DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived Cleggeron era

Yeah but the market will decide whether or not they can get away with it innit.

"This is a complex and very difficult issue. But everybody wants the same thing - not only sustainable funding for universities in the decades ahead but also a system where the teaching you receive at universities, there's no up front cost for it, it's free at the point of use, that we encourage more students from poorer backgrounds into university than is presently the case. And, crucially, when people pay back for their tuition they only do it when they can afford it and people who earn more pay a bit more back than others."

was wondering how nick clegg was setting himself up for this enormous u-turn. what a load of shit: "free at the point of use" is a staggeringly dishonest way to describe fees and loans. wonder how far the coalition will take that redefinition of the concept with the NHS.

"everybody wants the same thing" is obviously going to be a coalition catchphrase. suppose new labour set the blueprint for pretending to be ideology-free technocrats but even so this is particularly grating.

Well, yeah, so the options are: charge 7k, not enough people are willing to come to your university and pay that, you have to close OR don't charge 7k, whoops you've gone bust, you have to close.

xpost to Matt

i guess it may be that a lot of universities close, which is bad for the people who work in them

otoh, students might be bullied into borrowing money for something that isn't that worthwhile and the universities will keep going -- this seems more likely to me

absolutely amazing use of 'free at the point of use', fucking hell

Joe, is that a direct quote from Clegg? Where did you find it?

Oh, found it myself.

I was being facetious about the market, I don't actually believe it, although I'm sure the govt wouldn't be that arsed to see a few universities going bust and/or closing several departments.

This isn't perfect and it's got some lol spelling mistakes but here's a pretty chilling infographic about the US system:

http://www.collegescholarships.org/research/student-loans.jpg

yeah, emily, it's just from the lib dems site. i was looking for this, RIP lib dems' sole distinctive policy position:

Liberal Democrats are the only party which believes university education should be free and everyone who has the ability should be able to go to university and not be put off by the cost.

Our 6 point timetable for scrapping tuition fees:

1 Scrap fees for final year full-time students
2 Begin regulating part-time fees
3 Part time fees become regulated and fee loans become available to part time students
4 Expand free tuition to all full-time students apart from first year undergraduates
5 Expand free tuition to all part-time students apart from first year undergraduates
6 Scrap tuition fees for all first degree students

"everybody wants the same thing"

ie power.

money quote from the infographic:

"Since defaulted loans are a net gain to the government and its collection agencies, they have no incentive to moderate school prices. High prices means higher loans. Higher loans means more defaults and more profit for everyone. This has allowed school tuition to rise at twice the rate of inflation and four times the rate of wage growth."

it's not going to work like that under browne though. pay nothing up to £21,000. at £25,000 a year, you only pay £30 a month. if you never earn more than that and haven't paid off your loan in 30 years, it's written off. at £35,000 you pay £100 a month. it doesn't sound that unaffordable.

i suspect that the extra money going into the top universities will translate into nothing more than fatter salaries for overrated globe-trotting academics, so we can 'compete' with the americans for 'talent'

this is very far from the first thing i think almost anyone in academia would spend extra money on (lol dysfunctional early career situash), and is a tiny fraction of the budget anyway

wonder how this affects the open university

it's not going to work like that under browne though. pay nothing up to £21,000. at £25,000 a year, you only pay £30 a month. if you never earn more than that and haven't paid off your loan in 30 years, it's written off. at £35,000 you pay £100 a month. it doesn't sound that unaffordable.

Until they decide to lower the thresholds for the next lot, and raise the amount they have to pay back.

there'll be fewer open universities.

sigh

OU loves browne's proposals because they help part-timers, and presumably they don't need to charge £6k for distance learning.

The other import from the american system is going to be severe downward pressure on wages for instructors in over supplied or less marketable subjects. I'm not sure how long the grading system will last under a free market system and Thatcher removed tenure so I doubt you'd even see the two tier system you have in the states, just english lectures on wage parity with the cleaners of their offices.

is that driven by fees or is it just under the "free market" rubric?

Both. I'm sure fees will reduce the number of universities, increasing the supply of academics. There will also be pressure on some universities to compete on price and that means paring back costs to a minimum.

