"Those who benefit from a university education should pay for it." I agree!

[invisibleplanet]

I think the premise is flawed. Many graduates offer no benefit whatsoever by way of possessing a degree. In fact many would argue that spending three years having lie ins and drinking too much makes them more useless than any non graduate who has spent the time working.

Agreed. And it will cause 'learning' to become wholly related to, and dependent upon business/industry/capitalism, rather than for it's own sake, which will basically debase and devalue human knowledge and severely limit our future ability to attain knowledge & make use of it.

 

[newbie]

This is a good point. It should probably be 1% per year studied.

There will be no loopholes, so the added NI will apply to self-employed contractors. The employer pays through it getting added to the contractor's costs.

No loopholes? There's a massive one at the moment.

Y needs a contractor. X sets up LtdCo which sells services to Y. X is employed by LtdCo & paid minimum wage to do work for Y. At end of year LtdCo has made profit which it pays to its directors (X & spouse) as dividends. X only pays NI on wages, not dividends. X laughing, NI has been cheated.

There are always loopholes.

 

[_angel_]

The vast majority of degrees have no specific vocational content, but employers still need people who have developed their skills beyond A' Level. It doesn't cut down the types of degree that are considered useful.

Having said that, I'm not a fan of formal education for the sake of it. You do a degree because you need the bit of paper to prove it to someone. It's not necessarily the best way to learn anything. I support the campaign to end pay-walls for academic literature, I develop research tools using open source software so that noone will ever be able to charge for their use, and my teaching materials go out under a creative commons license (unit policy, as well as my choice). You don't need an academic to teach you, you just need access to the materials you need to learn.

You're taking quite a depressingly utilitarian view here of higher education, some people do it because they want to learn! I think that should be encouraged. I don't agree that there are 'too many people at university' either, as if it's a bad thing, although I do agree with what you said about employers demanding degrees when they are not really needed just to weed people out.

Maybe we should be encouraging people to go to university later on when/ if they really want to learn, rather than being forced to do it because they won't get any kind of job otherwise. And it should be funded through taxation, yes, not some complicated system of fees/loans/graduate tax.

 

[LiamO]

The cost of a doing a degree should be based on a sliding scale of how useful that degree is to society, and inversely proportional to the result you get.

First class degree in medicine = £1000.
Third class degree in geography = £50000.

First class degree in physics = £5000.
Third class degree in art history = £650000.

Anyone who gets two and a half years through a "golf management" degree then drops out without even bothering to do the exams has to donate their organs for transplant then have their eviscerated corpse strung up in public to serve as an example to others.

Fuckin bleedin-heart liberal

Yes the hierarchy of subjects (designed and suited for the Industrial Revolution and the C19th) continues to serve us all so well in the C21st ...

 

[ymu]

Well, I think they are and obviously they can starve in the gutter wearing skinny jeans. some sort of ironic t-shirt and Converse for all I care. However, people who take longer over their degrees are more likely to be w/c or BME so penalising them massively over the course of their entire working life isn't a very progressive proposal.

Well, it's people like you who are so determined not to pay their way that make these things so difficult.

But we can get around this problem. 1% per year of education, fixed at 3% on graduation. There, that should keep everyone happy.

 

[ymu]

No loopholes? There's a massive one at the moment.

Y needs a contractor. X sets up LtdCo which sells services to Y. X is employed by LtdCo & paid minimum wage to do work for Y. At end of year LtdCo has made profit which it pays to its directors (X & spouse) as dividends. X only pays NI on wages, not dividends. X laughing, NI has been cheated.

There are always loopholes.

Ah, but in a world run by me, unearned income will be taxed at a higher rate than earned income.

 

[ymu]

You're taking quite a depressingly utilitarian view here of higher education, some people do it because they want to learn! I think that should be encouraged. I don't agree that there are 'too many people at university' either, as if it's a bad thing, although I do agree with what you said about employers demanding degrees when they are not really needed just to weed people out.

Maybe we should be encouraging people to go to university later on when/ if they really want to learn, rather than being forced to do it because they won't get any kind of job otherwise. And it should be funded through taxation, yes, not some complicated system of fees/loans/graduate tax.

That's precisely what it would encourage and is intended to encourage. Someone who is given the opportunity by their employer and studies at their expense will never have the extra 3% added to their NI (even if they switch employer). Lots of employers support staff doing degrees not directly related to their work. It's a good way to retain staff without being able to give them a payrise.

 

[invisibleplanet]

How will the all pervading 'don't invest in a woman who might get married/pregnant/have kids' be avoided? Those attitudes still persist even today.

