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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Compounding the problem
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Slash 70% of the places, remove fees and reinstate grants.
Fixed that last bit.
The truth is, the interest rate is largely irrelevant, as is the sum advanced. This is a graduate tax in all but name; for a 30-year period, graduates will pay an extra 9% of any income over £21,000. A few might pay less, if they earn massive amounts early on, but for most, that is the deal. The interest rate could be 3% or 20%, it would make no difference to what they pay.
Personally, I think an additional marginal tax rate of 9% on top of our already high marginal tax rates is too much, especially since the existing marginal rates veer around so erratically according to your income. Oddly, though, people complain about the 'debt' and the nominal interest rate, but not about the one figure which really matters.
If you look at the world rankings of Universities, the UK is clearly in second place. It is way ahead of any other European country.
You will have destroyed one of the few areas in which the UK has excelled.
Which is poor optics, even though this is in all but name a graduate tax, not a loan in any traditional sense of the word.
Would have been much better to bite the bullet and call it a tax.
Once you're there, it should remain academically hard, but financially easy.
Remove university status from most of the former polys, and increase more apprenticeships and vocational training.
Also launch a campaign explaining nobody thinks less of you if you don't go to university.
The debt amount is irrelevant to mortgage lenders as really this is a student tax of 9% on earnings over £21k pa - and it's only that which is taken in to consideration by them and that has a far less material impact on their affordability calculations than other debts like personal loans or credit cards.
Lewis made a good point on the radio recently after press reports of the Tories cutting the interest rates by saying it's not the interest rate that matters but the threshold where repayments start which would help most graduates - the former helps the highest earners most as it's only they who are ever likely to repay their debt.
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-tuition-fees-changes
"a student loan is the 'best' form of debt you'll ever get. The interest is relatively low and crucially you only need to repay it if you earn enough."
Almost beyond parody from the Cambridge Bore.
Equally my Russell Group Desmond in Economics is utterly irrelevant to my day job of stopping people designing insane computer systems....
Maybe some people, aged 30 or so and looking at 50%+ marginal rates of income tax, are more likely to take the latter option.
- economies of scale
- that many polys could go back to being polys/technical colleges
- that more spaces could be made available for fully paying foreign students
Also, the idea that all HE is brilliant or even necessary is basically farcical.
That BNC would then scrape in is, obviously, entirely coincidental.
But I agree. There are perverse disincentives. My worry as someone with a child just filling in his UCAS form is what will happen if we get up to inflation of say 8%?
The terms and conditions can be easily changed by statutory instrument.
I've seen otherwise rational people with all three sprogs at or having been at uni blathering on in best Daily Mail style about degrees being ten a penny, numbers too high, standards dropping etc. Exceptionalism is a heady drug.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/18/wayne-rooney-due-court-face-drink-driving-charge-2am-arrest/
I got a £500 fine for speeding a decade and a half ago - based on a week’s next income at the time.
In the circs, seems sensible. Esp. as Everton are fining him bigly, by the sounds of it...
A university like UCL is already barely breaking even. If you cut 70 per cent of their places, than that is a huge fraction of their income gone and it will send them into bankruptcy. The Colleges going bankrupt under your plan are not former polys. They are Universities that have existed for hundreds of years.
Polys (if returned to polys) still need students. I am not sure there is much saving in changing the name of Nottingham Trent University back to Trent Polytechnic. If you have slashed 70 per cent of its places, then it is going under.
I didn't say that "all HE is brilliant or even necessary". I pointed to internationally recognised tables that show that the UK higher educational sector has outperformed all other European countries. Perhaps give me another profession in which this is the case?
Fascism begins with the Shutting of Universities. The Germans destroyed their universities in 1933, and catastrophe followed. Though to be fair to Hitler, even he didn't suggest something as wantonly destructive and stupid as you have.
Anyway; don't you think that many courses and unis will close anyway, when the full extent of the fees impact is understood (i.e. when journalists who paid 9k notice it on their own pay slips and start writing about)? I do.
Cheers for this article, Dr. Monk. I do wonder about the 50% target. Seems daft to me.
Of course this does open questions about those who obtained their degree overseas, or from a non-state subsidized university like Buckingham. And what about the likes of me, who got a degree in the UK back in the days of full maintenance grants and fully-paid tuition fees but now live and work overseas?
[1] And if so how to handle Oxbridge and Scottish master's?
https://twitter.com/estwebber/status/909775251566940160
The Tories on here will be in for a shock if they think their 'less should go to university' message will lead them to make ground with the under 35s more generally. That type of message tends to mainly appeal to those who already vote Conservative.
