Funding needs a rethink
SO it turns out that when Labour promised the nation’s students they would abolish tuition fees they hadn’t actually, y’know, worked out exactly how much it would cost. Or how to pay for it.
This week one of Corbyn’s apparatchiks said if they’d won the election it was merely Jeremy’s intention to abolish the fees. They couldn’t, er, just do it, like straightaway. Especially as their rough figure of £11.2billion, given during the campaign, was, um, probably more like £100billion, actually. You won’t find that sort of money down the back of the sofa.
But I still believe at a fundamental, visceral level that launching freshly-commissioned graduates out on to the sea of life with a drag-anchor of debt on their backs is… well, just wrong. It was bad enough when these fees were introduced (by a Labour government) and students were looking at debts of about £9,000. Today they’re in the process of ballooning to roughly £50,000 a head. That’s no way to start out adulthood, is it? My generation and subsequent ones didn’t have to carry that sort of burden after we’d got our degrees. Obviously courses have to be funded but it turns out tuition fees aren’t even doing that. This week it was revealed that three-quarters of students will never repay their loans in full. Who picks up the tab? Us taxpayers.
So if tax is quietly being used to mop up huge amounts of student debt, why not be open about it? I’m no economist but I simply cannot believe it is beyond the wit of a half-decent chancellor to come up with a system that spreads the costs – and risks – of paying for degree courses. And one of those risks currently is encouraging youngsters to think that incurring huge debt is normal and acceptable. It isn’t. Especially if you know you won’t necessarily have to pay it back.
It’s all wrong and we need a complete re-think. You don’t need a degree to work that out.