That's surprisingly interesting. Lewis comes off well. Badenoch gets her facts wrong and seems evasive at times, but broadly gets a strong message over. Is she, however, going to listen to what Lewis is saying and tweak her policy?
If its going to be a flagship offer to the youth vote, visible engagement with Lewis woukd be a sensible move
Its already better than watching Captain Pugwash on holiday in Mauritius or Zia Yusuf wearing Teresa Mays discarded outfits
It's a debate which does both credit, IMO (and I'm not much of a Kemi fan).
Lewis is right of course. Inflation plus interest rates are indeed obnoxious, but prioritising those will help only the top earning graduates. And the other justification for prioritising indexing of repayment thresholds, is that this was actually a promise attached to the loans when they were taken out.
What I'd like to see is a maximum amount of interest chargeable to loans, maybe 50% of the loan value. I'd also look at a system where only the original capital attracts interest and I'd also go back to the plan 1 system where the interest rate is linked to the bank rate rather than RPI. Finally I'd lower the fees cap to £6k and cut the number of funded places for nonsense courses or anything with the word business, management or studies in it. People who want to study those can pay uncapped fees.
We need to make university fees fairer and if that results in universities needing to live within their means better then that's probably for the best.
At the same time we need to have a rethink over what university is for in the era where entry level desk jobs have disappeared. We need more students to do medicine, dentistry, physical engineering, pure sciences or on the flip side we need more teachers, especially at primary level, more vocational careers that don't involve desk based work.
How do we get more graduates into jobs and not slavishly paying debt for a degree that will never give them any value, that's the question all parties need to answer. £15-20k worth of debt per year for a degree is extremely poor value today and unless this changes I expect our universities sector will be looking at bankruptcy much sooner than people realise.
"We need to make university fees fairer and if that results in universities needing to live within their means better then that's probably for the best."
I love the idea that Universities aren't living within their means!
Yes, university administration has grown exponentially in the past couple of decades.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
My grandson considered doing a degree in Golf Club management. In retrospect it might have proved considerably more rewarding, in terms of job prospects than History. His father nearly had a fit at the suggestion though!
A degree in golf club management?
When I was looking at sixth form colleges, Merrist Wood had a stand at the college fair at my school. They offered a course on green keeping that included getting to play golf regularly.
My friends and I were all up for it but told no in no uncertain terms.
But that was further education not higher education, so would have been great for someone not keen on academic subjects.
Greenkeeping is the “trade” of working on the course itself. Looking at grass types, planting and mowing schedules etc.
A degreee in “golf course management” is just another hospitality degree but with a golf element rather than a hotel element.
If you work at a golf club you’ll get free golf though, I did bar work as a student and played every couple of days. At a local golf club, not the Belfry.
Oh yes, what Merrist Wood were offering was a proper course that was very useful in the West Surrey area considering the number of golf courses around.
Hyper, aggressive, arrogant, never wrong, knows best
Every problem is somebody else's fault. No responsibility for past Tory policy.
Unable to answer in any detail, just attacking anybody, everybody.
I doubt any swing or undecided voter is ever going to listen to that and think she is in any way credible.
Kemi is like Thatcher in the sense she would cross the road to have an argument with someone, she doesn't quite have Thatcher's gravitas and intelligence and style though
Mrs Thatcher was widely regarded as a lightweight until she gained ex officio bottom in Number 10. Kemi will benefit similarly.
Relative to Heath or Callaghan maybe in never having held a great office of state but she had an Oxford degree, unlike Kemi and was an ex barrister, the ultimate establishment profession whereas Kemi was a computer science engineer
Kemi could do a lot better than to engage with Lewis and his team offline to work through possible solutions.
There’s two distinct problems; what to do with student finance going forward, and what to do with the legacy loans (many of which have been sold off).
As Martin Lewis says - its easy for him as he doesn't have to get elected and then make hard choices.
As a nation we face questions about how to fund university in a changing world, how many kids should go, what they should study, should we be forced by finances to prioritise overseas students (who pay more) than home? No easy answers.
IMHO if ever there was an industry rife for disruption by technology it’s higher education.
The materials are all online, exams and grading for most classroom-based courses is not particularly expensive to do.
What the universities are actually selling at the moment, is scarcity via admissions and the networking opportunities.
The biggest change, for my daughter's course, from when I went to university, is the collapse in individual engagement. The amount of face to face time for students and their teachers seems to be hitting rock bottom.
My son was certainly very unhappy with his son's experience, when compared to his own. Covid didn't help, of course and History, which my grandson read is much more of a 'read' than electronic engineering, which my son studied. But there wasn't, or certainly, didn't seem to be, the social interaction, with lecturers as well as other students, which my son recalled.
Its quite complicated. In 2020 about now we were all staring down the barrel and starting to think about wfh, and what assessment might look like and how we might do it. We got through to the end of that academic year, and I think none of the students already at Uni had any complaints - it was a national crisis.
2020 intake though -yes, they were sold the dream of Uni life and then very rapidly got locked into their on campus rooms with purely online/recorded content etc. Not great (although I would be interested to know how many of those claiming against their Unis followed the social distancing etc 100% - anecdotally Bath's campus was full of parties, a lot of the time. I don't blame them). We basically tried to deliver what we could but workshops and labs were really hard. I recall one student at the start of labs (in person) saying it was like meeting a TV star when she met met. Not my good looks etc but because that's all she had seen of me - on the PC screen.
So after year 1 for those guys, our course at Bath (very specifically pharmacy) was pretty much back to normal. It has to be - placements and in person clinical training are crucial. Our students have consistently praised us for our quick return to normality (with adjustments).
I guess if other places and courses have stuck to more online modes there will be more to grumble about.
Lastly - students also bar some responsibility. Last week I ran three 2 h workshops (in person) that I tried to run during covid. During covid it was almost impossible to engage the students. Most refused to turn on cameras, and it was hard work. In person I was constantly helping students with questions. Sometimes you get out what you put in.
And lastly - one of the reasons why a student may get less face to face time is the expansion of student numbers, often coupled with a reduction in staff headcount. Certainly the case here.
And wider adoption of the Oxbridge model where most of the teaching is done by postgrads or specialist tutors rather than researchers.
On Covid, I dimly recall meeting a chemistry student who'd had a post-pandemic bootcamp-type lab course to make up for all those missed practicals.
I'm not surprised by the latter. Chemistry courses accreditation will specify an amount of lab work that the students will need to have completed.
I was involved in some of the chemistry provision. We had a huge lab space (say 30 fume hoods) that was superbly ventilated (turn over of air with the fume hoods is huge). We were made to wear plastic face visors and try to keep apart as much as possible. I laugh at it now - the real issues with covid were not droplet spread but aerosols and the volume of air being turned over would have made that lab as safe as being outside!
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
I’m on Plan 1. Most of the discussion is about Plan 2 or later with much higher debts.
I was also on plan 1, graduated in 2011 so just missed plan 2. I paid it off last year, but didn't have the postgraduate loan. Was not a joy to pay, but at least there was an end in sight, moving back to a plan 1 set-up and reducing the Micky mouse courses seems the best way to go.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
It's not just the tax, it's the debt. Earn good money and get hit by a de facto tax. Earn rubbish money and you've got a lifetime of debt hanging over your head.
The problem was fees were never linked to earnings premium. Law or Economics or Medicine at a Russell Group University should always have had far higher fees than say creative arts or English at a low ranked university but the fee was always the same regardless of course or university
No, that is another problem and illustrates my earlier point that university is a finishing school, not a trade school. That is why there is an earnings premium to some universities rather than courses. Boris got the Telegraph job after the Times sacked him because he read Classics at Oxford, not because he read Classics.
ETA destroying the old school tie (college scarf) would be the best thing any party could do for the economy. Recruit people on merit!
Had Boris read Law at Oxford though and become a KC or Economics at Cambridge and become a partner at Goldmans or Chairman or CEO of a big company he would likely have earnt even more than he did at the Times and Telegraph before he became an MP.
To get into Oxbridge now you need A*AA or higher on average in terms of A level grades. So they do now recruit on merit, Oxbridge degrees are prestigious as they are the universities hardest to get into in terms of grades and interview performance
You are expanding and repeating the same point. There should not be an institutional premium. That there is, and it is so large, is harmful.
Employers should recruit on merit. Wasn't it Google who crunched the numbers and found their top tech workers did not come from Ivy League colleges?
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
It's neither thing, but some weird hybrid which has features of both.
For the higher earners, it's a loan which may end up being paid off; for those at the other end, it will be effectively a 9% additional tax on a slice of their earnings for the next three (or four) decades (and 15% for those who also took out postgrad loans).
That's surprisingly interesting. Lewis comes off well. Badenoch gets her facts wrong and seems evasive at times, but broadly gets a strong message over. Is she, however, going to listen to what Lewis is saying and tweak her policy?
If its going to be a flagship offer to the youth vote, visible engagement with Lewis woukd be a sensible move
Its already better than watching Captain Pugwash on holiday in Mauritius or Zia Yusuf wearing Teresa Mays discarded outfits
It's a debate which does both credit, IMO (and I'm not much of a Kemi fan).
Lewis is right of course. Inflation plus interest rates are indeed obnoxious, but prioritising those will help only the top earning graduates. And the other justification for prioritising indexing of repayment thresholds, is that this was actually a promise attached to the loans when they were taken out.
What I'd like to see is a maximum amount of interest chargeable to loans, maybe 50% of the loan value. I'd also look at a system where only the original capital attracts interest and I'd also go back to the plan 1 system where the interest rate is linked to the bank rate rather than RPI. Finally I'd lower the fees cap to £6k and cut the number of funded places for nonsense courses or anything with the word business, management or studies in it. People who want to study those can pay uncapped fees.
We need to make university fees fairer and if that results in universities needing to live within their means better then that's probably for the best.
At the same time we need to have a rethink over what university is for in the era where entry level desk jobs have disappeared. We need more students to do medicine, dentistry, physical engineering, pure sciences or on the flip side we need more teachers, especially at primary level, more vocational careers that don't involve desk based work.
How do we get more graduates into jobs and not slavishly paying debt for a degree that will never give them any value, that's the question all parties need to answer. £15-20k worth of debt per year for a degree is extremely poor value today and unless this changes I expect our universities sector will be looking at bankruptcy much sooner than people realise.
It's not helped by the UK graduate premium in terms of pay now becoming one of the lowest in the developed world.
On the plus side our minimum wage is one of the better ones in the developed world
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
I’m on Plan 1. Most of the discussion is about Plan 2 or later with much higher debts.
I was also on plan 1, graduated in 2011 so just missed plan 2. I paid it off last year, but didn't have the postgraduate loan. Was not a joy to pay, but at least there was an end in sight, moving back to a plan 1 set-up and reducing the Micky mouse courses seems the best way to go.
The issue is whether you’re ever out of work. My Plan 1 loan is still high because I took 2 years out to do a career change and then another 1.5 years on minimum wage as part of that. Meanwhile compound interest did what it does
Hyper, aggressive, arrogant, never wrong, knows best
Every problem is somebody else's fault. No responsibility for past Tory policy.
Unable to answer in any detail, just attacking anybody, everybody.
I doubt any swing or undecided voter is ever going to listen to that and think she is in any way credible.
Kemi is like Thatcher in the sense she would cross the road to have an argument with someone, she doesn't quite have Thatcher's gravitas and intelligence and style though
God help the Tories in a 6 week GE campaign with that style.
She's going to end up arguing with everyone and just being seen as someone with a serious behavioural problem.
I'm no Vine fan but he hit the nail on the head when he suggested she became very tetchy the minute she was asked about past Tory policy.
She was after all an MP for 10 years and a junior Minister for 7 years.
In the midst of it.
We get it
You do not like Kemi, and it seems to have taken over your mindset so much so that you have a strange need to denigrate her in so many of your contributions
Frankly, I have no doubt that she has more important things to think about than a raging left winger who would not vote for her anyway
She leads Farage and absolutely tanks Starmer in approvals, and this is a 3 year project that will see her take on labour at the next GE
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive ey xtra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
It's not just the tax, it's the debt. Earn good money and get hit by a de facto tax. Earn rubbish money and you've got a lifetime of debt hanging over your head.
