The Guardian view on abolishing student fees: easier to say than to do – The Guardian

Student funding is in a mess. Graduates now owe 100bn. More than three-quarters of them may never repay all their loan. In a report published last week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned not only that outstanding debt was growing, but the abolition of maintenance grants last year leaves poorer students owing 7,000 more than better-off ones. Higher interest rates, introduced to offset the cost of raising the earnings threshold in 2012, mean that the average debt after three years is now 50,000. One of the systems godfathers, the former Labour minister Andrew Adonis, said on these pages on Saturday that it was time to scrap it. Even Theresa Mays ally, Damian Green, says fees need a rethink. Loyalists, like David Willetts, architect of the 2012 system, argue that this is not a fiscal problem but a political one, fuelled by Jeremy Corbyns vote-winning pledge to abolish fees. But universities who have done very well out of the system are nervously watching Mr Corbyns success, and wondering what a post-Brexit future holds. Higher education, and the chances it creates for the brightest and best of the next generation, are too precious anational resource for this uncertainty.

Student fees were introduced nearly 20 years ago to boost university budgets without breaching the ferocious spending totals that the new chancellor, Gordon Brown, had committed to keep within. The level was whatnow appears a trifling 1,000; there wereno loans, but there were generous exemptions, so while a little over a third of the 300,000 students who went to university each year paid the full amount, 45% paid nothing at all. In 2006, Lord Adonis raised the level to 3,000 so that student numbers could be expanded without taxes needing to rise. All the same, this co-funding with the state cost Labour: the Liberal Democrats infamous pledge to abolish fees at the 2010 election had as dynamic an effect on the student vote in university towns like Cambridge, Leeds, Sheffield and Cardiff as Labours pledge did inplaces like Canterbury in 2017.

In coalition, the Lib Dems reluctantly conceded, amid noisy and occasionally violent protest, to raise fees to 9,000 a year. Teaching grants to universities were cut; for the first time student loans attracted above-inflation interest rates. The cap on student numbers was lifted. Universities responded as academics such as Stefan Collini eloquently protested by adopting business techniques, selling degrees rather than education. The average vice-chancellors salary is currently 277,834. Facilities are transformed. Its easier to get in to universityand student numbers paused, thenresumed their rise.

But, as the latest IFS report shows, some of the fiscal assumptions on which the new order was based are starting to look a bit flaky.Nor is it only the financial arrangements: the idea that fees would createa competitive market among universities that would drive up standards has proved to be a farce. Instead of a differential, virtually all universities immediately charged the full 9,000. There has been no move to introduce, say, two-year degrees to cut the cost to students: why would universities intentionally reduce their fee income? Lord Adonis now wants the competition regulator to investigate what he claims is a cartel. He believes the whole edifice has become unsustainable, creating apersonal and national debt mountain without improving outcomes.

Defenders of tuition fees including the Guardian have argued that there are hard-to-replicate benefits. They have funded a huge expansion of higher education. The so-called debt, only repayable once earnings exceed 21,000 and forgiven after 30 years, operates like a progressive graduate tax. High-earners pay more.

Yet that is not how it feels. Students and new graduates say their reward for doing everything the state encouraged has simply left them with a debt millstone. Post-2008, graduate salaries have stagnated and few earn enough to have a chance of getting on the housing ladder. Expanding student numbers has been a gift to the middle classes, still four times more likely to go to university than poorer contemporaries. No wonder Labours idea for a national education service from reception to graduation, free for everyone, got students queuing round the polling stations and won the backing of an unrepentant Blairite like Lord Adonis.

Yet just removing fees risks being an even bigger bung to the better off. Labour needs to spell out exactly how it would work, how it could be done without capping student numbers again, and how it would improve the student experience. Its not always better to chuck a system out and start over. But thismay be one of the times when it is.

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The Guardian view on abolishing student fees: easier to say than to do - The Guardian