Hope they split his community service - half of it sweeping the streets and the other half doing football coaching for some some of the many poor kids in the city.
The Germans invented modern research in both science and the humanities. Almost every important development in science from 1900 to 1933 took place in a German speaking university.
American scientists came to Germany with humility to learn.
The Germans lost all that when they destroyed their Universities.As someone more famous than me said, the only time an economically advanced country ever helped an economically poorer one was when then Germans systematically destroyed their Universities.
The poor, backward country that was helped was the USA.
He probably values free time more than money, so community service is probably a better punishment.
Just would have been nice if we could have fined him a couple of hundred grand to boost the coffers of the Treasury!
Yes, that is exactly right. Funding isn't the problem, it is the extent to which it is spread so thinly.
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/south-yorkshire-devolution-deal-scrapped-amid-acrimony-1-8759112
The Mayor of Yorkshire.
Which would be run by the Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, or YMCA for short.
A compulsory grammar test might help to whittle down the numbers somewhat. You wouldn't imagine the number of shockingly poor covering letters I read when helping with a graduate recruitment round...
I'm warming to the idea.
If South Yorkshire can't agree amongst themselves then it's going to be hard to get the One Yorkshire stuff to fly. Lots of bitterness about.
As I posted over the weekend the vast hike in fees had sod-all to do with funding universities (who have less money) or to do with making students pay for their education as at least 50% won't pay their "loans" off. In practice this is the government continuing to bail out our zombie banks with more debt-based "assets" to prop up their balance sheets.
David Cameron absolutely nailed it back in 2015,
Prime Minister David Cameron has been heard saying Yorkshire people "hate each other", while rehearsing a speech.
Wearing a microphone but not on camera, he was thought to be rehearsing an answer to a question on devolution and the number of bids from the county.
Ahead of a speech in Leeds, he said: "We just thought people in Yorkshire hated everyone else, we didn't realise they hated each other so much."
Later, Mr Cameron told the BBC's Test Match Special it was "a total joke".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-34222801
Oxford, Cambridge & Northampton should have been three names known throughout the world.
One town shut its university ... and fell into obscurity.
1) Someone has to pay for tertiary education. Since not everyone gets one, it seems reasonable that the primary recipient should bear their share of the cost. Since those primary recipients come disproportionately from affluent backgrounds, subsidising this would be an aggregate transfer of wealth from the poorer sections of society to the richer sections.
2) Demand for tertiary education remains high, even with the attached costs. It seems that would-be students see the deal as worthwhile.
3) Britain's big weakness is technical education. Far more effort needs to be put into encouraging it.
4) Some subjects are of particular economic or social advantage to the country (eg nursing). It seems reasonable that the country should bear more or all of the cost of some of these. It should not be beyond the wit of man to devise objective metrics for assessing these.
5) The use of RPI in calculating any element of this debt is an outrage. The government has largely abandoned it elsewhere as not fit for purpose. This is just an opportunity to chisel money.
6) Instead of using RPI (or CPI), fixed interest rates could be set each year, leaving the lender to bear the inflation risk. This would allow students to see more clearly what they were signing up for.
Back in the distant past, I was involved in recruiting graduates. When they went through agencies their CVs and any other information would be somewhat anonymised (e.g. to remove address) or rewritten. Since I never once found a 'good' recruiting agency, yet alone a brilliant one, everything we were given had to be taken somewhat at face value.
As an example, it became clear during one interview that the CV we had in front of us did not match the candidate. Fortunately he had brought a copy of his own CV along, and we made a quick trip to the photocopier.
The agency had rewritten his CV to better match the advertised role, and had placed the wrong name on the rewritten CV. I reckon many of the mistakes we saw on CVs were down to the agencies, not the candidates.
Although I did like the candidate who wrote 'I like reading, and enjoy many jeunres'. We actually hired that one, and he turned out to be a darned good engineer.
Intrigue from Oxbridge saw a chance to shut down a rival. The Mortimers of the 13th century were already busy.
Ah, so this about being a grammar nazi on an internet forum where it doesn't really matter. Thought that it might have something to do with that, but I'd thought I'd hold off judgement.
Also, if a bank is "stupid' for buying this debt, how can the student loans scheme be continuing to bail out our zombie banks with more debt-based "assets" to prop up their balance sheets?
When in Government, all three parties believed that students should pay tuition fees.
There is actually little difference in the behaviour of the three parties. In the lying contest that is modern politics, all the parties get first prize.
I expect when the Conservatives are next in opposition, they will believe in the abolition of tuition fees again.