The problem was fees were never linked to earnings premium. Law or Economics or Medicine at a Russell Group University should always have had far higher fees than say creative arts or English at a low ranked university but the fee was always the same regardless of course or university
No, that is another problem and illustrates my earlier point that university is a finishing school, not a trade school. That is why there is an earnings premium to some universities rather than courses. Boris got the Telegraph job after the Times sacked him because he read Classics at Oxford, not because he read Classics.
ETA destroying the old school tie (college scarf) would be the best thing any party could do for the economy. Recruit people on merit!
Had Boris read Law at Oxford though and become a KC or Economics at Cambridge and become a partner at Goldmans or Chairman or CEO of a big company he would likely have earnt even more than he did at the Times and Telegraph before he became an MP.
To get into Oxbridge now you need A*AA or higher on average in terms of A level grades. So they do now recruit on merit, Oxbridge degrees are prestigious as they are the universities hardest to get into in terms of grades and interview performance
You are expanding and repeating the same point. There should not be an institutional premium. That there is, and it is so large, is harmful.
Employers should recruit on merit. Wasn't it Google who crunched the numbers and found their top tech workers did not come from Ivy League colleges?
Why shouldn't there be? If a university has the highest admission grades it will have the highest average earnings premium in turn.
Now tech even in the UK has never been Oxbridge exclusive, and the likes of IT Imperial for example will also be very hard to get into and also see lots of grads from there join Google with high grades.
MIT or Cal Tech in the US will have lots of grads at Google but while not being Ivy League also have high entry grades
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
If the interest rate were set at CPI, this "Schrodinger's loan" uncertainty wouldn't matter so much. I've a lifetime in pensions and tax and am very comfortable with concepts of inflation, of opportunity costs, of probabilities, etc etc and yet I still struggled to advise my kids on whether to take the loans and then whether to pay them off early.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
I’m on Plan 1. Most of the discussion is about Plan 2 or later with much higher debts.
I was also on plan 1, graduated in 2011 so just missed plan 2. I paid it off last year, but didn't have the postgraduate loan. Was not a joy to pay, but at least there was an end in sight, moving back to a plan 1 set-up and reducing the Micky mouse courses seems the best way to go.
The issue is whether you’re ever out of work. My Plan 1 loan is still high because I took 2 years out to do a career change and then another 1.5 years on minimum wage as part of that. Meanwhile compound interest did what it does
Exactly, and compound interest is not only a gift but a curse too.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
For most people under more recent schemes it behaves like a tax (linked to income, for a fixed period rather than until paid off). It differs in that you can pay it off and stop paying, but it differs from just about every other loan in being income related.
Isn't the not a tax thing mainly to, in theory, not absolve those working abroad after graduation (although in practice they don't pay, generally, I should think). Cynically, it's also far better value for those with wealthy parents (no loan means no tax) or the highest earners (can repay, repay less than they would if taxed at the same rate).
Hyper, aggressive, arrogant, never wrong, knows best
Every problem is somebody else's fault. No responsibility for past Tory policy.
Unable to answer in any detail, just attacking anybody, everybody.
I doubt any swing or undecided voter is ever going to listen to that and think she is in any way credible.
Kemi is like Thatcher in the sense she would cross the road to have an argument with someone, she doesn't quite have Thatcher's gravitas and intelligence and style though
Mrs Thatcher was widely regarded as a lightweight until she gained ex officio bottom in Number 10. Kemi will benefit similarly.
Relative to Heath or Callaghan maybe in never having held a great office of state but she had an Oxford degree, unlike Kemi and was an ex barrister, the ultimate establishment profession whereas Kemi was a computer science engineer
Like Tony Blair, Mrs Thatcher's legal career is best glossed over. She was a junior tax barrister who, according to one account, was long on sympathising with clients facing huge tax burdens, but short on legal stratagems to reduce them.
On Oxford, yes, I've always advocated on pb that only Oxfordians should be considered in party leadership races. That is how I won £2,500 on Liz Truss, the same again on Rishi, and nothing on Kemi. Sorry for the aftertiming.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
I’m on Plan 1. Most of the discussion is about Plan 2 or later with much higher debts.
I was also on plan 1, graduated in 2011 so just missed plan 2. I paid it off last year, but didn't have the postgraduate loan. Was not a joy to pay, but at least there was an end in sight, moving back to a plan 1 set-up and reducing the Micky mouse courses seems the best way to go.
The issue is whether you’re ever out of work. My Plan 1 loan is still high because I took 2 years out to do a career change and then another 1.5 years on minimum wage as part of that. Meanwhile compound interest did what it does
Yes very true. We did have the luck of 10 years of pretty low interest rates. I would not have been able to shift it so quickly if I'd graduated with the interest rates and inflation of the last few years.
Hi @MartinSLewis, thank you. I really appreciate that, and honestly, don’t worry. I do love a feisty debate! It helps people understand what the real issues are.
You and I agree on the principle: student loans have become a scam.
It took me eight years to pay mine off. I made my last payment in 2011, and I remember how happy I was, and my debt was only £14,000. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a young person with £40,000 debt today.
Whatever the Coalition government brought in back in 2012, it’s clearly not working for the world of 2026. So I’d genuinely love to come on your show and debate my plan vs yours.
I’m putting student loans on the political agenda because we’ve got to do more for young people. It’s just one part of our New Deal For Young People.
As the opposition, Conservatives may not be able to change the law right now, certainly not without cross-party support, but we can set the agenda especially while the government seems distracted by all sorts of other things.
In the meantime, I’ll keep doing my job: setting out practical solutions and showing how we can make life in this country better, especially for young people.
Looking forward to seeing you soon.
That is refreshing and other politicians should learn the lesson
Of not listening to or engaging with an opposing point of view?
In the GMB clip - she just kept repeating, paraphrased: we must do something, my plan is something, therefore we must do my plan. If she will actually engage and listen, as suggested, then of course that is welcome.
The basic point from Lewis is that for many the loan is effectively a graduate tax - it will never be paid off. As payments are income linked (rather than debt linked) lowering an interest rate such that the debt will be smaller but will still never be paid off makes no practical difference for most graduates. The richer, who might pay it off, will be able to do so sooner at lower cost. And a greater proportion might be able to pay it off. But for those who cannot it makes no difference whatsoever.
(Full disclosure: I have paid off my loan, so I have no skin in this game, at least until my kids get to that age. My wife has a loan still, so I guess that could affect us - although I'm not sure what plan hers is under)
Engaging as they have both done following the show
This is a welcome change that many could learn the lesson
If something comes from the engagement, i.e. Badenoch either changing policy or putting forward a good argument for why hers is better, acknowledging the trade offs, then I will indeed be impressed
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
One of the big things which changed that was Motorola (and others) making huge investments in setting up manufacturing in China, and then getting most of it effectively confiscated by the state. The big US offshoring mistake was with China rather than Taiwan.
The US tech panic in the 80/90s was over Japan. Which then saw decades of stagnation.
Hyper, aggressive, arrogant, never wrong, knows best
Every problem is somebody else's fault. No responsibility for past Tory policy.
Unable to answer in any detail, just attacking anybody, everybody.
I doubt any swing or undecided voter is ever going to listen to that and think she is in any way credible.
Kemi is like Thatcher in the sense she would cross the road to have an argument with someone, she doesn't quite have Thatcher's gravitas and intelligence and style though
Mrs Thatcher was widely regarded as a lightweight until she gained ex officio bottom in Number 10. Kemi will benefit similarly.
Relative to Heath or Callaghan maybe in never having held a great office of state but she had an Oxford degree, unlike Kemi and was an ex barrister, the ultimate establishment profession whereas Kemi was a computer science engineer
Like Tony Blair, Mrs Thatcher's legal career is best glossed over. She was a junior tax barrister who, according to one account, was long on sympathising with clients facing huge tax burdens, but short on legal stratagems to reduce them.
On Oxford, yes, I've always advocated on pb that only Oxfordians should be considered in party leadership races. That is how I won £2,500 on Liz Truss, the same again on Rishi, and nothing on Kemi. Sorry for the aftertiming.
John Major is the only non Oxford educated Tory leadership candidate who has beaten an Oxford graduate for his party's leadership in the final round, as he did to beat Oxonian Heseltine in 1990. He also beat Oxford educated Redwood in 1995.
Labour has seen it thrice though, Jim Callaghan was a non Oxford educated Labour leadership candidate who beat an Oxford graduate when he beat Foot for the Labour leadership in the final round in 1976. Cardiff educated Kinnock beat Oxford educated Benn in 1988 too. Glasgow educated John Smith defeated Oxford educated Bryan Gould in 1992 as well.
On fees, FWIW, I'd rather see them either paid from general taxation (but the government can set quotas for funded places on particular subjects, to subsidise needed skills) or a general graduate tax (at a lower rate than 9%, which would presumably be possible with a wider base). Myself included in the latter, even though I've paid off my loan, and also those who never had fees in the first place.
ETA: Maybe with adjustment based on repayments already made, to adjust the tax rate. But that would get complicated.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
I’m on Plan 1. Most of the discussion is about Plan 2 or later with much higher debts.
I was also on plan 1, graduated in 2011 so just missed plan 2. I paid it off last year, but didn't have the postgraduate loan. Was not a joy to pay, but at least there was an end in sight, moving back to a plan 1 set-up and reducing the Micky mouse courses seems the best way to go.
The issue is whether you’re ever out of work. My Plan 1 loan is still high because I took 2 years out to do a career change and then another 1.5 years on minimum wage as part of that. Meanwhile compound interest did what it does
Yes very true. We did have the luck of 10 years of pretty low interest rates. I would not have been able to shift it so quickly if I'd graduated with the interest rates and inflation of the last few years.
Indeed. My student loan statement shows several months at 0.25%. Until the post-covid period it was gently inflating away...
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
It's neither thing, but some weird hybrid which has features of both.
For the higher earners, it's a loan which may end up being paid off; for those at the other end, it will be effectively a 9% additional tax on a slice of their earnings for the next three (or four) decades (and 15% for those who also took out postgrad loans).
One of the many unfortunate features of the present system is that well heeled families can essentially provide that their offspring have a significantly lower rate of tax through most of their working lives making it easier to get a mortgage or a car loan or a holiday. I appreciate this happens because the parents or grandparents have forked out but we end up with a very divided society favouring the wealthy.
Hyper, aggressive, arrogant, never wrong, knows best
Every problem is somebody else's fault. No responsibility for past Tory policy.
Unable to answer in any detail, just attacking anybody, everybody.
I doubt any swing or undecided voter is ever going to listen to that and think she is in any way credible.
Kemi is like Thatcher in the sense she would cross the road to have an argument with someone, she doesn't quite have Thatcher's gravitas and intelligence and style though
Mrs Thatcher was widely regarded as a lightweight until she gained ex officio bottom in Number 10. Kemi will benefit similarly.
Relative to Heath or Callaghan maybe in never having held a great office of state but she had an Oxford degree, unlike Kemi and was an ex barrister, the ultimate establishment profession whereas Kemi was a computer science engineer
Like Tony Blair, Mrs Thatcher's legal career is best glossed over. She was a junior tax barrister who, according to one account, was long on sympathising with clients facing huge tax burdens, but short on legal stratagems to reduce them.
On Oxford, yes, I've always advocated on pb that only Oxfordians should be considered in party leadership races. That is how I won £2,500 on Liz Truss, the same again on Rishi, and nothing on Kemi. Sorry for the aftertiming.
A computer service engineer.
I'm sorry that's HR speak for "turn your computer off count to 10 and switch it back on and if that doesn't work call back"
We do know she's computer literate.
She is a self confessed Web hacker
She's not as her "I'm an engineer " tone suggests an engineer on manufacturing, design, construction etc.
