Should the government get on and raise fees?

For the former new VP Education Alex Stanley said that students must not be expected to foot the bill for the university funding crisis:

Increasing tuition fees would only up the debt burden on students, especially those from the poorest backgrounds, and further punish students who are investing in their futures and the future of the country.

And for UCU’s Jo Grady, it’s those with the deepest pockets, not students, that should pay:

Students already face up to 40 years of forced debt repayments and must not be saddled with even higher fees.

Of course it’s only “students” that pay upfront that would be hit – it’s graduates that will pay. And in a system with a repayment threshold and a write off period, it’s the richest of them that will pay it.

You can see why they’re saying what they’re saying – both want a publicly funded HE system. But the downside to the approach is that it plays into the idea that it’s the sticker price that matters – when it hasn’t for a long time.

And in a system where the bulk of tuition funding comes in that form, it has the downside of both staff and students campaigning on a headline of less investment in higher education – even if the subheading always includes a call for public funding.

It also allows ministers to get away with saying things like “to help tackle cost of living we’re freezing fees again”. Something must be up if UCU and NUS’ headline reaction to fee increases is almost identical to that of the last 5 universities ministers.

When the post-2012 Plan 2 was a thing, one of my favourite wind-ups when presenting on this sort of stuff at events was to argue to student leaders that tuition fees really ought to go up to £15,000.

It pretty much would have only impacted rich men in their fifties – and students would have enjoyed a radically better education as a result.

For a quick look at how each system impacts lifetime repayments by eventual earnings decile, here’s a comparison:

The steepening of the Yellow, Orange and Green lines is all about cutting the repayment threshold – a big impact on poorer graduates, and something that UCU and NUS barely peeped over.

The flattening off of the Orange and Green lines is the cutting of student interest to just RPI.

The Yellow line is a weird outlier, when in 2012 Michelle Donelan froze the repayment threshold but hadn’t yet cut interest. Middle lifetime earners in that cohort get to pay most of all.

The Orange line is what happens if you take fees of £9,250 and raise them to £9,750.

In comparison to the 40 year term and the low repayment threshold (Scotland’s is now £31,395, for example), it barely touches the sides.