University funding has, especially since the introduction of tuition fees, become one of those political, economic and social conundrums. The problem is essentially this: if you want to, as was the initial goal of New Labour under Tony Blair, get 50% of our young population through university, how do you go about funding it? More students means more money being spent per person, both by the universities, but also by the government itself, in the form of subsidised grants and loans.
This represents the third incarnation of the tuition fees system since it's initial inception in the late 1990s. This was followed by the introduction of 'top-up'fees in 2004; finally the introduction of market driven, variable fees, following the completion of Lord Browne's review.
Browne's idea is that universities should be allowed to raise fees, in theory, as much as they want. They pay a levy for any courses wherein they want to charge higher than this; thereby meaning that universities, and the Russell Group in particular, will theoretically have to justify charging 12,000 pound, which universities such as Oxford and Cambridge are expected to do by media pundits.
The figures suggest that, if the average student pays 6,000 pound in tuition fees, and takes out the maintenance loan offered, your average student will now graduate about 30,000 pound in debt. You won't have to repay until you earn over 21,000 (the current rate is 15).
With cuts planned in higher education funding, this means that universities will be now expecting to claw back money in fees. However, in order for them to rake in more money from fees than they will be losing in cuts, it is suggested that the tuition fees for most institutions will have to 7,000.
Students in this scenario end up paying more and borrowing more. This would be good, were it not for the fact that we were in this mess because the government of the last ten years presided over a cheap credit boom. The cuts of the next five years are being justified because the government cannot go on paying for things it cannot afford. This is exactly what students have been exhorted to do, ever since tuition fees were introduced. The promise of university is increasingly predicated on the idea that the money is worth paying now, because the rewards reaped later will be worth it.
The problem with the Browne Review is that it, much like many of the spending reviews conducted since the new Coalition came to power, is based solely on economic figures. A spending review should review spending, it's true. Yet, there is more to student life than merely fees and loans.
Higher education is a bit of a minefield as far as costs are concerned. Just reaming off a few examples here, but concerns such as rent, water, gas, electricity and Internet are major issues. Your average student also needs money to live on every week, and the especially cautious ones might also need insurance for laptops, bikes, possessions. Literature and humanities students often have to pay for books on top of their tuition fees. Finally, let's just factor in the idea that your average 18-22 year old is going to spend money once you give it to them. As higher education has modernised, more of a student culture has arisen. Club nights, events, holidays, there is a student industry in operation, just eating up the money that comes from subsidies.
It should too, because education at university is one of the better things in life; for the friends made, the memories treasured, the things learnt. The problem is that, in a country where more students are graduating and more are graduating with an expectation of a higher earning potential, not everyone is going to achieve this. Oversubscription of university places is also oversubscription in the graduate job market; it is a fight to get on the property ladder, the need to get savings, investments and a pension together.
It is almost unthinkable in the modern university system, for example, for a student to have savings. I don't mean child savings, I mean savings for the future. Spend now and pay back later is good enough until you have to pay back later. In the case of the new system, student loan repayments will amount to about 30 pound a month, if you are earning over the 21,000 mark. Factor in tax, NI and all the utilities I just listed, and you have yourself a squeezed graduate middle class. This brings us back to the idea of 'fairness' which has been bandied around by the Conservatives in the last few weeks as though it is a word with a fixed definition. It isn't, because students need more than a degree to guarantee walking into a job. They need extra-curricular activities, previous work experience. In the cases of getting work in the arts sector, they must be willing to work for no money when they finish university. As far as certain job areas are concerned, this means being willing to work for no money in London, which is a fairly pricey proposition anyway.
In the midst of this 'fairness'debate, the government has trumpeted the fact that the poor will still get a lot of help in going to university( in fact they may be better off). Yet, the idea of university to people from certain income brackets, from certain ethnicities and certain postcodes, is still a distant dream and is certainly a distant dream if the university in question is a Russell Group university. As far as middle class families who do not qualify for the most help are concerned, the problem is that a family putting a child through university is not a fixed mathematical equation; parental income going in does not equal graduate earnings going out. Families where only one of the parents work are already having their child benefit removed - that is another debate from another week, but said family is not going to automatically produce an offspring that is set to be a rising star at Deloitte as soon as they get out of university.
One argument for university is that it represents skills for life, not just skills for a job. Unfortunately, this is countered by the fact that most employers, in interviews, tend to deal, like governments, in cold hard facts; qualifications gained, earning potential, how you can fit in within a certain organisation. University education also exists in the wake of time spent in a still wobbly, league-table obsessed school system, which needs fixing far more than its HE counterpart.
I'll write on this some more, but the genius of the Cameron Conservatives and Clegg Lib Dems is that they are presenting a Thatcher-esque marketisation of university education with a somewhat benevolent face. So, whilst rhetoric continues to abound about university being a life-affirming experience, it continues to be reformed along business lines, by advisers who are business people. University is a fairly unique time in a person's life, but ministers cannot make claims to their being beacons of learning whilst slashing spending and messing about with numbers of places, admissions etc.
Students in this new climate ultimately become customers. Hence an English Literature student will hit the roof if they are forced to pay 6,000 for 6 hours of contact time; universities must then justify that expense with new incentives. For example, the fees for BPP, the independent law and business school, are 6,000 but this includes textbooks and learning resources. Money in universities has to be spent wisely; decisions taken by politicians on idealogical grounds will have real consequences at grass-roots levels, since student bodies have already demonstrated an eye for how their money is being allocated. Will a student want portions of their tuition fees split up and used to pay for a student union club night when there are no seats in the library come exam time? Probably yes, but still, more debates like this will be had in student unions across the country, I'm sure.
University education can either be a cultural, aesthetic, growing experience where all who deserve to learn, should. This is what your more left-wing intellectual might say, your member of staff who is teaching an arts or humanities subject. On the other hand, it is a place where young people are prepared and given a greater earning potential for an increasingly competitive job market. This might be what your CEO with ties to a big university might say (think Tesco's CEO/University of Manchester). In a time where money is in short supply, and student places are in high demand, universities may end up fulfilling neither function very well.
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