The matter of a university place in the USA and her claims remain completely unanswered
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
It's neither thing, but some weird hybrid which has features of both.
For the higher earners, it's a loan which may end up being paid off; for those at the other end, it will be effectively a 9% additional tax on a slice of their earnings for the next three (or four) decades (and 15% for those who also took out postgrad loans).
One of the many unfortunate features of the present system is that well heeled families can essentially provide that their offspring have a significantly lower rate of tax through most of their working lives making it easier to get a mortgage or a car loan or a holiday. I appreciate this happens because the parents or grandparents have forked out but we end up with a very divided society favouring the wealthy.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
If the interest rate were set at CPI, this "Schrodinger's loan" uncertainty wouldn't matter so much. I've a lifetime in pensions and tax and am very comfortable with concepts of inflation, of opportunity costs, of probabilities, etc etc and yet I still struggled to advise my kids on whether to take the loans and then whether to pay them off early.
If you can pay their fees in cash, do it
If they’re studying for something that absolutely requires a degree, such as medicine or engineering, then take the loans.
If they’re studying something that expects to get them into the top 1% (£100k/year) within a decade, then let them get the loans.
There’s a load of white-collar jobs in accounting, law, IT, that don’t require a degree for entry-level positions.
If they’re in any way practical, and might benefit from learning a trade at 18, then pass them down that route. They can always change paths later.
If they’re not sure what they want to do with life, then advise them to think carefully before committing to what’s half a mortgage aged 21.
If they’re just going to uni because that’s the societal expectation, then HELL NO.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Not while you still need a degree to become a doctor, surgeon, lawyer, teacher, academic, Vicar, even a nurse or senior police officer now.
If you want to be a middle manager or in admin or work on an IT service desk there may not be many jobs not automated to graduate into anyway, so some would be better off starting their own niche small business
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I remember 1981 Thatchers ratings may not have been as bad as Starmer's but visceral hatred was off the scale. Them came Falklands and Michael Foot
Badenoch is no Foot in terms of oratory or respect but politically she will tank on personality.
If economic situation improves it's possible Starmer may go, Reeves could stay or The architect of most of it Darren Jones could be in number 10 or number 11
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
Yet being the operative word.
I think in a decades time they will be like one of TSE’s Stepmoms.
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
If you want some extra colour for your article, then read this open letter to Xi, from the founder of Taiwan's second largest chip manufacturer (they also have a fab in Tainan). It's quite... something.
Hi @MartinSLewis, thank you. I really appreciate that, and honestly, don’t worry. I do love a feisty debate! It helps people understand what the real issues are.
You and I agree on the principle: student loans have become a scam.
It took me eight years to pay mine off. I made my last payment in 2011, and I remember how happy I was, and my debt was only £14,000. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a young person with £40,000 debt today.
Whatever the Coalition government brought in back in 2012, it’s clearly not working for the world of 2026. So I’d genuinely love to come on your show and debate my plan vs yours.
I’m putting student loans on the political agenda because we’ve got to do more for young people. It’s just one part of our New Deal For Young People.
As the opposition, Conservatives may not be able to change the law right now, certainly not without cross-party support, but we can set the agenda especially while the government seems distracted by all sorts of other things.
In the meantime, I’ll keep doing my job: setting out practical solutions and showing how we can make life in this country better, especially for young people.
Looking forward to seeing you soon.
That is refreshing and other politicians should learn the lesson
Of not listening to or engaging with an opposing point of view?
In the GMB clip - she just kept repeating, paraphrased: we must do something, my plan is something, therefore we must do my plan. If she will actually engage and listen, as suggested, then of course that is welcome.
The basic point from Lewis is that for many the loan is effectively a graduate tax - it will never be paid off. As payments are income linked (rather than debt linked) lowering an interest rate such that the debt will be smaller but will still never be paid off makes no practical difference for most graduates. The richer, who might pay it off, will be able to do so sooner at lower cost. And a greater proportion might be able to pay it off. But for those who cannot it makes no difference whatsoever.
(Full disclosure: I have paid off my loan, so I have no skin in this game, at least until my kids get to that age. My wife has a loan still, so I guess that could affect us - although I'm not sure what plan hers is under)
Engaging as they have both done following the show
This is a welcome change that many could learn the lesson
If something comes from the engagement, i.e. Badenoch either changing policy or putting forward a good argument for why hers is better, acknowledging the trade offs, then I will indeed be impressed
Most politicians who talk to Lewis agree to chat to him afterwards.
Hyper, aggressive, arrogant, never wrong, knows best
Every problem is somebody else's fault. No responsibility for past Tory policy.
Unable to answer in any detail, just attacking anybody, everybody.
I doubt any swing or undecided voter is ever going to listen to that and think she is in any way credible.
Kemi is like Thatcher in the sense she would cross the road to have an argument with someone, she doesn't quite have Thatcher's gravitas and intelligence and style though
Mrs Thatcher was widely regarded as a lightweight until she gained ex officio bottom in Number 10. Kemi will benefit similarly.
Relative to Heath or Callaghan maybe in never having held a great office of state but she had an Oxford degree, unlike Kemi and was an ex barrister, the ultimate establishment profession whereas Kemi was a computer science engineer
Like Tony Blair, Mrs Thatcher's legal career is best glossed over. She was a junior tax barrister who, according to one account, was long on sympathising with clients facing huge tax burdens, but short on legal stratagems to reduce them.
On Oxford, yes, I've always advocated on pb that only Oxfordians should be considered in party leadership races. That is how I won £2,500 on Liz Truss, the same again on Rishi, and nothing on Kemi. Sorry for the aftertiming.
A computer service engineer.
I'm sorry that's HR speak for "turn your computer off count to 10 and switch it back on and if that doesn't work call back"
We do know she's computer literate.
She is a self confessed Web hacker
She's not as her "I'm an engineer " tone suggests an engineer on manufacturing, design, construction etc.
The matter of a university place in the USA and her claims remain completely unanswered
Yeah, no-one cares though. I had thought this was my own conclusion but apparently it is due to Balfour – Nothing matters very much, and most things don't matter at all.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
JEEZ, grow up
Is there a degree course in Remote Insults. Extra credit for distance and qualified invective, not just the standard PB stuff.
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
It was the peak of the Outsourcing Mania.
I recall one “high level investment advisor” who became almost incoherent with rage at the idea of onshore investment in production. He wanted the CEO in question thrown out by the shareholders for “destroying the value of the company”.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
JEEZ, grow up
We will see. You are the one constantly craving validation.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
It's neither thing, but some weird hybrid which has features of both.
For the higher earners, it's a loan which may end up being paid off; for those at the other end, it will be effectively a 9% additional tax on a slice of their earnings for the next three (or four) decades (and 15% for those who also took out postgrad loans).
One of the many unfortunate features of the present system is that well heeled families can essentially provide that their offspring have a significantly lower rate of tax through most of their working lives making it easier to get a mortgage or a car loan or a holiday. I appreciate this happens because the parents or grandparents have forked out but we end up with a very divided society favouring the wealthy.
Yet another version of Sam Vimes's boots.
Indeed. When my daughter got married she kept her first flat and rented it out. The tax penalties for doing so are becoming prohibitive and she is considering giving up the landlord trope when her current tenants leave. She was asking what she might best do with the money. I found it very difficult to think of any investment that would give a better tax free return than paying off a chunk of her student debt.
It is somewhat suboptimal, from an entrepreneurial point of view, that this is the case but running a business in Scotland in particular is not a passion to be encouraged unless you see your role in life to pay for ever more public sector leeches that feed off those foolhardy enough to take it on. JM Barrie once said, "“There are few more impressive sights than a Scotsman on the make” but we live in a different country now with all such aspirations beaten out of us.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
JEEZ, grow up
Is there a degree course in Remote Insults. Extra credit for distance and qualified invective, not just the standard PB stuff.
It would have to be less than 3 years, probably less than the attention span of a gnat tbh.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
Yet being the operative word.
I think in a decades time they will be like one of TSE’s Stepmoms.
I think change is coming, no doubt about that. But its across everything, not just university. Leon's ability to comprehend what a university is and isn't seems to be limited to his exploits in the early 80's on an arts based course. He doesn't seem able to see beyond that. He's like on of those annoying people who think Unis close down over the holidays in the way schools do. No, I don't get June, July, August and most of September off.
There is also some weird, deep seated need to be right about everything. And a belief that he can become an expert by reading reddit threads for a day, in the face of discussions with genuine experts.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
Yet being the operative word.
I think in a decades time they will be like one of TSE’s Stepmoms.
There is also some weird, deep seated need to be right about everything. And a belief that he can become an expert by reading reddit threads for a day, in the face of discussions with genuine experts.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I understand the logic of why AI will kill off tertiary education, but I think people forget that it's already at least partly a "signal", rather than of actual inherent value. There are a few exceptions, but in general it's quite unusual for your degree to be much more than that.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
If you want another deep dive for your article. The Taiwanese aborigines weren't just head hunters. Around 3500 to 5000 years ago they developed sail technology (perhaps to avoid having their heads chopped off and being buried under a nascent semiconductor plant) and went on to populate an area stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island as far south as New Zealand. Maoris, Samoans, native Filipinos, Madagascans, Hawaiians and a heck of a lot more all came from there. They are the seed of the Austronesian peoples according to the Out of Taiwan theory, which is the most commonly accepted. Their Polynesian presence and influence gives Taiwan a particularly louche and bohemian tone not normally associated with Chinese societies. You may have noticed a squat and curly haired subset of the population.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
It's neither thing, but some weird hybrid which has features of both.
For the higher earners, it's a loan which may end up being paid off; for those at the other end, it will be effectively a 9% additional tax on a slice of their earnings for the next three (or four) decades (and 15% for those who also took out postgrad loans).
One of the many unfortunate features of the present system is that well heeled families can essentially provide that their offspring have a significantly lower rate of tax through most of their working lives making it easier to get a mortgage or a car loan or a holiday. I appreciate this happens because the parents or grandparents have forked out but we end up with a very divided society favouring the wealthy.
Yet another version of Sam Vimes's boots.
Indeed. When my daughter got married she kept her first flat and rented it out. The tax penalties for doing so are becoming prohibitive and she is considering giving up the landlord trope when her current tenants leave. She was asking what she might best do with the money. I found it very difficult to think of any investment that would give a better tax free return than paying off a chunk of her student debt.
It is somewhat suboptimal, from an entrepreneurial point of view, that this is the case but running a business in Scotland in particular is not a passion to be encouraged unless you see your role in life to pay for ever more public sector leeches that feed off those foolhardy enough to take it on. JM Barrie once said, "“There are few more impressive sights than a Scotsman on the make” but we live in a different country now with all such aspirations beaten out of us.
I agree with the first of that in particular. I'm considering selling my flat but I'm really struggling to find somewhere to put the money that is similarly risk-free and delivers such brilliant returns (both rent and value).
Obviously £50k would go into premium bonds. Perhaps that's the scheme that should expanded to take the heat out of the housing market.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
JEEZ, grow up
We will see. You are the one constantly craving validation.
For sure. I’m a narcissist AND an exhibitionist. It’s a flaw, much of the time
But I’m also pretty good at this extrapolation business. Can you honestly not see the existential menace heading your way?
It’s a perfect storm for you guys. Sorry
On the upside practical STEM subjects at a respectable uni like Bath will be amongst the last to go. Which is a sort of positive, because I wish you no ill! Indeed I think it’s’ really sad - the end of the university. But it is now within view
That's presumably the provisional proposal. Now we will have to see what Starmer and Reeves' backbenchers think of it. My guess is that they will want something more generous.
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
If you want another deep dive for your article. The Taiwanese aborigines weren't just head hunters. Around 3500 to 5000 years ago they developed sail technology (perhaps to avoid having their heads chopped off and being buried under a nascent semiconductor plant) and went on to populate an area stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island as far south as New Zealand. Maoris, Samoans, native Filipinos, Madagascans, Hawaiians and a heck of a lot more all came from there. They are the seed of the Austronesian peoples according to the Out of Taiwan theory, which is the most commonly accepted. Their Polynesian presence and influence gives Taiwan a particularly louche and bohemian tone not normally associated with Chinese societies. You may have noticed a squat and curly haired subset of the population.