It's no coincidence that the universities and departments that pay well in the US are the ones that pull in lot's of research grants or big fees. This is why (after largely self funding her Phd) E. is apply to business schools and not sociology departments.

"everybody wants the same thing" gets my vote for the title of the next rolling UKpol thread.

everybody wants the same thing: sb at the point of entry

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/12/tuition-fees-vince-cable-lib-dem-rebellion

this early repayment penalty idea sounds pretty stupid.

"At a difficult meeting with his backbenchers last night, the business secretary urged his party to recognise that not all student funding could go towards universities and in the name of fairness some cash had to go those needing to learn basic skills."

so gracious! but lib dem backbenchers think they should just take the only remaining educational opportunities from people who are unemployed or in very low paid work to fund cheap university places. that's "progressive" for you.

noodle dyou reckon that maybe polytechnics etc weren't *that* bad?

The Polys started out in life with a clear-cut purpose and they were intended to help up-skill a section of the workforce. No doubt the decline of British industry undermined some of what they did but the change to University status mostly came from a misguided attempt to avoid the snobbery directed at them by idiots who had as little as possible to do with industry anyway. Problem is once they became universities they sank into the same muddy waters as the rest of the HE sector, plus they were forced to compete with institutions that had - at least - superior snob value.

I sincerely feel for anybody caught in a declining field of employment but I think if we want to assert the importance of education in an increasingly market-oriented society then we need a stronger case for an expansive HE sector than "it keeps a lot of people in jobs".

And a lot of people out of the job market.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11525031

"There is a feeling that the rich can afford it - and the poor will quite rightly be protected - but people in the middle could find themselves really penalised," says Justine Roberts of the Mumsnet website.

Is Mumsnet the lazy journo's new way of taking the pulse of Middle England?

Anyone else get the sense that the tories caving to the LDs and middle classes on tuition fees will be the stick to shaft them with for the rest of the parliament?

About the early repayment thing: can't they just decouple the amount payable from the time it takes to repay the loan? So you just assume a nominal repayment period, say 15 years, calculate what the total repayment would be over that period and allow the graduate to pay that total back over a period of their choice (though you'd probably want to factor in inflation somehow).

Anyway, it's clear the outcome of this will be fewer working/lower-middle class students at university. Whether this is a net good or bad is subjective, depending on whether you think that having an educated population is important, that there are too many people doing Media Studies at Thames Valley, or both.

whether you think that having an educated population is important, that there are too many people doing Media Studies at Thames Valley, or both

I kind of think both, but am too lazy to extrapolate a wider view based on this

Additional ramifications of this that we haven't yet considered = the effects on aspiring architects or doctors. At least doctors are more-or-less guranteed a decent salary at the end of it, although give the Tories a few more years...

..and they'll be guaranteed even bigger salaries.

although I'm in favour of learning for learning's sake and think that is a fine reason for going to university. I also have no problem with using education as a tool of economic and industrial policy. I don't see anything wrong with subsidizing certain subjects to create the workers we need for a successful economy. I wouldn't be so narrow as to limit this to scientists, engineers, doctors etc. The creative industries add a great deal of value to the UK economy as do academia and teaching. The dissolution of the polytechnic system and the 50% target were daft, though.

This laissez-faire system isn't going to improve the mix of graduates coming out. It will inevitablye xclude some of the best and the brightest. It may even lead to science and engineering subjects costing more as they are more expensive to teach, and unlike the system of broad based academics in the US, you know exactly who the chemistry students are from the date of application. I worry that only top class research institutions are going to be able to afford to teach technical subjects to the highest levels. Many "uneconomic" departments will close.

It seems like this is a moment wasted to review the purpose and delivery of Higher Education but its going to be missed in a fight over fees.

Also, many of the 'good' vocational programmes - here I'm thinking of the fashion colleges eg. LCF and St Martin's - are ultra-competitive because they attract massive numbers of foreign students paying top-whack fees, possibly at the expense of less lucrative British applicants. People come from all over the world to go to these schools because - outside of some places in Belgium, France and NYC - there are no better places and you will probably find yourself up to your eyeballs in opportunity after a degree at St Martin's, for example.

the 50 per cent target wasn't daft: it was for people by the age of 30, to have taken some higher level study, not necessarily a three year degree.

john denham's laying it out pretty starkly right now - some universities are basically being privatised, losing 90 per cent of public funding - the lse is one.

