Kicking the dark horse of tuition fees
At the meeting over Labour’s manifesto on 11 May, shadow education secretary Angela Rayner expressed dismay at John McDonnell’s announcement that Labour would prize abolishing the tuition fee over early years support.
Her justification for this ire came down to two central factors: that she, as a single mother under the first New Labour government, benefitted massively from their development of the Sure Start scheme and others like it.While Rayner’s backstory is certainly an engaging & endearing one (which certainly merits a read), for now I’d like to focus on the other half of her reasoning, one centred in politics rather than admittedly subjective, if not persuasive, personal experience.
Rayner claimed that the abolition of the tuition fee would be likely to benefit the middle class, because those are the kinds of people that go to university, whereas every child needs support, especially the children of working class parents – that was the whole point of Sure Start to begin with.So, Angela has a point. Reading between the lines, it’s clear that abolishing the tuition fee isn’t the most egalitarian education measure there is, as the Guardian highlights; indeed, it feels, at face value, like a populist platitude that wouldn’t be out of place in Caroline Lucas’ handwriting.
However, Rayner’s accusation of middle class bias bears similarities that which was aimed at Miliband after he announced the plan to reduce the fee from £9000 to £6000 per year.
The idea went like this: if you only reduce fees rather than abolishing them, those who benefit the most are the ones who can pay off the reduced levels of debt the fastest. There are two further groups: those in the middle, earning enough to pay off the debt, but not enough to see it off quickly. This middle group suffers from the relatively high interest on the tuition fee loan. The final group is that which never earns enough to pay off the debt, at which point it will be written off. Therefore, the poorest group sees no benefit from reducing the tuition fee.
On this basis, it was argued, the policy was not as egalitarian as it appeared. Of course, this claim is somewhat flawed, because, regardless of the accumulation of interest, less debt is still less debt. A poorer graduate having to pay back £27,000 in tuition fees will accumulate interest just the same as one having to pay £18,000, and the one paying back less will see less cumulative interest in the long run, because that’s how percentages work.
By comparison, a flat abolition of any tuition fee means there is no debt, so there is no interest, so there is no marked difference between the debt of a richer graduate and a poorer graduate. You’d expect centrist, meritocratic politicians to back such an idea, because it doesn’t discriminate against anyone; in fact, multiple times, the idea of a graduate tax has been raised by New(ish) Labour to maintain the notion that university is not free, but break the connection between greater income and lower debt.
The elephant in the room is that it was Tony Blair that presided over the introduction of the tuition fee, and its increase from £1000 to £3000 per year in 2006. It seems peculiar that it would be Labour introducing the method of paying for university that Corbyn is himself begging to repeal.
One could easily cut this conversation short by stating the obvious: Rayner is talking sense and Corbyn is well known as one of the keenest backbench rebels of the New Labour tenure. However, this ignores valuable information that could explain why this is not simply a Corbynite contradiction, and why Labour aren’t hypocrites to propose alternatives to, or the total scrapping of, the tuition fee.
The key issue is that the university environment has changed inextricably since its origins, and the way in which it’s changed can do much to explain why it wasn’t the four consecutive Conservative governments, but the first Labour one in more than 20 years, that saw the introduction of the tuition fee.
77,163 students received their first degree in 1990. This had risen to 399,820 in 2016. That’s roughly a fivefold increase. Beyond the numbers, there has been a notable demographic change. It should also be noted that this increase has not been stuffed into the same universities; in fact, many more universities were created both with the reorganisation of polytechnics in 1992 and the new universities (some 49 out of the 130 total) founded since.
A majority of converted polytechnics and new universities primarily cater to less ‘academic’ but nonetheless valuable causes, such as part-time and mature study, vocational courses, and sandwich courses. This can be seen as a case of simple supply and demand: previously, most UK universities catered to science and humanities courses; more recent developments in terms of the newly varied makeup of students mean new universities set up to cater to these new needs.
However, when tuition fees were passed into law, this was yet to take effect. Therefore, the introduction of the tuition fee might not have been entirely progressive, but it could certainly have been justified more than it is today; in the previous century, it was common knowledge that university was reserved only for the best and brightest, especially given that ‘university’ was essentially the Russell Group and a few others.
Necessarily (and unfortunately), those with adequate secondary education to reach university level tended to be those with the parents best placed to pay for better teaching, be it through private school, or an expensive catchment for a praised grammar or even an especially lauded comprehensive.
Institutionalising tuition fees in the 60s or 70s would have been akin to Corbyn’s latter-day pledge to remove the VAT exemption from private school fees; it would have hit the richest members of society the hardest and have relatively little impact on the people at large; although, much like the VAT policy, it would pose the risk of putting off disadvantaged students with bright minds and great potential, but lower economic capital.
However, this was the 90s, and sea change was going on beneath the surface – hence the massive demographic changes in university attendees since. Over this period, the notion of the tuition fee has become steadily more regressive as the uptake amongst lower income groups has gone up and up. This has made the history of the tuition fee almost as toxic for Labour as it is for the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether the Overton Window takes paying for further education as a given.
The current Conservative position on tuition fees is inequitable; that much is clear. Because the point at which you start paying back the student loan is not falling, the rate of interest on the loan is going up, and maintenance grants are being cut, life is being made harder for those for whom debt is a burden, while the beneficial status quo remains for the stalwart group that can afford to pay off the loans – the group that was the intended tax target of the policy to begin with. While this group would benefit from abolition, it is a much smaller percentage than it was when the policy began, which is the central change.
The tuition fee would cost a vast £11.2bn sum to overturn. However, if the newfound diversity of the university intake is any indicator of how inequitable the fee is in action, perhaps Angela Rayner is wrong to call its abolition out as simply a middle-class platitude.
