Ed Miliband is mooting a tuition fees cut, to a maximum of £6,000 a year according to reports. I graduate in 2016. If Labour wins the next election, I’ll be in one of only 4 cohorts to pay £27,000 for their education. If I’m really unlucky, I might get lumped with a graduate tax too.
It’s not my plight, however, that’s got Labour talking about tuition fees again. Instead, it’s the government’s admission that the current policy is likely to be more expensive than planned: official estimates suggest that 45 per cent of students will never pay back their loans. Just 3.6 per cent more and the new system would be more expensive than the old.
What’s gone wrong? In raising the tuition fee cap, the government expected that a market in degrees would emerge, with costs varying according to a course’s impact on earning potential. This hasn’t happened. Many courses are charging the full £9,000 a year, from those which definitely increase your earnings to those which definitely don’t – studying Engineering at Cambridge costs the same as doing Drama at East Anglia, but the risk of their graduates defaulting on their student debt is likely to differ.
There’s a market in private schools: some partake in a facilities arms-race; some adopt a ‘no frills, just A*s’ grammar school-esque model and others go bust.
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