50% target was daft in that there weren't many attractive or even strongly promoted alternatives to a 3 year degree.

If graduates earn more over a lifetime then why can't we just use straight income tax to fund universities. Graduates (and others who clearly benefit from having graduates around) will pay more tax.

I really hate the idea that it is only the individual who benefits and only the individual who pays. It's a slippery slope from this to privatised everything.

Cable has approved the Browne report according to the BBC.

Elizabeth Truss, a Tory, says other countries that have variable tuition fees, like the US, have a higher rate of university participation from low-income groups than the UK. Cable agrees.

Anyone know the background to this statement?

although I'm in favour of learning for learning's sake and think that is a fine reason for going to university. I also have no problem with using education as a tool of economic and industrial policy. I don't see anything wrong with subsidizing certain subjects to create the workers we need for a successful economy. I wouldn't be so narrow as to limit this to scientists, engineers, doctors etc. The creative industries add a great deal of value to the UK economy as do academia and teaching. The dissolution of the polytechnic system and the 50% target were daft, though.

This laissez-faire system isn't going to improve the mix of graduates coming out. It will inevitablye xclude some of the best and the brightest. It may even lead to science and engineering subjects costing more as they are more expensive to teach, and unlike the system of broad based academics in the US, you know exactly who the chemistry students are from the date of application. I worry that only top class research institutions are going to be able to afford to teach technical subjects to the highest levels. Many "uneconomic" departments will close.

It seems like this is a moment wasted to review the purpose and delivery of Higher Education but its going to be missed in a fight over fees.

Ed OTM throughout this post.

4.43pm: John Hemming, the Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley, says that, like Cable, he signed the NUS pledge and that it committed MP to pressuring the government "to introduce a fairer alternative". Browne's system is fairer, Hemming says. "But that does not mean it's fair enough." Hemming says he would like to propose changes that could make the system even more progressive.

Good weaseling here

If graduates earn more over a lifetime then why can't we just use straight income tax to fund universities.

Exactly. But we can't raise income tax because all the people who avoid it already will flee the country if we do.

I really hate the idea that it is only the individual who benefits and only the individual who pays. It's a slippery slope from this to privatised everything.

Slippery slope that we're a long way down already. The average 19 year-old seems to have fully assimilated the idea that a degree is solely an investment in their employability.

Plenty others have assimilated the idea of it as a three year pissup, tbf- there's a balancing argument when state money goes in there too imo. but not disagreeing with you that employability shouldn't be the only consideration

What makes this worse that the american system is that there (or here even) there is a system of public and private subsidy; pell grants, GI bill, university endowments, athletic scholarships, charitable foundation money (cf. Pittsburgh Promise, everyone one at a city high school get $10,000 a year for HE funded by an endowment shaken out of local businesses that benefit from graduates).

Britain has none of this infrastructure and does not have nearly the same tradition of Liberal philanthropism (and obscured government subsidy). indeed the US is going the other way from the UK, nationalising student loans, increasing Pell grants. You get a tax credit on (already subsidised) repaid student loan interest if you earn under $80,000 as well.

It comes to something when the system starts to look less progressive than that in the USA.

NUS making early repayment an issue is moronic. So what if rich people abuse loans as cheap finance? Removing the subsidy is going to make this issue go away anyway. You are removing incentive for people to be financially responsible.

this is making me really fucking angry (not just the NUS, the whole thing).

In other news Lid Dem Father Jack Hackett MP is being investigated for "inappropriate behaviour" towards a female constituent.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/49170000/jpg/_49170170_000500203-1.jpg

FECK! ARSE! GURRRRRLS! DRINK! DRINK! DRINK! DRINK! DRINK!

Hancock declined to comment on the details of the case, but has previously denied any wrongdoing and insisted he only offered "help and support" to a 36-year-old woman.

A total of 192 public bodies are to be scrapped in the Government's reform of quangos, Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude said today. Another 289 will be reformed.