I know a small amount about Taiwan and did not know that. That's fascinating. @Leon, have you noticed any Polynesian-looking types? This strikes me as a subject ripe for covering in a popular and engaging history. Any recommendations of such?
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
It's neither thing, but some weird hybrid which has features of both.
For the higher earners, it's a loan which may end up being paid off; for those at the other end, it will be effectively a 9% additional tax on a slice of their earnings for the next three (or four) decades (and 15% for those who also took out postgrad loans).
One of the many unfortunate features of the present system is that well heeled families can essentially provide that their offspring have a significantly lower rate of tax through most of their working lives making it easier to get a mortgage or a car loan or a holiday. I appreciate this happens because the parents or grandparents have forked out but we end up with a very divided society favouring the wealthy.
Yet another version of Sam Vimes's boots.
Indeed. When my daughter got married she kept her first flat and rented it out. The tax penalties for doing so are becoming prohibitive and she is considering giving up the landlord trope when her current tenants leave. She was asking what she might best do with the money. I found it very difficult to think of any investment that would give a better tax free return than paying off a chunk of her student debt.
It is somewhat suboptimal, from an entrepreneurial point of view, that this is the case but running a business in Scotland in particular is not a passion to be encouraged unless you see your role in life to pay for ever more public sector leeches that feed off those foolhardy enough to take it on. JM Barrie once said, "“There are few more impressive sights than a Scotsman on the make” but we live in a different country now with all such aspirations beaten out of us.
I agree with the first of that in particular. I'm considering selling my flat but I'm really struggling to find somewhere to put the money that is similarly risk-free and delivers such brilliant returns (both rent and value).
Obviously £50k would go into premium bonds. Perhaps that's the scheme that should expanded to take the heat out of the housing market.
My better half has been pestering me to get into BTL constantly for about 10 years, since our kids first started uni courses and we saw how crappy the private rented sector was in the uni towns. Every now and then I print off for her a calculation showing how the global index tracker fund in her ISA and SIPP, that I chose instead, has performed against a notional HMO in those property markets. Well, 2 calculations, one that makes no allowance for agent's fees on rents, void periods, maintenance and repairs, the cost of her time chasing the agent etc, stamp duty on the way in, agent's fees on the way out, one that does.
Residential property is an illiquid investment with massive ongoing costs, and landlords are everyone's favourite whipping boy now. The political sensitivity makes me think it is at least as risky as equities but with much worse liquidity and very difficult to put in a tax wrapper.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I understand the logic of why AI will kill off tertiary education, but I think people forget that it's already at least partly a "signal", rather than of actual inherent value. There are a few exceptions, but in general it's quite unusual for your degree to be much more than that.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
There are so many great quotes in the Dune books but one of my favourites is about the young Jessica and her training as a Bene Gesserit. It said, from memory, that the first thing that they got taught was how to learn.
All good University courses should teach this. The ability to remember lots of facts is occasionally useful but the real skill is to learn how to think and analyse in the area you are studying. What are the relevant questions? What are the key factors that can change things? What is missing from the picture being painted?
University courses that teach how to parrot facts are of course doomed, they have been since the internet was invented and it is surprising so many still exist. But to be taught how to think, that is a precious thing.
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
If you want another deep dive for your article. The Taiwanese aborigines weren't just head hunters. Around 3500 to 5000 years ago they developed sail technology (perhaps to avoid having their heads chopped off and being buried under a nascent semiconductor plant) and went on to populate an area stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island as far south as New Zealand. Maoris, Samoans, native Filipinos, Madagascans, Hawaiians and a heck of a lot more all came from there. They are the seed of the Austronesian peoples according to the Out of Taiwan theory, which is the most commonly accepted. Their Polynesian presence and influence gives Taiwan a particularly louche and bohemian tone not normally associated with Chinese societies. You may have noticed a squat and curly haired subset of the population.
Sometimes that's just Han grannies with perms though :-)
My partner is a quarter plains aboriginal, but looks Han just with wider eyes. He has an Antecubital Ahn’s Line which he claims is typical for them.
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
If you want another deep dive for your article. The Taiwanese aborigines weren't just head hunters. Around 3500 to 5000 years ago they developed sail technology (perhaps to avoid having their heads chopped off and being buried under a nascent semiconductor plant) and went on to populate an area stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island as far south as New Zealand. Maoris, Samoans, native Filipinos, Madagascans, Hawaiians and a heck of a lot more all came from there. They are the seed of the Austronesian peoples according to the Out of Taiwan theory, which is the most commonly accepted. Their Polynesian presence and influence gives Taiwan a particularly louche and bohemian tone not normally associated with Chinese societies. You may have noticed a squat and curly haired subset of the population.
I know a small amount about Taiwan and did not know that. That's fascinating. @Leon, have you noticed any Polynesian-looking types? This strikes me as a subject ripe for covering in a popular and engaging history. Any recommendations of such?
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
Yet being the operative word.
I think in a decades time they will be like one of TSE’s Stepmoms.
I think change is coming, no doubt about that. But its across everything, not just university. Leon's ability to comprehend what a university is and isn't seems to be limited to his exploits in the early 80's on an arts based course. He doesn't seem able to see beyond that. He's like on of those annoying people who think Unis close down over the holidays in the way schools do. No, I don't get June, July, August and most of September off.
There is also some weird, deep seated need to be right about everything. And a belief that he can become an expert by reading reddit threads for a day, in the face of discussions with genuine experts.
He’s not unique in that respect here, though, and I don’t mean you Sir.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
Part of the problem is that it can be either a tax and a loan, depending on if it gets paid off or not.
If it was just a tax, then fair enough, the government could just muck about with the rules on a whim.
If its a loan, then unilaterally changing the terms isn't reasonable.
The real problem is that far too many people have wasted money doing degrees which haven't added enough value to make the repayments worth it, and they are (naturally enough) fairly cheesed off about it. The villain of the peice here is one T. Blair, because it was him who had the stupid idea of sending half the population to university, despite it being fairly obvious (at least looking back with hindsight) that quite a lot of them aren't getting much of value out of it.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I understand the logic of why AI will kill off tertiary education, but I think people forget that it's already at least partly a "signal", rather than of actual inherent value. There are a few exceptions, but in general it's quite unusual for your degree to be much more than that.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
There are so many great quotes in the Dune books but one of my favourites is about the young Jessica and her training as a Bene Gesserit. It said, from memory, that the first thing that they got taught was how to learn.
All good University courses should teach this. The ability to remember lots of facts is occasionally useful but the real skill is to learn how to think and analyse in the area you are studying. What are the relevant questions? What are the key factors that can change things? What is missing from the picture being painted?
University courses that teach how to parrot facts are of course doomed, they have been since the internet was invented and it is surprising so many still exist. But to be taught how to think, that is a precious thing.
I went to a great lecture about how to get a gold medal in the Olympics. (I can be topical!) It said gold medallists had usually started taking a sport seriously at a young age, but the choice of sport didn't matter (except for gymnastics). Many only switched to their Olympic sport at a much older age. Rather, it was the experience of learning how to train that mattered.
That's presumably the provisional proposal. Now we will have to see what Starmer and Reeves' backbenchers think of it. My guess is that they will want something more generous.
Especially once the ‘charities’ have dug into it and lobbied the backbenchers who never came into politics to make a difficult decision.
The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling. For one thing, I can use Licenses to do absolutely “terrible” things to foreign countries, especially those countries that have been RIPPING US OFF for many decades, but incomprehensibly, according to the ruling, can’t charge them a License fee - BUT ALL LICENSES CHARGE FEES, why can’t the United States do so? You do a license to get a fee! The opinion doesn’t explain that, but I know the answer! The court has also approved all other Tariffs, of which there are many, and they can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used. Our incompetent supreme court did a great job for the wrong people, and for that they should be ashamed of themselves (but not the Great Three!). The next thing you know they will rule in favor of China and others, who are making an absolute fortune on Birthright Citizenship, by saying the 14th Amendment was NOT written to take care of the “babies of slaves,” which it was as proven by the EXACT TIMING of its construction, filing, and ratification, which perfectly coincided with the END OF THE CIVIL WAR. How much better can you do than that? But this supreme court will find a way to come to the wrong conclusion, one that again will make China, and various other Nations, happy and rich. Let our supreme court keep making decisions that are so bad and deleterious to the future of our Nation - I have a job to do. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
Part of the problem is that it can be either a tax and a loan, depending on if it gets paid off or not.
If it was just a tax, then fair enough, the government could just muck about with the rules on a whim.
If its a loan, then unilaterally changing the terms isn't reasonable.
The real problem is that far too many people have wasted money doing degrees which haven't added enough value to make the repayments worth it, and they are (naturally enough) fairly cheesed off about it. The villain of the peice here is one T. Blair, because it was him who had the stupid idea of sending half the population to university, despite it being fairly obvious (at least looking back with hindsight) that quite a lot of them aren't getting much of value out of it.
Lots of other OECD countries have moved to sending half their population or more to university. Seems to work fine, or better than fine, for them.
Conflict of interest statement: They pay my wages. Well... they don't I don't teach undergrads. But postgrads' tutition fees pays for the majority of my wages. Oh well, back to marking...
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I understand the logic of why AI will kill off tertiary education, but I think people forget that it's already at least partly a "signal", rather than of actual inherent value. There are a few exceptions, but in general it's quite unusual for your degree to be much more than that.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
This is a response to the Citrini article @Sandpit posted early today (which takes something like the Leon line, relating to service industries, but with rather more sophisticated analysis).
It's a valid-ish rebuttal, for now. But of course compute costs will fall significantly again, over the next few years.
This is a ridiculous stat in a ridiculous story: "The marginal cost of running an agent, had collapsed to, essentially, the cost of electricity." The marginal cost of a coding agent is not even remotely close to "the cost of electricity." These agents are absurdly expensive to use and run. Why do you think AI labs are banning people from having multiple $200 subscriptions? Because those subscriptions are heavily, heavily discounted to drive demand. Why did labs stop folks from using their subscription costs in OpenClaw? The OpenClaw guy had five max subs and was losing 20k a month building and running his amazing project (because he was retired and had the money to set in fire) before AI labs banned this practice of having multiple subs. In case you just missed it: Because these agents are expensive as hell to run. The cost of running coding agents daily on eight hour shifts is thousands of dollars a month at API pricing and that is subsidized too. My team regularly burns anywhere from 4K-8K a month across three people using the latest and greatest for an AI driven building workflow. That's not even agents running 24x7 "making money while you sleep" which is utter and total nonsense. This is one of the most spectacularly unprofitable businesses in history so far. People talking about the end of all work because this stuff runs for "pennies" cannot do even the most basic math. New NVIDIA chips don't even break even for data centers for like 24-36 months and they are basically obsolete by then. That doesn't count power and cooling and people to run it all. Imagine if your car was basically worth zero after three years? I'm so sick of these idiotic Population Bomb level stories about the end of all work and running agents for pennies. It's a mass delusion for people who can't be bothered to bust out a calculator on their phone for five seconds. https://x.com/Dan_Jeffries1/status/2025849211095314868
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
If you want another deep dive for your article. The Taiwanese aborigines weren't just head hunters. Around 3500 to 5000 years ago they developed sail technology (perhaps to avoid having their heads chopped off and being buried under a nascent semiconductor plant) and went on to populate an area stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island as far south as New Zealand. Maoris, Samoans, native Filipinos, Madagascans, Hawaiians and a heck of a lot more all came from there. They are the seed of the Austronesian peoples according to the Out of Taiwan theory, which is the most commonly accepted. Their Polynesian presence and influence gives Taiwan a particularly louche and bohemian tone not normally associated with Chinese societies. You may have noticed a squat and curly haired subset of the population.