 

[ymu]

How will the all pervading 'don't invest in a woman who might get married/pregnant/have kids' be avoided? Those attitudes still persist even today.

It's a fair point, but graduate women lose far less than non-graduate women.

The gender pay gap remains – men earn 16% more than women on average and "progress appears to be grinding to a halt". But there are significant differences among women. Those with degrees are estimated to face only a 4% loss in lifetime earnings as a result of motherhood, while mothers with no qualifications suffer a 58% loss.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/11/equality-report-race-britain-launch

4% loss of lifetime earnings is equivalent to taking around 18 months off work to have kids. It's not clear that women with degrees are particularly discriminated against, although I haven't looked at the methodology they used in any detail.

That is a different question to whether an employer is willing to invest in a woman who might have kids, but retention of staff is the biggest cost-saving any employer can make and offering training is one of the most cost-effective ways to do this. A woman who is earning more than childcare costs is much more likely to return to the workplace than one who is earning less. I don't think it's a magic wand to solve discrimination in the workplace, but I'm not sure it has any negative effects.

 

[Maurice Picarda]

Maybe we should be encouraging people to go to university later on when/ if they really want to learn, rather than being forced to do it because they won't get any kind of job otherwise. And it should be funded through taxation, yes, not some complicated system of fees/loans/graduate tax.

This is perfectly sensible: if non-vocational tertiary education was only available to the over-30s then it would be restricted to those with a genuine interest and aptitude for academic study. And demand would probably be low enough for it to be affordable without hypothecated tax systems.

 

[ymu]

The cost of a doing a degree should be based on a sliding scale of how useful that degree is to society, and inversely proportional to the result you get.

First class degree in medicine = £1000.
Third class degree in geography = £50000.

First class degree in physics = £5000.
Third class degree in art history = £650000.

Anyone who gets two and a half years through a "golf management" degree then drops out without even bothering to do the exams has to donate their organs for transplant then have their eviscerated corpse strung up in public to serve as an example to others.

You should probably look up the income distribution for people with different types of degrees and consider their contribution to the economy and the social economy, before making such idiotic statements. It's the Tories who are screwing us over with their proposals based on prejudice rather than any evidence or even a nod to the real world. Urban is better than that.

Geographers are rather important in the search for solutions to global warming, btw.

 

[_angel_]

This is perfectly sensible: if non-vocational tertiary education was only available to the over-30s then it would be restricted to those with a genuine interest and aptitude for academic study. And demand would probably be low enough for it to be affordable without hypothecated tax systems.

I wouldn't go as far as restricting it only to the over thirties, but it would be better to encourage university to older students instead of making it something you just have to do like GCSEs to get a job. Don't agree with any kind of graduate tax or fees tho (ymu) apart from anything else it's just stupidly complex.

 

[ymu]

I am not suggesting either a graduate tax or fees.

 

[Maurice Picarda]

I am not suggesting either a graduate tax or fees.

You are suggesting something "stupidly complex", though. Also something which makes it punitively expensive to operate a business in the UK which requires knowledge workers - precisely the sort of industry where it's often easiest to shift location abroad.

 

[The39thStep]

I think the premise is flawed. Many graduates offer no benefit whatsoever by way of possessing a degree. In fact many would argue that spending three years having lie ins and drinking too much makes them more useless than any non graduate who has spent the time working.

Excellent post

 

[ymu]

You are suggesting something "stupidly complex", though. Also something which makes it punitively expensive to operate a business in the UK which requires knowledge workers - precisely the sort of industry where it's often easiest to shift location abroad.

It's not stupidly complex at all. It's no more complex than the current system of NI.

Knowledge-based industry is the one sector where we do not lose business to overseas. We don't make cars, but we do design them. We are 2% of the world pharmaceutical industry but have 10% of global pharmaceutical R&D, and a large chunk of pharmaceutical manufacturing as well.

Why? Because we have five of the top ten universities in the world. It's a sector we cannot afford not to fund properly.

A 2% increase in the cost of employing a graduate is trivial compared to the cost of relocating to a country with a weaker university sector.

 

[ymu]

I think the premise is flawed. Many graduates offer no benefit whatsoever by way of possessing a degree. In fact many would argue that spending three years having lie ins and drinking too much makes them more useless than any non graduate who has spent the time working.

I agree completely with this apart from the flawed premise bit. I said the same thing in the OP - did you read it at all?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

By whose measure does the UK have five of the top ten unis in the world?

 

[butchersapron]

4 here drops to 3 this year.

