This article is more than 6 years old

Are headline writers getting it wrong on fees?

As the nation's press runs away with stories on tuition fees, Steven Jones argues that much of the subtleties of the system - both its faults and benefits - are being lost in the debate.
This article is more than 6 years old

Steven Jones is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Manchester

Yesterday’s briefing by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (Higher Education Funding in England: Past, Present and Options for the Future) was covered in the same way by most of the national press. “Three quarters of graduates will never pay off student debts” ran the headline the Independent. Coverage in the Times was almost indistinguishable. The Mirror did little more than capitalise its NEVER, and the Telegraph headline merely framed the 77.4% figure as “almost eight in ten.”

For journalists, it’s the obvious way into a complex story, a hook that ostensibly captures the current system’s flaws and rank unfairness. What better evidence of a broken model than millions of graduates weighed down with debt they’ll never earn enough to repay?

But there’s a danger that the terms of the much-anticipated national debate (as called for by Damian Green last week) will be shaped too narrowly by this statistic. While some evidence suggests that students graduating into higher levels of debt feel more anxiety than those in previous generations, the report offers other kinds of evidence that should arguably have a greater bearing on public thinking.

Indeed, to some extent, the unrepaid bit of a graduate’s debt embodies the funding model’s most progressive element. Because it kicks in when a graduate’s earnings are too low for repayment to be deemed possible, it’s effectively the government’s subsidy for HE, a solitary concession that universities might just be a public good as well as a private one. Jo Johnson hints at this when he talks about “a vital and deliberate investment in the skills base of this country”.

The problem is that the more substantive defects of the current system are trickier for newspapers to distill into a few big-font words on the front page. Take the “back-door” freeze on graduates’ opening repayment level. This not only contravened assurances that the threshold would rise with inflation, but we now learn that it costs students an average of more than £4,000 each. As the IFS briefing note explains, this is because the impact of the freeze is permanent. Over the five year period to which it initially applies, the long-run taxpayer cost is reduced from £7 billion to £5.9 billion. If extended for another five years, the government saves a further £700 million. Middle earners are hit hardest.

The 6.1% interest rate that some graduates will face come September is equally difficult to justify. For high earners, the use of RPI + 0–3% (rather than CPI + 0%) increases lifetime repayments by almost £40,000 in today’s money. A blog from Million Plus’s CEO uses adjectives like “staggering” and “usurious”.

We also need to be more mindful of those who don’t fall into the government’s go-to definition of a ‘student’. While recruitment holds firm among the young, full-time cohort, the same cannot be said of part-time or mature students. Many commentators have explained why we should avoid looking at HE participation through such a conveniently narrow lens, but policy discourse doesn’t budge, and the sector’s part-time and mature students remain largely invisible.

Claims about the graduate premium, such as Jo Johnson’s that “a degree is worth on average £250,000 in higher lifetime earnings for a woman”, should always be accompanied by an acknowledgement that subject-by-subject differentials are enormous. Other broken promises – on maintenance grants, on nurses’ bursaries – must be central to any national debate. Perhaps IFS’s most damning observations is that “incentives for universities to provide high-quality courses in return for the money they receive are surprisingly limited.”

As David Kernohan notes, the briefing should allow the sector to take a more nuanced and long-term view on HE funding in the aftermath of a heated election campaign. Our students deserve nothing less. The immediate focus of the press has been on the proportion of graduates who are projected never to earn enough that their debt is paid in full. But beneath the headlines lie a series of issues that more directly impact on equity, and potentially present greater long-term threats to students’ participation and the sector’s sustainability.

3 responses to “Are headline writers getting it wrong on fees?

  1. As far as I can tell, the student loan debt carries none of the usual add-on negatives of debt. It doesn’t count on credit ratings and there are no penalties for defaulting (i.e. being unable to repay after 30 years). As such, the fact that it doesn’t get paid off is not a bad thing at all but a positive of the system. About three quarters of students have their studies and (in some cases lives as well) subsidised by the government. Isn’t that a good thing?

    The level of interest must certainly be looked at and seems impossible to justify. Bringing it down to the level of inflation would cost a lot less than scrapping the fees entirely and be far less disruptive.

    Another important point that I would make, albeit only anecdotally, is that students do not act like they care about their debt. They are certainly conscious of it and will make mention, when complaining, that they are paying lots of money to study. But I have not seen any evidence that student attendance or engagement has increased since the fees were introduced or since they rose. From my own personal observation, students are not acting like people acutely aware that if they fail a year of studies then it will cost them significantly.

    Has anyone seen studies on this point?

  2. I’m not a fan of the current system, but its best feature is that it places an incentive on the government to maintain a healthy graduate job market.
    It always bemuses me that large sums having to be written off by the Treasury are covered as failings of the system, rather than this important feature functioning as it should. When income tax revenues decline, the press and the government don’t generally try to blame the workforce.

  3. I have just read the BBC coverage on fees. Many of the facts are correct but out of context. Yes student participation has increased with the advent of £9K a year fees but this does not mean that students do not worry about their study debt or are not risk adverse. The UK does have the highest fee levels in the world so by putting in US fees, which has a different system, into the diagram is misleading although they do state this in the text.

    One of the many stresses facing UG students is the fear of debt as researchers in the area such as Claire Callender and myself point out. Coverage also needs to be mindful of the fact that university for many 18 year olds is no longer a choice but expectation. This changes the attitude towards participation, expectations of university and engagement. Frustratingly Government, the HE sector and the media continuously focus on the short term rather than the long. Debt of the individual is not good for society or the economy. We know from recent research that English UG debt does impact on PG participation so we are undermining another market as a result. As UK debt increases helped by the study loans debt, will this lead to more years of austerity and the problems it has causes as Government tries to reduce it? And lastly, due to the different fee levels across the four countries in the UK, is it really morale to have a tripartite system of debt amongst the same generation resulting in some being advantaged over others as a result?

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