I know a small amount about Taiwan and did not know that. That's fascinating. @Leon, have you noticed any Polynesian-looking types? This strikes me as a subject ripe for covering in a popular and engaging history. Any recommendations of such?
Not aware of any. When I lived there in the 90's my flatmate was Aborigine. He looked like a Samoan rugby player. 9 out of the 10 language branches of Austronesian still exist on Taiwan as aboriginal languages. My flatmate spoke three. And Taiwanese and Mandarin. He rented to us to improve his English. Which was his sixth best language. There were openly gay mega techno clubs and monogamy treated as an idealised intention not really as an obligation. It's still the only country in Asia with same sex marriage. All not very Chinese. Here's a short You Tube clip very briefly going into the evidence. Search Out of Taiwan for more.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
Yeah, circa £57k which is good don’t get me wrong but not very high these days in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not a salary where an extra £400 per month is not noticed, especially if kids are involved (not something I currently have).
I actually don’t mind continuing to pay off my loan for the reasons Taz has stated. I am Plan 1 plus Postgraduate Loan so the amount overall is lower but the interest rates have made it painfully long to pay off. I still have circa £27k outstanding and I graduated 13 years ago.
I am just saying that many bemoan the youth tax burden especially when it comes to kids, etc, but student loans make up a not insignificant part of that tax burden for a good 20-30 years.
If you are paying 400 a month with 27K outstanding will you not clear it in about 5-6 years? And then it won't be a graduate tax any more?
Maybe. Depends on the interest rate which is variable and whether I keep my job. I plan to overpay to clear it faster when other debts are paid off.
Ultimately though I will be 40+ years old then. Middle aged. That would have been my entire youth subject to that heavy tax burden.
But the point is that the loans mean its NOT a graduate tax, as a graduate tax you would carry on paying forever.
The system is clearly not right at the moment, but it isn't a graduate tax.
It's neither thing, but some weird hybrid which has features of both.
For the higher earners, it's a loan which may end up being paid off; for those at the other end, it will be effectively a 9% additional tax on a slice of their earnings for the next three (or four) decades (and 15% for those who also took out postgrad loans).
One of the many unfortunate features of the present system is that well heeled families can essentially provide that their offspring have a significantly lower rate of tax through most of their working lives making it easier to get a mortgage or a car loan or a holiday. I appreciate this happens because the parents or grandparents have forked out but we end up with a very divided society favouring the wealthy.
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
In my view almost all the mistakes made by the US in semiconductors stem from one thing; arrogance. They never believed any other country could beat them, only the US could produce cutting-edge technology.
Let foreign students come and learn, their crappy countries will never be able to catch up anyway. Build fabs in China, it's a dump that can't produce anything but cheap crap without US help.
They should have known better, and it's not like the didn't have warning. Japan gave them a mighty scare in the late 70s and early 80s when they pulled the DRAM market out from under American suppliers. People forget Intel was originally a DRAM company until the Japanese out-developed them and took that market away. Intel only survived because of the accidental success of their 8086 CPU line.
The same arrogance still exists today. US vendors dominate the most advanced design sectors - CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, etc. But competition has already eaten the lower end of those markets and are working upwards. Intel and AMD design the big CPUs, but look at the cheap microcontrollers that go into basically everything now - the US is a bit player in that market. The biggest suppliers are STMicro and Infineon (Europe), Renesas (Japan), NXP (Netherlands/China), Espressif (China), etc. The US only really has TI in that market.
Some of those microcontrollers are so powerful now they're doing jobs that would have needed a full-blown CPU a decade ago, and the gap keeps narrowing.
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
I had the good fortune of getting through university by 2008, so a bit out of the loop on this stuff, but if you're paying a grad tax of £400 per month, does that not mean you're on quite good money?
We've fiscaldragged virtually every proper graduate job on to it since it was implemented.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I understand the logic of why AI will kill off tertiary education, but I think people forget that it's already at least partly a "signal", rather than of actual inherent value. There are a few exceptions, but in general it's quite unusual for your degree to be much more than that.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
There are so many great quotes in the Dune books but one of my favourites is about the young Jessica and her training as a Bene Gesserit. It said, from memory, that the first thing that they got taught was how to learn.
All good University courses should teach this. The ability to remember lots of facts is occasionally useful but the real skill is to learn how to think and analyse in the area you are studying. What are the relevant questions? What are the key factors that can change things? What is missing from the picture being painted?
University courses that teach how to parrot facts are of course doomed, they have been since the internet was invented and it is surprising so many still exist. But to be taught how to think, that is a precious thing.
I went to a great lecture about how to get a gold medal in the Olympics. (I can be topical!) It said gold medallists had usually started taking a sport seriously at a young age, but the choice of sport didn't matter (except for gymnastics). Many only switched to their Olympic sport at a much older age. Rather, it was the experience of learning how to train that mattered.
Indeed. It used to be said that at university you learned how to think in one subject, and then you'd know how to think period, in any subject. But I wonder whether students are taught how to think nowadays. (I never went to a university at all.)
The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling. For one thing, I can use Licenses to do absolutely “terrible” things to foreign countries, especially those countries that have been RIPPING US OFF for many decades, but incomprehensibly, according to the ruling, can’t charge them a License fee - BUT ALL LICENSES CHARGE FEES, why can’t the United States do so? You do a license to get a fee! The opinion doesn’t explain that, but I know the answer! The court has also approved all other Tariffs, of which there are many, and they can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used. Our incompetent supreme court did a great job for the wrong people, and for that they should be ashamed of themselves (but not the Great Three!). The next thing you know they will rule in favor of China and others, who are making an absolute fortune on Birthright Citizenship, by saying the 14th Amendment was NOT written to take care of the “babies of slaves,” which it was as proven by the EXACT TIMING of its construction, filing, and ratification, which perfectly coincided with the END OF THE CIVIL WAR. How much better can you do than that? But this supreme court will find a way to come to the wrong conclusion, one that again will make China, and various other Nations, happy and rich. Let our supreme court keep making decisions that are so bad and deleterious to the future of our Nation - I have a job to do. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling. For one thing, I can use Licenses to do absolutely “terrible” things to foreign countries, especially those countries that have been RIPPING US OFF for many decades, but incomprehensibly, according to the ruling, can’t charge them a License fee - BUT ALL LICENSES CHARGE FEES, why can’t the United States do so? You do a license to get a fee! The opinion doesn’t explain that, but I know the answer! The court has also approved all other Tariffs, of which there are many, and they can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used. Our incompetent supreme court did a great job for the wrong people, and for that they should be ashamed of themselves (but not the Great Three!). The next thing you know they will rule in favor of China and others, who are making an absolute fortune on Birthright Citizenship, by saying the 14th Amendment was NOT written to take care of the “babies of slaves,” which it was as proven by the EXACT TIMING of its construction, filing, and ratification, which perfectly coincided with the END OF THE CIVIL WAR. How much better can you do than that? But this supreme court will find a way to come to the wrong conclusion, one that again will make China, and various other Nations, happy and rich. Let our supreme court keep making decisions that are so bad and deleterious to the future of our Nation - I have a job to do. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
That's surprisingly interesting. Lewis comes off well. Badenoch gets her facts wrong and seems evasive at times, but broadly gets a strong message over. Is she, however, going to listen to what Lewis is saying and tweak her policy?
If its going to be a flagship offer to the youth vote, visible engagement with Lewis woukd be a sensible move
Its already better than watching Captain Pugwash on holiday in Mauritius or Zia Yusuf wearing Teresa Mays discarded outfits
It's a debate which does both credit, IMO (and I'm not much of a Kemi fan).
Lewis is right of course. Inflation plus interest rates are indeed obnoxious, but prioritising those will help only the top earning graduates. And the other justification for prioritising indexing of repayment thresholds, is that this was actually a promise attached to the loans when they were taken out.
What I'd like to see is a maximum amount of interest chargeable to loans, maybe 50% of the loan value. I'd also look at a system where only the original capital attracts interest and I'd also go back to the plan 1 system where the interest rate is linked to the bank rate rather than RPI. Finally I'd lower the fees cap to £6k and cut the number of funded places for nonsense courses or anything with the word business, management or studies in it. People who want to study those can pay uncapped fees.
We need to make university fees fairer and if that results in universities needing to live within their means better then that's probably for the best.
At the same time we need to have a rethink over what university is for in the era where entry level desk jobs have disappeared. We need more students to do medicine, dentistry, physical engineering, pure sciences or on the flip side we need more teachers, especially at primary level, more vocational careers that don't involve desk based work.
How do we get more graduates into jobs and not slavishly paying debt for a degree that will never give them any value, that's the question all parties need to answer. £15-20k worth of debt per year for a degree is extremely poor value today and unless this changes I expect our universities sector will be looking at bankruptcy much sooner than people realise.
It's not helped by the UK graduate premium in terms of pay now becoming one of the lowest in the developed world.
Laws of supply and demand in operation.
Increase the supply of graduates substantially (as has happened over the last 30 years), and their price will fall. I didn't need a university economics degree to figure that out either!
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
If you want another deep dive for your article. The Taiwanese aborigines weren't just head hunters. Around 3500 to 5000 years ago they developed sail technology (perhaps to avoid having their heads chopped off and being buried under a nascent semiconductor plant) and went on to populate an area stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island as far south as New Zealand. Maoris, Samoans, native Filipinos, Madagascans, Hawaiians and a heck of a lot more all came from there. They are the seed of the Austronesian peoples according to the Out of Taiwan theory, which is the most commonly accepted. Their Polynesian presence and influence gives Taiwan a particularly louche and bohemian tone not normally associated with Chinese societies. You may have noticed a squat and curly haired subset of the population.
I know a small amount about Taiwan and did not know that. That's fascinating. @Leon, have you noticed any Polynesian-looking types? This strikes me as a subject ripe for covering in a popular and engaging history. Any recommendations of such?
Not aware of any. When I lived there in the 90's my flatmate was Aborigine. He looked like a Samoan rugby player. 9 out of the 10 language branches of Austronesian still exist on Taiwan as aboriginal languages. My flatmate spoke three. And Taiwanese and Mandarin. He rented to us to improve his English. Which was his sixth best language. There were openly gay mega techno clubs and monogamy treated as an idealised intention not really as an obligation. It's still the only country in Asia with same sex marriage. All not very Chinese. Here's a short You Tube clip very briefly going into the evidence. Search Out of Taiwan for more.
Dear @KemiBadenoch, apologies for gate crashing your @GMB interview today. Student loans are so life-impacting that I wanted to ensure the key point was made - that financially, if not psychologically, the repayment threshold is a bigger issue than the interest, (as I explain here: x.com/MartinSLewis/s…)
Thank you for being so courteous after the interruption - you handled it far better than I would have the other way round. I have asked my office to request a meeting, if you are available, to discuss this more calmly.
You snivelling little git!
To be fair I watched the clip and both Lewis and Balls did pile on but Kemi kept calm and dealt with it
And fair play to Lewis for his apology and agreement for subsequent meetings to take place to improve Kemi's offer
As a conservative I am very pleased Kemi is wanting to help young people rather than just pensioners
HYUFD will be along to tell us how much better Jimmy Dimly would have handled the situation shortly.
That's surprisingly interesting. Lewis comes off well. Badenoch gets her facts wrong and seems evasive at times, but broadly gets a strong message over. Is she, however, going to listen to what Lewis is saying and tweak her policy?
If its going to be a flagship offer to the youth vote, visible engagement with Lewis woukd be a sensible move
Its already better than watching Captain Pugwash on holiday in Mauritius or Zia Yusuf wearing Teresa Mays discarded outfits
It's a debate which does both credit, IMO (and I'm not much of a Kemi fan).
Lewis is right of course. Inflation plus interest rates are indeed obnoxious, but prioritising those will help only the top earning graduates. And the other justification for prioritising indexing of repayment thresholds, is that this was actually a promise attached to the loans when they were taken out.