Her justification for this ire came down to two central factors: that she, as a single mother under the first New Labour government, benefitted massively from their development of the Sure Start scheme and others like it.While Rayner’s backstory is certainly an engaging & endearing one (which certainly merits a read), for now I’d like to focus on the other half of her reasoning, one centred in politics rather than admittedly subjective, if not persuasive, personal experience.
Rayner claimed that the abolition of the tuition fee would be likely to benefit the middle class, because those are the kinds of people that go to university, whereas every child needs support, especially the children of working class parents – that was the whole point of Sure Start to begin with.So, Angela has a point. Reading between the lines, it’s clear that abolishing the tuition fee isn’t the most egalitarian education measure there is, as the Guardian highlights; indeed, it feels, at face value, like a populist platitude that wouldn’t be out of place in Caroline Lucas’ handwriting.
However, Rayner’s accusation of middle class bias bears similarities that which was aimed at Miliband after he announced the plan to reduce the fee from £9000 to £6000 per year.
The idea went like this: if you only reduce fees rather than abolishing them, those who benefit the most are the ones who can pay off the reduced levels of debt the fastest. There are two further groups: those in the middle, earning enough to pay off the debt, but not enough to see it off quickly. This middle group suffers from the relatively high interest on the tuition fee loan. The final group is that which never earns enough to pay off the debt, at which point it will be written off. Therefore, the poorest group sees no benefit from reducing the tuition fee.
On this basis, it was argued, the policy was not as egalitarian as it appeared. Of course, this claim is somewhat flawed, because, regardless of the accumulation of interest, less debt is still less debt. A poorer graduate having to pay back £27,000 in tuition fees will accumulate interest just the same as one having to pay £18,000, and the one paying back less will see less cumulative interest in the long run, because that’s how percentages work.
By comparison, a flat abolition of any tuition fee means there is no debt, so there is no interest, so there is no marked difference between the debt of a richer graduate and a poorer graduate. You’d expect centrist, meritocratic politicians to back such an idea, because it doesn’t discriminate against anyone; in fact, multiple times, the idea of a graduate tax has been raised by New(ish) Labour to maintain the notion that university is not free, but break the connection between greater income and lower debt.
The elephant in the room is that it was Tony Blair that presided over the introduction of the tuition fee, and its increase from £1000 to £3000 per year in 2006. It seems peculiar that it would be Labour introducing the method of paying for university that Corbyn is himself begging to repeal.
One could easily cut this conversation short by stating the obvious: Rayner is talking sense and Corbyn is well known as one of the keenest backbench rebels of the New Labour tenure. However, this ignores valuable information that could explain why this is not simply a Corbynite contradiction, and why Labour aren’t hypocrites to propose alternatives to, or the total scrapping of, the tuition fee.
The key issue is that the university environment has changed inextricably since its origins, and the way in which it’s changed can do much to explain why it wasn’t the four consecutive Conservative governments, but the first Labour one in more than 20 years, that saw the introduction of the tuition fee.
77,163 students received their first degree in 1990. This had risen to 399,820 in 2016. That’s roughly a fivefold increase. Beyond the numbers, there has been a notable demographic change. It should also be noted that this increase has not been stuffed into the same universities; in fact, many more universities were created both with the reorganisation of polytechnics in 1992 and the new universities (some 49 out of the 130 total) founded since.
A majority of converted polytechnics and new universities primarily cater to less ‘academic’ but nonetheless valuable causes, such as part-time and mature study, vocational courses, and sandwich courses. This can be seen as a case of simple supply and demand: previously, most UK universities catered to science and humanities courses; more recent developments in terms of the newly varied makeup of students mean new universities set up to cater to these new needs.
However, when tuition fees were passed into law, this was yet to take effect. Therefore, the introduction of the tuition fee might not have been entirely progressive, but it could certainly have been justified more than it is today; in the previous century, it was common knowledge that university was reserved only for the best and brightest, especially given that ‘university’ was essentially the Russell Group and a few others.
Necessarily (and unfortunately), those with adequate secondary education to reach university level tended to be those with the parents best placed to pay for better teaching, be it through private school, or an expensive catchment for a praised grammar or even an especially lauded comprehensive.
Institutionalising tuition fees in the 60s or 70s would have been akin to Corbyn’s latter-day pledge to remove the VAT exemption from private school fees; it would have hit the richest members of society the hardest and have relatively little impact on the people at large; although, much like the VAT policy, it would pose the risk of putting off disadvantaged students with bright minds and great potential, but lower economic capital.
However, this was the 90s, and sea change was going on beneath the surface – hence the massive demographic changes in university attendees since. Over this period, the notion of the tuition fee has become steadily more regressive as the uptake amongst lower income groups has gone up and up. This has made the history of the tuition fee almost as toxic for Labour as it is for the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether the Overton Window takes paying for further education as a given.
The current Conservative position on tuition fees is inequitable; that much is clear. Because the point at which you start paying back the student loan is not falling, the rate of interest on the loan is going up, and maintenance grants are being cut, life is being made harder for those for whom debt is a burden, while the beneficial status quo remains for the stalwart group that can afford to pay off the loans – the group that was the intended tax target of the policy to begin with. While this group would benefit from abolition, it is a much smaller percentage than it was when the policy began, which is the central change.
The tuition fee would cost a vast £11.2bn sum to overturn. However, if the newfound diversity of the university intake is any indicator of how inequitable the fee is in action, perhaps Angela Rayner is wrong to call its abolition out as simply a middle-class platitude.
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