 

[_angel_]

I am not suggesting either a graduate tax or fees.

Wouldn't it just be simpler to fund tuition fees out of taxation though?

 

[ymu]

By whose measure does the UK have five of the top ten unis in the world?

It does depend which league tables you look at and what they take into account. It's Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Imperial and King's which are there or there abouts.

 

[ymu]

Wouldn't it just be simpler to fund tuition fees out of taxation though?

It would be simpler yes, but it would also be a lot easier to attack (and has been successfully attacked over the last 25 years) - precisely because of those layabout students, most of whom are middle-class kids intent on pissing their privilege up the wall. Kids from state schools get better degrees than those from public schools, but the privately educated still dominate admissions. That makes no sense.

Funding through general taxation does nothing to improve access for the less well off. This scheme makes a full grant easily affordable for all students, discourages those who already have a job for life on daddies estate, and encourages employers to train people who are already in work, rather than recruit unknown quantities just because they've been writing essays for three years. It's criminal how much talent goes to waste simply because they didn't thrive at school or university was not an option due to financial constraints.

I also think that it can, and should, be extended to non-HE training, which is incredibly difficult to access at the moment. Either employers start paying for training, or they stop moaning about the taxes that provide their trained employees. The latter will never happen in a capitalist system.

 

[_angel_]

I wouldn't do it that way, like you said the problem is the disproportionate amount of private school kids in unis (and crucially the top unis) Maybe there should be some kind of quota system whereby only 7 (or whatever percent it is that make up private school v state ones) of university places go to private school kids?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

It does depend which league tables you look at and what they take into account. It's Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Imperial and King's which are there or there abouts.

Where do France's Grandes Ecoles sit in the tables? They tend to be very specialised so do they qualify? I'm suspicious of this measure, I must say. I would guess that at least three of the others in the top 10 must be from the US. Nearly all the top unis are in these two English-speaking countries? Hmmm. English-speaking academics are notorious for only talking to each other, aren't they?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I wouldn't do it that way, like you said the problem is the disproportionate amount of private school kids in unis (and crucially the top unis) Maybe there should be some kind of quota system whereby only 7 (or whatever percent it is that make up private school v state ones) of university places go to private school kids?

Some universities already recognise the problem. Bristol, for instance, makes lower offers to applicants from state schools. After all, if you attended Eton and only got three Cs in your A-levels, you've really not done very well.

 

[ymu]

Where do France's Grandes Ecoles sit in the tables? They tend to be very specialised so do they qualify? I'm suspicious of this measure, I must say. I would guess that at least three of the others in the top 10 must be from the US. Nearly all the top unis are in these two English-speaking countries? Hmmm.

You can look up the various tables and methodologies as easily as I can. There's a lot of stuff out there about what the various rankings mean and how useless they are for judging anything very much at all. But the strength of our university sector is the source of a lot of high tech, high value jobs, and we need it to stay strong if we are to retain much high value industry as the economic centre of power shifts to ASEAN.

There is another reason to question Cable's rationing plan: his impending attack on universities. The university – the main centre for UK science – is funded from two sources: the research councils (which distribute £2.8bn annually) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (£7.4bn). This dual funding gives universities stability. In the latest independent rankings of the world's universities, the UK is second only to the US in the quality of its education and research. This week, Cambridge beat Harvard to first place in one important league table. Yet it is the depth and breadth of our university sector that is extraordinary. The UK had 30 of the 200 best universities in the world. For a small nation of just 62 million people, that is extraordinary: Germany had 12 places, Japan 10 places.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/10/irrational-to-ration-science-funding

The government are cutting £5.2bn of that £10.2bn funding, by the way. And Browne is the only way out on offer. We're pretty fucked.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

There's a lot of stuff out there about what the various rankings mean and how useless they are for judging anything very much at all.

Why bring them up then?

 

[butchersapron]

Some universities already recognise the problem. Bristol, for instance, makes lower offers to applicants from state schools. After all, if you attended Eton and only got three Cs in your A-levels, you've really not done very well.

Yet it's still stuffed full of the most privileged people in the country - suggesting that the problem lies elsewhere than what offers are made.

 

[ymu]

Some universities already recognise the problem. Bristol, for instance, makes lower offers to applicants from state schools. After all, if you attended Eton and only got three Cs in your A-levels, you've really not done very well.

Just to clarify that point, it's not a quota system as such. State school kids get better degree results for a given set of A' Level results. It's an attempt to predict which students will actually thrive in an academic environment.

 

[ymu]

Why bring them up then?

The point being made is still valid. Try reading the rest of the post?