What I'd like to see is a maximum amount of interest chargeable to loans, maybe 50% of the loan value. I'd also look at a system where only the original capital attracts interest and I'd also go back to the plan 1 system where the interest rate is linked to the bank rate rather than RPI. Finally I'd lower the fees cap to £6k and cut the number of funded places for nonsense courses or anything with the word business, management or studies in it. People who want to study those can pay uncapped fees.
We need to make university fees fairer and if that results in universities needing to live within their means better then that's probably for the best.
At the same time we need to have a rethink over what university is for in the era where entry level desk jobs have disappeared. We need more students to do medicine, dentistry, physical engineering, pure sciences or on the flip side we need more teachers, especially at primary level, more vocational careers that don't involve desk based work.
How do we get more graduates into jobs and not slavishly paying debt for a degree that will never give them any value, that's the question all parties need to answer. £15-20k worth of debt per year for a degree is extremely poor value today and unless this changes I expect our universities sector will be looking at bankruptcy much sooner than people realise.
It's not helped by the UK graduate premium in terms of pay now becoming one of the lowest in the developed world.
Laws of supply and demand in operation.
Increase the supply of graduates substantially (as has happened over the last 30 years), and their price will fall. I didn't need a university economics degree to figure that out either!
And yet that hasn't happened in the same way elsewhere (see, for example, Canada). I think you may need to update your priors ?
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
Part of the problem is that it can be either a tax and a loan, depending on if it gets paid off or not.
If it was just a tax, then fair enough, the government could just muck about with the rules on a whim.
If its a loan, then unilaterally changing the terms isn't reasonable.
The real problem is that far too many people have wasted money doing degrees which haven't added enough value to make the repayments worth it, and they are (naturally enough) fairly cheesed off about it. The villain of the peice here is one T. Blair, because it was him who had the stupid idea of sending half the population to university, despite it being fairly obvious (at least looking back with hindsight) that quite a lot of them aren't getting much of value out of it.
Lots of other OECD countries have moved to sending half their population or more to university. Seems to work fine, or better than fine, for them.
Conflict of interest statement: They pay my wages. Well... they don't I don't teach undergrads. But postgrads' tutition fees pays for the majority of my wages. Oh well, back to marking...
It's either that too many people are doing degrees, or the degrees they are doing aren't adding enough value.
I suspect that we have a bit of a problem with both terms in this particularly equation.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
JEEZ, grow up
We will see. You are the one constantly craving validation.
For sure. I’m a narcissist AND an exhibitionist. It’s a flaw, much of the time
But I’m also pretty good at this extrapolation business. Can you honestly not see the existential menace heading your way?
It’s a perfect storm for you guys. Sorry
On the upside practical STEM subjects at a respectable uni like Bath will be amongst the last to go. Which is a sort of positive, because I wish you no ill! Indeed I think it’s’ really sad - the end of the university. But it is now within view
Most middle manager jobs, admin and IT service desk jobs will be automated and gone long before Oxbridge and most other Russell Group universities and high earning premium courses are gone.
By then no governing party will ever get elected again without backing a universal basic income backed by a robot tax anyway, so more will start to go to university again to study arts and humanities and fill the months, even years when they cannot find a full time paid job
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Not while you still need a degree to become a doctor, surgeon, lawyer, teacher, academic, Vicar, even a nurse or senior police officer now.
If you want to be a middle manager or in admin or work on an IT service desk there may not be many jobs not automated to graduate into anyway, so some would be better off starting their own niche small business
The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling. For one thing, I can use Licenses to do absolutely “terrible” things to foreign countries, especially those countries that have been RIPPING US OFF for many decades, but incomprehensibly, according to the ruling, can’t charge them a License fee - BUT ALL LICENSES CHARGE FEES, why can’t the United States do so? You do a license to get a fee! The opinion doesn’t explain that, but I know the answer! The court has also approved all other Tariffs, of which there are many, and they can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used. Our incompetent supreme court did a great job for the wrong people, and for that they should be ashamed of themselves (but not the Great Three!). The next thing you know they will rule in favor of China and others, who are making an absolute fortune on Birthright Citizenship, by saying the 14th Amendment was NOT written to take care of the “babies of slaves,” which it was as proven by the EXACT TIMING of its construction, filing, and ratification, which perfectly coincided with the END OF THE CIVIL WAR. How much better can you do than that? But this supreme court will find a way to come to the wrong conclusion, one that again will make China, and various other Nations, happy and rich. Let our supreme court keep making decisions that are so bad and deleterious to the future of our Nation - I have a job to do. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
TDDR (Too demented; didn't read.)
I did. The problem these days is that it is almost impossible to tell whether this is a pastiche, a satire or the real thing. I'm still not completely sure.
The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling. For one thing, I can use Licenses to do absolutely “terrible” things to foreign countries, especially those countries that have been RIPPING US OFF for many decades, but incomprehensibly, according to the ruling, can’t charge them a License fee - BUT ALL LICENSES CHARGE FEES, why can’t the United States do so? You do a license to get a fee! The opinion doesn’t explain that, but I know the answer! The court has also approved all other Tariffs, of which there are many, and they can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used. Our incompetent supreme court did a great job for the wrong people, and for that they should be ashamed of themselves (but not the Great Three!). The next thing you know they will rule in favor of China and others, who are making an absolute fortune on Birthright Citizenship, by saying the 14th Amendment was NOT written to take care of the “babies of slaves,” which it was as proven by the EXACT TIMING of its construction, filing, and ratification, which perfectly coincided with the END OF THE CIVIL WAR. How much better can you do than that? But this supreme court will find a way to come to the wrong conclusion, one that again will make China, and various other Nations, happy and rich. Let our supreme court keep making decisions that are so bad and deleterious to the future of our Nation - I have a job to do. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
TDDR (Too demented; didn't read.)
I did. The problem these days is that it is almost impossible to tell whether this is a pastiche, a satire or the real thing. I'm still not completely sure.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I understand the logic of why AI will kill off tertiary education, but I think people forget that it's already at least partly a "signal", rather than of actual inherent value. There are a few exceptions, but in general it's quite unusual for your degree to be much more than that.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
There are so many great quotes in the Dune books but one of my favourites is about the young Jessica and her training as a Bene Gesserit. It said, from memory, that the first thing that they got taught was how to learn.
All good University courses should teach this. The ability to remember lots of facts is occasionally useful but the real skill is to learn how to think and analyse in the area you are studying. What are the relevant questions? What are the key factors that can change things? What is missing from the picture being painted?
University courses that teach how to parrot facts are of course doomed, they have been since the internet was invented and it is surprising so many still exist. But to be taught how to think, that is a precious thing.
I went to a great lecture about how to get a gold medal in the Olympics. (I can be topical!) It said gold medallists had usually started taking a sport seriously at a young age, but the choice of sport didn't matter (except for gymnastics). Many only switched to their Olympic sport at a much older age. Rather, it was the experience of learning how to train that mattered.
Indeed. It used to be said that at university you learned how to think in one subject, and then you'd know how to think period, in any subject. But I wonder whether students are taught how to think nowadays. (I never went to a university at all.)
Students (and indeed pupils) are taught how to learn effectively. This is one reason for rampant grade inflation!
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
Yet being the operative word.
I think in a decades time they will be like one of TSE’s Stepmoms.
I think change is coming, no doubt about that. But its across everything, not just university. Leon's ability to comprehend what a university is and isn't seems to be limited to his exploits in the early 80's on an arts based course. He doesn't seem able to see beyond that. He's like on of those annoying people who think Unis close down over the holidays in the way schools do. No, I don't get June, July, August and most of September off.
There is also some weird, deep seated need to be right about everything. And a belief that he can become an expert by reading reddit threads for a day, in the face of discussions with genuine experts.
Ok I take back the pleasantries. You’re a fucking beta cuck moron and your job deserves to go. Which it will
However why does Badenoch get away with it when she was in the government that presided over the current system in the first place?
The repayment is high precisely because of what they did.
They talk about changing the terms of the loan but the Tories set the precedent for that in the first place.
Again the only people with any genuine “not our problem” are Reform and the Greens.
Reeves will clearly do something about tuition fees, just too late to get any political credit. But nobody was pointing this out when the Tories were in power, why not?
Badenoch wasn’t even in parliament when it was enacted.
Nobody pointed it out as no one realised. No we have buyers remorse so the taxpayer has to cough up for the entitled,
You clearly have no understanding of the situation. It is a tax, not a real loan. Government changes taxes all the time. If you want to promote economic activity, free the under 30s of a massive extra tax burden. Mine is currently circa. £400 per month on top of everything else.
Part of the problem is that it can be either a tax and a loan, depending on if it gets paid off or not.
If it was just a tax, then fair enough, the government could just muck about with the rules on a whim.
If its a loan, then unilaterally changing the terms isn't reasonable.
The real problem is that far too many people have wasted money doing degrees which haven't added enough value to make the repayments worth it, and they are (naturally enough) fairly cheesed off about it. The villain of the peice here is one T. Blair, because it was him who had the stupid idea of sending half the population to university, despite it being fairly obvious (at least looking back with hindsight) that quite a lot of them aren't getting much of value out of it.
I think Blair’s goal was laudable, in the sense that he sought to increase access and social mobility. The issue was badging it as a specific “going to university” aim rather than staying in post-18 education or training. Inadvertently or not, it had the effect of downplaying the importance of vocational training, which has helped reinforce the skills shortage.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
JEEZ, grow up
We will see. You are the one constantly craving validation.
For sure. I’m a narcissist AND an exhibitionist. It’s a flaw, much of the time
But I’m also pretty good at this extrapolation business. Can you honestly not see the existential menace heading your way?
It’s a perfect storm for you guys. Sorry
On the upside practical STEM subjects at a respectable uni like Bath will be amongst the last to go. Which is a sort of positive, because I wish you no ill! Indeed I think it’s’ really sad - the end of the university. But it is now within view
Most middle manager jobs, admin and IT service desk jobs will be automated and gone long before Oxbridge and most other Russell Group universities and high earning premium courses are gone.
By then no governing party will ever get elected again without backing a universal basic income backed by a robot tax anyway, so more will start to go to university again to study arts and humanities and fill the months, even years when they cannot find a full time paid job
Are you becoming a Marxist, HYUFD? As the great man said:
,,,, in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
If you want another deep dive for your article. The Taiwanese aborigines weren't just head hunters. Around 3500 to 5000 years ago they developed sail technology (perhaps to avoid having their heads chopped off and being buried under a nascent semiconductor plant) and went on to populate an area stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island as far south as New Zealand. Maoris, Samoans, native Filipinos, Madagascans, Hawaiians and a heck of a lot more all came from there. They are the seed of the Austronesian peoples according to the Out of Taiwan theory, which is the most commonly accepted. Their Polynesian presence and influence gives Taiwan a particularly louche and bohemian tone not normally associated with Chinese societies. You may have noticed a squat and curly haired subset of the population.
I know a small amount about Taiwan and did not know that. That's fascinating. @Leon, have you noticed any Polynesian-looking types? This strikes me as a subject ripe for covering in a popular and engaging history. Any recommendations of such?
Not aware of any. When I lived there in the 90's my flatmate was Aborigine. He looked like a Samoan rugby player. 9 out of the 10 language branches of Austronesian still exist on Taiwan as aboriginal languages. My flatmate spoke three. And Taiwanese and Mandarin. He rented to us to improve his English. Which was his sixth best language. There were openly gay mega techno clubs and monogamy treated as an idealised intention not really as an obligation. It's still the only country in Asia with same sex marriage. All not very Chinese. Here's a short You Tube clip very briefly going into the evidence. Search Out of Taiwan for more.
America deciding to offshore its high tech chip production to Taiwan must count as one of the stupidest unforced errors in history
America had the tech and the money and the space. Uniquely so. They could have imported the hard working East Asian people if absolutely necessary
Now they are totally dependant on an island across a mighty ocean and perilously close to America’s most potent economic and military rival, a rival which claims that island as its own, and with good reason
Tut
Wasn't it the reverse? Taiwan deliberately chose to pour energy into dominating a critical sector of technology so that the US, and others, would have a vested interest in defending them should China try anything, no?
