Time to axe tuition fees says Blairite peer who brought them in
ThE man who brought in tuition fees for Tony Blair called for them to be scrapped last night.
Lord Adonis, the architect of the former prime minister’s education reforms, claimed they were becoming a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ that saddled graduates with debts of £50,000 or more.
he said: ‘Fees have now become so politically diseased, they should be abolished entirely.’
Admitting he was ‘largely responsible’ for the structure of fees and student loans, with repayments pegged to graduate incomes, Lord Adonis said greedy university leaders were rewarding themselves handsomely but had failed to improve teaching quality.
he added: ‘Vice-chancellors... increased their pay and perks as fast as they increased tuition fees, and are now “earning” salaries of £275,000 on average and in some cases over £400,000.
‘Debt levels for new graduates are now so high that the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that three- quarters of graduates will never pay it all back.’
And he warned that the Treasury ‘will soon realise it is sitting on a Ponzi scheme’, referring to the fraud in which unwitting investors are conned into bankrolling a non-existent business and are paid ‘dividends’ from the payments of subsequent investors.
The comments will add to pressure on ministers to reduce fees of up to £9,000 a year. They are set to rise to £9,250 next year, and are likely to reach £9,500 in 2019.
The government’s own projections suggest the outstanding value of loans will top £100bil- lion next year and hit £200billion in a decade. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn pledged to get rid of the fees in his manifesto, and this week Cabinet minister Andrea Leadsom suggested interest rates on the loans could be cut.
Defenders of the loan scheme say it is progressive, with the government picking up unpaid debts after 30 years and repayments made only on graduate earnings of over £21,000.
universities minister Jo Johnson defended the loans system as more progressive in its repayment terms than the version that Lord Adonis oversaw, which was revamped in 2012.
‘The government consciously subsidises the studies of those who for a variety of reasons, including family responsibilities, may not repay their loans in full,’ he said.
‘This is a vital and deliberate investment in the skills base of this country, not a symptom of a broken student finance system. The evidence bears this out – young people from poorer backgrounds are going to university at a record rate, up 43 per cent since 2009.’
Lord Adonis’s intervention comes after a damning report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank, which said students from the poorest households would accrue debts of £57,000 by graduation, and that 77 per cent would fail to pay them off after 30 years.
Labour appeared to gain support from young people over its commitment to scrap the existing loans system during the general election.
Lord Adonis, a former adviser to Mr Blair who also served as an education minister told The guardian: ‘Some Tories publicly branded Corbyn’s move a bribe, but it is only a matter of time before they realise tuition fees at their current level are politically dead.’