentive here is for an end to accademic degrees and the expansion of MBA's and so forth which offer a high return rate on the students "investment" (i.e. debt). It doesn't matter that the likelyhood of getting a job as a manager is small, there is nothing to feed that information back into the system.

Raising the cap isn't going to create an effective market either. The problem is that enshrined in the bill is the idea that uiversities need to cram more people into the system, and the government is funding that. It might change the finance issue, but it won't change the other problems, and it won't create a market.

The system in the bill doesn't allow for a market, it's purely a way of financing an expansion of higher education that is dead against the market needs.

Ultimately you are left with two options.

Either we are going to see the Government forced to intervene and subsidise essential courses, in which case you abandon the current formulas for the teaching block grants from HEFCE. In which case, why not do that now? Why not explicitly fund Science and Engineering courses at Russel group universities more than courses in third rate instiutions? If people want to do surfing degrees, let them pay the extra it costs. It doesn't benefit the country to have surfers.

Alternatively we will see the Government abandon it's attempts to prop up third rate universities by a combination of insentives for them to recruit more students with lower A-Levels and punishments if they fail to do so. In that case, these instiutions will either convert back to Polytechnics or go bust completely. In which case the cost of higher education will decline and we will be back to a level where the government can sustainable afford to fund higher education properly.

So I'm left wondering why we need a "market" at all.

The only problem is we have a Government hell bent on pissing taxpayers money up against the wall on unnecessary, useless qualifications while it destroys what little trade related non vocational training systems we have left in this country. Perhaps this is why Britains productivity ratings are lower than America and Europes.

Sure, markets work to

maximise value, but there is no long term price information in any market based on fees which doesn't include government intervention that puts a value on accademic side of things, which is essential to maintain the higher education system in the long term. So it will ultimately fail.

Sorry to go on. I ought to be more pithy.

This is probably the best explanation of what I'm trying to say:

As an example of the way a market doesn't work in higher education: People still do Media Studies with the intention of going into the media in some form. The problem is there are more media studies places than there are jobs in the media. But as long as the students are willing to pay in the hope of getting a job, there is a market for media studies degrees. Given that it takes three years to do a degree, a prospective student will not know what the supply of media studies jobs is going to be in three years time. Therefore he can not make a sensible decision as to whether he should invest in a media studies degree. He has to gamble.

That is the fundemental problem with the market.

The supply of the course is linked to the demand for the courses. Yet the demand for the courses is not linked to the supply of the jobs.