Yep. The US did not throw away their lead in chips, it was taken from them.
The Taiwanese government recognised the importance of semiconductors early on and pumped money and effort in to supporting companies that would build fabs on the island. That led to the founding of TSMC and the smaller UMC.
Japan tried something similar, which worked for a while, but their mistake was trying to get existing domestic technology companies like NEC and Hitachi to invest in semi fabs. They did, but it wasn't a core part of their business so as soon as the industry went in to a lean period they diverted funds away to other areas and fell behind the Taiwanese.
Their one notable success was Toshiba, which heavily invested in manufacturing flash memory and became the biggest supplier in the world for a while. A financial scandal forced them to spin off their flash memory division as Kioxia, which is something like third or fourth in the market today.
There are people on here with - horror! - more experience and knowledge in this area. But I catch up fast
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
If you want another deep dive for your article. The Taiwanese aborigines weren't just head hunters. Around 3500 to 5000 years ago they developed sail technology (perhaps to avoid having their heads chopped off and being buried under a nascent semiconductor plant) and went on to populate an area stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island as far south as New Zealand. Maoris, Samoans, native Filipinos, Madagascans, Hawaiians and a heck of a lot more all came from there. They are the seed of the Austronesian peoples according to the Out of Taiwan theory, which is the most commonly accepted. Their Polynesian presence and influence gives Taiwan a particularly louche and bohemian tone not normally associated with Chinese societies. You may have noticed a squat and curly haired subset of the population.
I know a small amount about Taiwan and did not know that. That's fascinating. @Leon, have you noticed any Polynesian-looking types? This strikes me as a subject ripe for covering in a popular and engaging history. Any recommendations of such?
Not aware of any. When I lived there in the 90's my flatmate was Aborigine. He looked like a Samoan rugby player. 9 out of the 10 language branches of Austronesian still exist on Taiwan as aboriginal languages. My flatmate spoke three. And Taiwanese and Mandarin. He rented to us to improve his English. Which was his sixth best language. There were openly gay mega techno clubs and monogamy treated as an idealised intention not really as an obligation. It's still the only country in Asia with same sex marriage. All not very Chinese. Here's a short You Tube clip very briefly going into the evidence. Search Out of Taiwan for more.
The coffee culture is also reputed to be excellent. Is that so ? (Pondering a visit some time.)
Was dreadful when I lived there. The ROC government bought mountains of essentially coffee dust from Central America in exchange for diplomatic recognition. It's probably changed.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
JEEZ, grow up
We will see. You are the one constantly craving validation.
For sure. I’m a narcissist AND an exhibitionist. It’s a flaw, much of the time
But I’m also pretty good at this extrapolation business. Can you honestly not see the existential menace heading your way?
It’s a perfect storm for you guys. Sorry
On the upside practical STEM subjects at a respectable uni like Bath will be amongst the last to go. Which is a sort of positive, because I wish you no ill! Indeed I think it’s’ really sad - the end of the university. But it is now within view
Most middle manager jobs, admin and IT service desk jobs will be automated and gone long before Oxbridge and most other Russell Group universities and high earning premium courses are gone.
By then no governing party will ever get elected again without backing a universal basic income backed by a robot tax anyway, so more will start to go to university again to study arts and humanities and fill the months, even years when they cannot find a full time paid job
Are you becoming a Marxist, HYUFD? As the great man said:
,,,, in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
No, we need small business and entrepreneurs more than ever, cut tax on them. We also need specialists in their field more than ever contrary to Marx. Cut takes on companies and organisations which create well paid jobs as excellent goods and services as well.
Large corporations and organisations automating and replacing half their paid workforce though? Hammer them with a robot tax por discourager les autres, not least as we need to fund all the extra welfare benefits they are forcing us to pay!
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I understand the logic of why AI will kill off tertiary education, but I think people forget that it's already at least partly a "signal", rather than of actual inherent value. There are a few exceptions, but in general it's quite unusual for your degree to be much more than that.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
There are so many great quotes in the Dune books but one of my favourites is about the young Jessica and her training as a Bene Gesserit. It said, from memory, that the first thing that they got taught was how to learn.
All good University courses should teach this. The ability to remember lots of facts is occasionally useful but the real skill is to learn how to think and analyse in the area you are studying. What are the relevant questions? What are the key factors that can change things? What is missing from the picture being painted?
University courses that teach how to parrot facts are of course doomed, they have been since the internet was invented and it is surprising so many still exist. But to be taught how to think, that is a precious thing.
I went to a great lecture about how to get a gold medal in the Olympics. (I can be topical!) It said gold medallists had usually started taking a sport seriously at a young age, but the choice of sport didn't matter (except for gymnastics). Many only switched to their Olympic sport at a much older age. Rather, it was the experience of learning how to train that mattered.
Indeed. It used to be said that at university you learned how to think in one subject, and then you'd know how to think period, in any subject. But I wonder whether students are taught how to think nowadays. (I never went to a university at all.)
Students (and indeed pupils) are taught how to learn effectively. This is one reason for rampant grade inflation!
We should go back to the system from my day where only the top 10% of candidates were awarded an A at A Level. So anyone getting 3 As was a bit of a rarity, not the norm.
The introduction of A* was an admission of failure in the grading system.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I understand the logic of why AI will kill off tertiary education, but I think people forget that it's already at least partly a "signal", rather than of actual inherent value. There are a few exceptions, but in general it's quite unusual for your degree to be much more than that.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
There are so many great quotes in the Dune books but one of my favourites is about the young Jessica and her training as a Bene Gesserit. It said, from memory, that the first thing that they got taught was how to learn.
All good University courses should teach this. The ability to remember lots of facts is occasionally useful but the real skill is to learn how to think and analyse in the area you are studying. What are the relevant questions? What are the key factors that can change things? What is missing from the picture being painted?
University courses that teach how to parrot facts are of course doomed, they have been since the internet was invented and it is surprising so many still exist. But to be taught how to think, that is a precious thing.
I 'think' thats one of the reasons that STEM graduates are so valued in other fields. No-one expects to recall all the facts anymore (if they ever did). But learning analytical thinking etc is a transferable skill.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
It was a mistake in my opinion to have ever imposed tuition fees on university students.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I understand the logic of why AI will kill off tertiary education, but I think people forget that it's already at least partly a "signal", rather than of actual inherent value. There are a few exceptions, but in general it's quite unusual for your degree to be much more than that.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
There are so many great quotes in the Dune books but one of my favourites is about the young Jessica and her training as a Bene Gesserit. It said, from memory, that the first thing that they got taught was how to learn.
All good University courses should teach this. The ability to remember lots of facts is occasionally useful but the real skill is to learn how to think and analyse in the area you are studying. What are the relevant questions? What are the key factors that can change things? What is missing from the picture being painted?
University courses that teach how to parrot facts are of course doomed, they have been since the internet was invented and it is surprising so many still exist. But to be taught how to think, that is a precious thing.
I 'think' thats one of the reasons that STEM graduates are so valued in other fields. No-one expects to recall all the facts anymore (if they ever did). But learning analytical thinking etc is a transferable skill.
You can't think though without knowing some facts and how to analyse facts and data and make reasoned conclusions from that and on what needs to be done
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I understand the logic of why AI will kill off tertiary education, but I think people forget that it's already at least partly a "signal", rather than of actual inherent value. There are a few exceptions, but in general it's quite unusual for your degree to be much more than that.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
There are so many great quotes in the Dune books but one of my favourites is about the young Jessica and her training as a Bene Gesserit. It said, from memory, that the first thing that they got taught was how to learn.
All good University courses should teach this. The ability to remember lots of facts is occasionally useful but the real skill is to learn how to think and analyse in the area you are studying. What are the relevant questions? What are the key factors that can change things? What is missing from the picture being painted?
University courses that teach how to parrot facts are of course doomed, they have been since the internet was invented and it is surprising so many still exist. But to be taught how to think, that is a precious thing.
I went to a great lecture about how to get a gold medal in the Olympics. (I can be topical!) It said gold medallists had usually started taking a sport seriously at a young age, but the choice of sport didn't matter (except for gymnastics). Many only switched to their Olympic sport at a much older age. Rather, it was the experience of learning how to train that mattered.
Arguably desire to train too. We see in local cricket how the pre-teen kids love it, but when the hormones kick in there are SO many things they would rather do than play boring old cricket. I don't really subscribe to the 10,000 hours idea, but doing lots of what you are good at, over and over again, is surely a big part of sporting success.
I have, have I not, been saying for about 3 years - here in the snug of the Olde PB Armes - that universities as we know it are totally doomed
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
Record applications to my course this year says you are not right... yet.
I understand the logic of why AI will kill off tertiary education, but I think people forget that it's already at least partly a "signal", rather than of actual inherent value. There are a few exceptions, but in general it's quite unusual for your degree to be much more than that.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
There are so many great quotes in the Dune books but one of my favourites is about the young Jessica and her training as a Bene Gesserit. It said, from memory, that the first thing that they got taught was how to learn.
All good University courses should teach this. The ability to remember lots of facts is occasionally useful but the real skill is to learn how to think and analyse in the area you are studying. What are the relevant questions? What are the key factors that can change things? What is missing from the picture being painted?
University courses that teach how to parrot facts are of course doomed, they have been since the internet was invented and it is surprising so many still exist. But to be taught how to think, that is a precious thing.
I went to a great lecture about how to get a gold medal in the Olympics. (I can be topical!) It said gold medallists had usually started taking a sport seriously at a young age, but the choice of sport didn't matter (except for gymnastics). Many only switched to their Olympic sport at a much older age. Rather, it was the experience of learning how to train that mattered.
Indeed. It used to be said that at university you learned how to think in one subject, and then you'd know how to think period, in any subject. But I wonder whether students are taught how to think nowadays. (I never went to a university at all.)
Students (and indeed pupils) are taught how to learn effectively. This is one reason for rampant grade inflation!
We should go back to the system from my day where only the top 10% of candidates were awarded an A at A Level. So anyone getting 3 As was a bit of a rarity, not the norm.
The introduction of A* was an admission of failure in the grading system.
That depends on whether we want the grading system to identify the top 10 per cent or the ones who hold the stethoscope the right way round. The latter risks lack of discrimination, the former means nothing need be taught at all – there'd still be a top 10 per cent.
Comments
I was involved in some of the chemistry provision. We had a huge lab space (say 30 fume hoods) that was superbly ventilated (turn over of air with the fume hoods is huge). We were made to wear plastic face visors and try to keep apart as much as possible. I laugh at it now - the real issues with covid were not droplet spread but aerosols and the volume of air being turned over would have made that lab as safe as being outside!
Employers should recruit on merit. Wasn't it Google who crunched the numbers and found their top tech workers did not come from Ivy League colleges?
For the higher earners, it's a loan which may end up being paid off; for those at the other end, it will be effectively a 9% additional tax on a slice of their earnings for the next three (or four) decades (and 15% for those who also took out postgrad loans).
Plan 1 loan is still high because I took 2 years out to do a career change and then another 1.5 years on minimum wage as part of that. Meanwhile compound interest did what it does
You do not like Kemi, and it seems to have taken over your mindset so much so that you have a strange need to denigrate her in so many of your contributions
Frankly, I have no doubt that she has more important things to think about than a raging left winger who would not vote for her anyway
She leads Farage and absolutely tanks Starmer in approvals, and this is a 3 year project that will see her take on labour at the next GE
All day I’ve been deep diving this. My impression is that it is a mix of both. Yes, Taiwan showed incredible prescience (and got a bit lucky?) and partly it was agreement - Taiwan sent young men to learn in America and America was happy to teach. Also Morris Chang!
And yet America was the world leader in all this from the 50s-70s and they did kinda chuck it away. Tho you could argue: who foresaw the arrival of a genuinely potent arrival in the form of China? Even in the 90s i can recall guys like Clinton laughing at the idea of China as a genuine threat to American supremacy
Now tech even in the UK has never been Oxbridge exclusive, and the likes of IT Imperial for example will also be very hard to get into and also see lots of grads from there join Google with high grades.
