As promised in my last blog here is a piece about the graduate tax.
 |
When Vince Cable stopped supporting a graduate tax, he failed to get a compromise |
The argument for a graduate tax has to take into account the arguments for and against the marketisation of the university system. So I’ll talk about this first. Marketising a University system promotes the idea that education is a commodity rather than a right. Many say that this will mean that students would be able to demand more from their university, indeed; it is likely that many universities will improve contact time and will likely produce a more school-like approach to teaching students.
The problems about this are three-fold; for a start this will change the very nature of university, academia is about more than simply being taught something new (even school isn’t like this! http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/22/university-students-degrees-david-mitchell); it’s about learning to work independently to deadlines and using your initiative to go out, do the research, form an opinion about it and effectively present it. These are skills that are important for the (relevant) workplace and absolutely essential for academia. Turning university into a school-like atmosphere will reduce this value. Secondly, this is likely to produce the appearance that students are facing less pressure with much the same effect as the appearance that GCSE’s and A-levels are “getting easier” their value will diminish destroying the very point of marketising universities! The final problem here is that not every university will want to go the school-based approach: many already get significant revenue from research and spin-off businesses, so diverting funds into a school-like approach will not be worthwhile. What will happen? The ‘lower’ classed universities will go the school route, and top Universities in the Russell group will simply refuse to go a more student-orientated approach as they won’t have to as they’ll still have the prestige, the money and the research opportunities for serious academics.
If we look at the USA, this two-tier system already exists on a far more extreme level; it simply isn’t plausible for a bright and talented student to get to go to Harvard (for example) because they can’t afford the tuition fees & living costs which can be around $78,681* (£51,038). Yet Universities like Harvard are so affluent that the university has an endowment of $27.4 billion (£17.4 bn almost as large as the entirety of the UK university budgets). This hasn’t given power to students; rather it has given the power to the wealthy!
Admittedly my arguments for/against the marketisation of universities here have been very brief, but they must be tackled in order to establish part of the advantages of a ‘graduate tax’.
As I have already alluded to, a graduate tax is not my ideal choice; but the way that a graduate tax may avoid the same effects as putting big figures like £36,000 on the cost of a university education are important to the reasons why I would be willing to advocate it. Don’t get me wrong a graduate tax would require stringent laws to ensure that it is protected from governments who want to spend the money on “other things” but the idea that over a set period of time someone pays an extra 3% in income tax over a 20 year period once they start earning over a certain wage isn’t a horrible scenario and allows us to look at simply putting a blanket set grant to all students for their living costs and they effectively pay back a significant proportion of what they get out of it over a long term period. Indeed, even the idea of the money being spent on ‘other things’ is not all unattractive as long as universities are getting the money that they need. It would defeat the argument of “why should I pay for someone else’s education”.
When looking at a graduate tax, however, we have to pay close attention to detail on what it actually costs an individual who comes out of university. It is important to bring in rules like putting a lower cap on when an individual has to start making graduate tax payments (say £21,000/year), if the average wage for graduates is £25,000/year then each students will ‘pay back’ their tuition within 25 years at a cost of £750 per year 1/3 of the cost being put forward in the current system! Putting a time limit on the graduate payments also means that there is an outright time when you will no longer have to keep paying for your education, ensuring that those who are from wealthy backgrounds cannot benefit from paying off their loans early (and avoid inflation) nor do those from lower income backgrounds loose out because of mitigating circumstances.
There are more things to take into account here, the idea that business should start making more of a contribution into higher education is an important one; but this should be considered as part of a far wider set of reforms for higher education (which you can read about here!) The important thing I find about the graduate tax, however, is that it gives the opportunity to eliminate the need for “means testing” or the up-front worry of how much debt you’re going to have over your head. The graduate tax simplifies things for the student, the tax payer and the treasury; if a student uses the skills they learned at university to go into the oil industry and are earning £60,000 plus per year they’ll spend between £600-£1,800 per year putting money back into the higher education system meaning that they’ll have put in £45,000+ into the system allowing for significant investment to go into research into that sector (and others) boosting not only the academic sector but the economy as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment