How we can fix our tuition-fee shambles
Universities and students alike are held back by our current funding system. But there is a better way…
Our present system of tuition fees is a contradictory mess, not so much the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, as the left hand knocking the hell out of the right.
We put huge resources into encouraging students from disadvantaged backgrounds to go to university, for example. Yet we tell them that they will acquire up to £40,000 worth of debt if they accept the challenge. We offer them the excuse that, if they do not earn very much after they graduate (they don’t start making repayments until they are earning £21,000), they will never have to pay the debt back, thus saying that your best safeguard in going to university is to earn insignificant amounts of money as a result.
Tuition fees were not brought in for any educational reason, but simply because the government could not afford to pay for universities. They were and are a purely political decision and, as such, will not be a successful guarantee either of world-class universities or happy and fulfilled students. To apply a political solution to an academic problem (in this case, how to maintain the standing of our universities in the world rankings) is akin to asking a fizzy drinks designer to draw up a nuclear power station.
Scrapping them entirely would be foolhardy: if the government didn’t have the money when fees were introduced, it certainly doesn’t have it now. Two separate, more coherent answers suggest themselves.
The totally independent University of Buckingham, which receives no direct state funding, is a shining example of what happens when a university is allowed to act in its own best interests, rather than those of the government. But it is nearly alone in Britain. Rarely can we learn from the US education system, but in respect of universities we can.
Their top universities are independent of government and cope with the cost of education through the endowments they hold, alongside a tradition of self-help whereby students work their way through college. The system is not perfect: headline fees can be even higher than they are here. But it is alumni who provide much of the money. Those who have gained the most give the most.
Our universities do not have such huge endowments. But if government gave even a proportion of what it now pays in tuition fee loans to universities to give them a core for their own endowments, for a bridging period, it would be a massive kick-start to a new system. A further source of funding for endowments could be a levy on firms who depend most on top graduates to run their business. Here again, those who gain the most give the most.
A second solution kills two birds with one stone. At the moment the taxpayer subsidises university education, yet has no control over the subjects students take. Put at its bluntest, society needs more maths, science and medical graduates, not more media studies experts.
We live in a bizarre world in which we depend on importing nurses to maintain our basic health services, but give no direct government money to those who wish to study advanced nursing skills. I was recently speaking to someone studying mental health nursing, an area we all agree is in crisis. Yet the last vestige of government support was being withdrawn, and she confessed that her course would have been impossible for her had the bills not been paid by her parents.
Does this make any sort of sense? Tuition fees need to be based on a totally new principle whereby the amount given and the terms and conditions are linked to the need society has for graduates in any given subject, and the likely income the graduate will receive with a degree in that subject.
The greatest support goes to those whose skills we need most. We need doctors, engineers, mathematicians, chemists and physicists more than ever. Surely any system for the payment of tuition fees, and the fees themselves, should be designed to favour what we need students to study, not necessarily what appears more glamorous, attractive or easier to them at the time?
Our current tuition fees system addresses symptoms of a deep malaise, not the cause. Enough of bandages. Whichever course we choose, we need radical surgery.