MIT or Cal Tech in the US will have lots of grads at Google but while not being Ivy League also have high entry grades
Isn't the not a tax thing mainly to, in theory, not absolve those working abroad after graduation (although in practice they don't pay, generally, I should think). Cynically, it's also far better value for those with wealthy parents (no loan means no tax) or the highest earners (can repay, repay less than they would if taxed at the same rate).
On Oxford, yes, I've always advocated on pb that only Oxfordians should be considered in party leadership races. That is how I won £2,500 on Liz Truss, the same again on Rishi, and nothing on Kemi. Sorry for the aftertiming.
The big US offshoring mistake was with China rather than Taiwan.
The US tech panic in the 80/90s was over Japan. Which then saw decades of stagnation.
John Major is the only non Oxford educated Tory leadership candidate who has beaten an Oxford graduate for his party's leadership in the final round, as he did to beat Oxonian Heseltine in 1990. He also beat Oxford educated Redwood in 1995.
Labour has seen it thrice though, Jim Callaghan was a non Oxford educated Labour leadership candidate who beat an Oxford graduate when he beat Foot for the Labour leadership in the final round in 1976. Cardiff educated Kinnock beat Oxford educated Benn in 1988 too. Glasgow educated John Smith defeated Oxford educated Bryan Gould in 1992 as well.
ETA: Maybe with adjustment based on repayments already made, to adjust the tax rate. But that would get complicated.
As poor as Reeves and SKS have been I’d keep them.
They may be lucky generals with this but I remember Napoleons quote.
Possibly the most optimistic I’ve seen for a while.
https://panmureliberum.com/insights/spring-forecast-will-show-value-of-stability-long-may-it-last/
I'm sorry that's HR speak for "turn your computer off count to 10 and switch it back on and if that doesn't work call back"
We do know she's computer literate.
She is a self confessed Web hacker
She's not as her "I'm an engineer " tone suggests an engineer on manufacturing, design, construction etc.
The matter of a university place in the USA and her claims remain completely unanswered
If they’re studying for something that absolutely requires a degree, such as medicine or engineering, then take the loans.
If they’re studying something that expects to get them into the top 1% (£100k/year) within a decade, then let them get the loans.
There’s a load of white-collar jobs in accounting, law, IT, that don’t require a degree for entry-level positions.
If they’re in any way practical, and might benefit from learning a trade at 18, then pass them down that route. They can always change paths later.
If they’re not sure what they want to do with life, then advise them to think carefully before committing to what’s half a mortgage aged 21.
If they’re just going to uni because that’s the societal expectation, then HELL NO.
I am right, I was right, I am always right. No one will take on the debt any more. The courses are all online anyway. There aren’t any jobs at the end. Etc
The higher education system, as we know it, is finished. I just worked it out first, by EXTRAPOLATING
If you want to be a middle manager or in admin or work on an IT service desk there may not be many jobs not automated to graduate into anyway, so some would be better off starting their own niche small business
Badenoch is no Foot in terms of oratory or respect but politically she will tank on personality.
If economic situation improves it's possible Starmer may go, Reeves could stay or The architect of most of it Darren Jones could be in number 10 or number 11
I think in a decades time they will be like one of TSE’s Stepmoms.
It's quite... something.
Open Letter to Xi: Invasion of Taiwan Is a Dead End, Returning Power to the People Is the Right Path
https://x.com/terenceshen/status/2025391367237574727
All do, of all parties.
Some tweak policy some don't.
Nothing new or original here at all
Classic up ramping
I recall one “high level investment advisor” who became almost incoherent with rage at the idea of onshore investment in production. He wanted the CEO in question thrown out by the shareholders for “destroying the value of the company”.
It is somewhat suboptimal, from an entrepreneurial point of view, that this is the case but running a business in Scotland in particular is not a passion to be encouraged unless you see your role in life to pay for ever more public sector leeches that feed off those foolhardy enough to take it on. JM Barrie once said, "“There are few more impressive sights than a Scotsman on the make” but we live in a different country now with all such aspirations beaten out of us.
There is also some weird, deep seated need to be right about everything. And a belief that he can become an expert by reading reddit threads for a day, in the face of discussions with genuine experts.
Indeed you can sort of a imagine a world swamped by AI slop where a degree is an even more valuable signal than before. Perhaps our universities should implement an outright ban on AI to boost that signal further.
The Taiwanese aborigines weren't just head hunters.
Around 3500 to 5000 years ago they developed sail technology (perhaps to avoid having their heads chopped off and being buried under a nascent semiconductor plant) and went on to populate an area stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island as far south as New Zealand.
Maoris, Samoans, native Filipinos, Madagascans, Hawaiians and a heck of a lot more all came from there.
They are the seed of the Austronesian peoples according to the Out of Taiwan theory, which is the most commonly accepted.
Their Polynesian presence and influence gives Taiwan a particularly louche and bohemian tone not normally associated with Chinese societies.
You may have noticed a squat and curly haired subset of the population.
You need to make it special.
Obviously £50k would go into premium bonds. Perhaps that's the scheme that should expanded to take the heat out of the housing market.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c98q9j04q39t
But I’m also pretty good at this extrapolation business. Can you honestly not see the existential menace heading your way?
It’s a perfect storm for you guys. Sorry
On the upside practical STEM subjects at a respectable uni like Bath will be amongst the last to go. Which is a sort of positive, because I wish you no ill! Indeed I think it’s’ really sad - the end of the university. But it is now within view
This strikes me as a subject ripe for covering in a popular and engaging history. Any recommendations of such?
Residential property is an illiquid investment with massive ongoing costs, and landlords are everyone's favourite whipping boy now. The political sensitivity makes me think it is at least as risky as equities but with much worse liquidity and very difficult to put in a tax wrapper.
All good University courses should teach this. The ability to remember lots of facts is occasionally useful but the real skill is to learn how to think and analyse in the area you are studying. What are the relevant questions? What are the key factors that can change things? What is missing from the picture being painted?
University courses that teach how to parrot facts are of course doomed, they have been since the internet was invented and it is surprising so many still exist. But to be taught how to think, that is a precious thing.
My partner is a quarter plains aboriginal, but looks Han just with wider eyes. He has an Antecubital Ahn’s Line which he claims is typical for them.
(The number of anthropology books about Taiwan I've read is very low.)
@TheRestOfPB:
If it was just a tax, then fair enough, the government could just muck about with the rules on a whim.
If its a loan, then unilaterally changing the terms isn't reasonable.
The real problem is that far too many people have wasted money doing degrees which haven't added enough value to make the repayments worth it, and they are (naturally enough) fairly cheesed off about it. The villain of the peice here is one T. Blair, because it was him who had the stupid idea of sending half the population to university, despite it being fairly obvious (at least looking back with hindsight) that quite a lot of them aren't getting much of value out of it.
The supreme court (will be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling. For one thing, I can use Licenses to do absolutely “terrible” things to foreign countries, especially those countries that have been RIPPING US OFF for many decades, but incomprehensibly, according to the ruling, can’t charge them a License fee - BUT ALL LICENSES CHARGE FEES, why can’t the United States do so? You do a license to get a fee! The opinion doesn’t explain that, but I know the answer! The court has also approved all other Tariffs, of which there are many, and they can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the Tariffs as initially used. Our incompetent supreme court did a great job for the wrong people, and for that they should be ashamed of themselves (but not the Great Three!). The next thing you know they will rule in favor of China and others, who are making an absolute fortune on Birthright Citizenship, by saying the 14th Amendment was NOT written to take care of the “babies of slaves,” which it was as proven by the EXACT TIMING of its construction, filing, and ratification, which perfectly coincided with the END OF THE CIVIL WAR. How much better can you do than that? But this supreme court will find a way to come to the wrong conclusion, one that again will make China, and various other Nations, happy and rich. Let our supreme court keep making decisions that are so bad and deleterious to the future of our Nation - I have a job to do. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Conflict of interest statement: They pay my wages. Well... they don't I don't teach undergrads. But postgrads' tutition fees pays for the majority of my wages. Oh well, back to marking...
It's a valid-ish rebuttal, for now.
But of course compute costs will fall significantly again, over the next few years.
This is a ridiculous stat in a ridiculous story:
"The marginal cost of running an agent, had collapsed to, essentially, the cost of electricity."
The marginal cost of a coding agent is not even remotely close to "the cost of electricity."
These agents are absurdly expensive to use and run. Why do you think AI labs are banning people from having multiple $200 subscriptions? Because those subscriptions are heavily, heavily discounted to drive demand. Why did labs stop folks from using their subscription costs in OpenClaw?
The OpenClaw guy had five max subs and was losing 20k a month building and running his amazing project (because he was retired and had the money to set in fire) before AI labs banned this practice of having multiple subs.
In case you just missed it: Because these agents are expensive as hell to run.
The cost of running coding agents daily on eight hour shifts is thousands of dollars a month at API pricing and that is subsidized too.
My team regularly burns anywhere from 4K-8K a month across three people using the latest and greatest for an AI driven building workflow.
That's not even agents running 24x7 "making money while you sleep" which is utter and total nonsense.
This is one of the most spectacularly unprofitable businesses in history so far.
People talking about the end of all work because this stuff runs for "pennies" cannot do even the most basic math.
New NVIDIA chips don't even break even for data centers for like 24-36 months and they are basically obsolete by then. That doesn't count power and cooling and people to run it all.
Imagine if your car was basically worth zero after three years?
I'm so sick of these idiotic Population Bomb level stories about the end of all work and running agents for pennies.
It's a mass delusion for people who can't be bothered to bust out a calculator on their phone for five seconds.
https://x.com/Dan_Jeffries1/status/2025849211095314868
There were openly gay mega techno clubs and monogamy treated as an idealised intention not really as an obligation.
It's still the only country in Asia with same sex marriage.
All not very Chinese.
Here's a short You Tube clip very briefly going into the evidence.
Search Out of Taiwan for more.
https://youtube.com/shorts/5L0HX3g2ro0?si=t_jn6IZi8cM7oTk5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Park
Let foreign students come and learn, their crappy countries will never be able to catch up anyway. Build fabs in China, it's a dump that can't produce anything but cheap crap without US help.
They should have known better, and it's not like the didn't have warning. Japan gave them a mighty scare in the late 70s and early 80s when they pulled the DRAM market out from under American suppliers. People forget Intel was originally a DRAM company until the Japanese out-developed them and took that market away. Intel only survived because of the accidental success of their 8086 CPU line.
The same arrogance still exists today. US vendors dominate the most advanced design sectors - CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, etc. But competition has already eaten the lower end of those markets and are working upwards. Intel and AMD design the big CPUs, but look at the cheap microcontrollers that go into basically everything now - the US is a bit player in that market. The biggest suppliers are STMicro and Infineon (Europe), Renesas (Japan), NXP (Netherlands/China), Espressif (China), etc. The US only really has TI in that market.
Some of those microcontrollers are so powerful now they're doing jobs that would have needed a full-blown CPU a decade ago, and the gap keeps narrowing.
(Too demented; didn't read.)
Increase the supply of graduates substantially (as has happened over the last 30 years), and their price will fall. I didn't need a university economics degree to figure that out either!
Is that so ?
(Pondering a visit some time.)
I think you may need to update your priors ?
I suspect that we have a bit of a problem with both terms in this particularly equation.
By then no governing party will ever get elected again without backing a universal basic income backed by a robot tax anyway, so more will start to go to university again to study arts and humanities and fill the months, even years when they cannot find a full time paid job
And scientist.
,,,, in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
The ROC government bought mountains of essentially coffee dust from Central America in exchange for diplomatic recognition.
It's probably changed.
Large corporations and organisations automating and replacing half their paid workforce though? Hammer them with a robot tax por discourager les autres, not least as we need to fund all the extra welfare benefits they are forcing us to pay!
The introduction of A* was an admission of failure in the grading system.