Further to the discussion of university fees. Found this posting by someone which deserves to be saved from oblivion.
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The top-up fees argument has had an extraordinary effect on politics in the UK. I find it quite baffling. As somebody who organised more occupations, marches and mass-whatevers than Che Guevara on this and associated issues over the years, I don't particularly want to go back through it all again (the argument hasn't really moved on since 1993 when Labour first started considering the relative merits of graduate taxes, income-contingent loans, etc.)
Nobody has ever reasonably explained to me the argument that, if graduates earn more money (and on average they do) why it is fairer to charge all graduates who earn over an average wage, rather than charge those graduates who earn the highest wages, through taxing the wealthy, as well as charging non-graduate rich people who benefit from graduates' skills?
If the cost is not exorbitant for graduates who have reached the magic income (a tiny proportion of society) then it would be negligable across general taxation. Indeed it IS so - and there's the key point.
The truth is that the loans and fees argument is based on a string of lies. The key ones are:
a) fees pay for undergraduate tuition (they don't, never have, never will).
b)This will cost the taxpayer much less (it won't, and never was going to).
It, like PFI, is an accountant's dodge, and nothing more.
A number of the universities in the UK have held the government to ransom on funding, and the government has long planned to avoid borrowing (other than 'to invest' where a return is clear).
A loan - even though the return is income contingent and much of it will never come back - does little or nothing to save tax-payers money today or any other time, but appears on a different column on the budget and means Brown can meet his iron laws, the UK can meet the Euro convergence criteria, and students can be in huge amounts of debt at the start of their working lives.
I feel strongly about it, because I know I could never have done my MA and PhD if I had had the sorts of undergraduate debts people who have followed me have been lumbered with.
And, while those qualifications have had negligible effect on my income, I do consider them to be important.
That the government have realised the effect that their policies were having on student poverty and made concessions is not really something to go wild with enthusiasm about.
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