Chris

As is so often the case in this country there are class issues at play. Once upon a time you could only go to university if daddy could pay for it, which meant daddy was either landed gentry or a wealthy merchant. The student grant system was designed to allow poorer students access to degrees on the same terms as the wealthy ones, with the State paying them an allowance instead of their parents. All that quite predictably got unaffordable as the number of people going to university sky-rocketed in the 1980s. But the idea that funding higher education was a class issue poisoned the debate. I was at uni in the early 90s, just as grants were first being frozen and top-up loans offered (luckily, for the first 2-3 years the top-up loan was so small you could, just about, go without it if you wanted to), but well after the days when you got a full grant in term time and no-questions-asked unemployment benefit throughout the summer. Student Union rhetoric in the early to mid 90s was all about how education is a right, not a privilege. No useful debate about how the privilege was to be paid for, obviously.

The loan system has parked the debate rather than settled it. Many students won’t come anywhere near paying it off, especially in Englandshire where you have to get a loan to pay your fees as well. There are no tuition fees in the socialist republic of Scotland but as a consequence the universities are cash-strapped because the government, as the one paying all the fees, gets to say how much it’s prepared to pay, and it’s not nearly enough. The institutions here are therefore groaning at the seams with overseas students studying non-courses for which they pay a prince’s ransom, which at least some of them think is worth the cash just to get on the bottom rung of the immigration ladder.

Much as I hate to admit it I think the loan system is probably a good idea in principle because a university degree is elective and frankly not necessary for everyone. Sure it’s character building but why should everyone else pay for that? And, for that matter, a pay-back system that is linked to financial ability and stops making demands of you when you stop earning is also equitable. The problem of course is that that is not a loan, it is something else, more like, but not quite like, a tax, and politicians on both sides need to be honest about that. We need to stop, for example, screaming about how much debt students are in because the cash value of their debt is irrelevant in many ways, if they’re not going to pay it off anyway. And we need to tighten it up so overseas visitors can’t exploit it, although the size of student ‘debt’ I suspect is vastly, vastly caused by UK nationals and not Romanians.