Opinion: Dealing with critics on our own terms – graduate contributions

At an ALDC conference a number of weeks ago now I was encouraged by Nick Clegg’s call to be brave enough to “deal with our critics on our own terms” rather than accepting the (often false) basis for their criticisms and trying to explain away the difficult choices our party has had to make since May 2010.

So it got me thinking: why not develop our own narrative about the issue that has arguably caused us the most grief?

By accepting the premise of calling the charges incurred by students entering university from this year “tuition fees”, we tacitly accept that these are indeed fees which students pay for their tuition. Which gives the impression – thanks to all the uproar at the time the system was reformed, back in late 2010/early 2011, from the Labour Party and the NUS – that these are indeed upfront charges that students have to pay to go to university.

Of course, in practice, no-one has to pay anything upfront. But that message still hasn’t got out there enough. Perhaps, thanks to the effort by Simon Hughes and others, it’s beginning to get to university-entry-age people (though reports of student numbers being down this year show that there’s still more room for improvement), but it’s certainly not got through to the wider public.

So let’s call these charges by what they actually are: graduate contributions.

They’re not a tax, as such (although if we had been prepared to call it that at the time, that may have saved us a fair amount of grief!). They’re certainly not fees. They’re debt, perhaps, but not debt by any other measure (they don’t count for mortgage assessment purposes, for instance, as other debt would). They’re the amount graduates (those who can afford to do so), over a number of years, contribute towards the cost of their university education.

By changing the terms of the debate, we can start to explain why most MPs in our party were prepared to back the changes. We got a better deal for students than anything Labour or the Tories were prepared to give them (let’s not forget, Browne recommended no cap at all). By refusing to talk about it, we’re just giving Labour and the NUS room to criticise us without putting our point across.

And I won’t even start to go into whether we kept to the second part of the infamous pledge (“I will vote against any increase in tuition fees and press the government to introduce a fairer alternative”, for those that don’t have it committed to their memory).

Most of this year’s student intake will be finishing their degrees in 2015 (apart from the part-time students, whom we helped more than anyone else ever had by bringing them into the post-graduation payment system). They won’t start repaying until April 2016. The start of this university academic year is arguably our last chance to change the terms of the debate. So let’s talk about graduate contributions, and deal with our critics on our own terms.

* Nik Alatortsev was a Brent Lib Dem candidate at the 2010 Local elections, and currently works as Organiser and Press Officer for St Albans and Hertfordshire Liberal Democrats. He (very occasionally) blogs at ldnik.wordpress.com

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33 Comments

  • Good luck with changing the terms of debate if youdon’t want address the ‘infamous’ pledge.

    When in a hole stop digging

  • daft h'a'porth 28th Aug '12 - 12:00pm

    “Of course, in practice, no-one has to pay anything upfront”

    You, sir, are the latest in a long string of commentators who have not sufficiently researched this situation. I respectfully suggest that you look up a few useful terms, like ‘ELQ’ and ‘retraining’, and perhaps spend some time on thestudentroom searching for terms like ‘SLC’ and ‘ELQ’ and reading threads like this one. Then, when you have a better idea about the sorts of situation that people are actually dealing with as a result of your tuition fees, you may be in a better position to understand what the Lib Dems have wrought.

    For the many people who are forced into paying them upfront or giving up on higher education, I assure you that they function as fees (and often very real debt) at best, or more realistically, for most people in that situation, as an absolute barrier. Why not take the time to look into it?

  • Agree with daft h’a’porth.

    The new fees make retraining for mature students an impossibility. The government talks about improving job prospects and freeing up the labour market, yet how are prospective jobseekers supposed to improve their job prospects if retraining is completely unaffordable?

  • But a) they are fees in as much as they they were fees that we were opposing b) most MPs in our party abstained or voted against the changes, and c) they did count towards my mortgage assessment, if only in terms of the impact on my income.

    In my view, a mea culpa should take place, including an admission that a promise was broken, followed by a simple explanation as to i) why (there really wasn’t any other option out there) ii) that this system remains better than the older system, and iii) that in an ideal world we should never punish people for specific forms of aspiration and hypothecate taxes for every decision people make in their lives.

  • Prior to the next General Election which will the LibDem promise to abolish; Tuition Fees, or Graduate Contributions?

    @Mark Valladares. There is no chance of this seeing the light of day, such are the party’s sensivities.

  • Kevin McNamara 28th Aug '12 - 1:06pm

    I agree with Henry. We need to apologise and say this was a dealbreaker for the Tories.

  • daft h'a'porth 28th Aug '12 - 1:13pm

    @Henry
    Not bad as far as it goes, except that you’ve omitted the practical aspect from your proposed remedy. It might read something like this:

    iv) the Lib Dems are not blind to the fact that ELQ legislation combined with sky-high tuition fees are a massive barrier to retraining and indeed to first-time university access for those who are deemed ineligible by the SLC. Having recognised this issue, the Lib Dems are ready and willing to do something constructive to amend the situation. Concretely, we propose that [insert proposed solution here].

  • There’s a great moment in Star Wars where the Emperor is trying to turn Luke Skywalker to the dark side. And this would be a similar time for the Lib Dems.

    This party has rightly attacked spin over substance, yet what you propose is Blair / Mandleson at their best/worst. The simple fact is that in any plain English keeping of the pledge the cost of university education should not have risen with Lib Dem support, even for the richest of students.

    If this path continues to be followed then the public will know that the ‘new politics’ and ‘no more broken promises’ of the 2010 campaign were nothing but smoke and mirrors. If this path is followed then God help anyone who wants a truthful Liberal voice at the centre of UK politics because it would have ceased to exist. Spinning your way out of this would be the same as Blair did when he used the distinction between ‘top up fees’ and tuition fees. It was underhand and downright dishonest.

  • Nik Alatortsev 28th Aug '12 - 1:21pm

    @ Henry/Kevin: my point was that the system in place now is fundamentally different to the one that existed under Labour (where people did have to pay upfront, in both incarnations of ‘tuition fees’ and ‘top-up fees’ – everyone did, unless they got support from their LEA, as I was extremely lucky to do).

    @ Sophie/daft h’a’porth – fair point, and I wasn’t aware of the restrictions on having previous degrees (my understanding was that you could be funded for a set number of years for any undergrad degree). I did try to ask around for people who might know more, but with everyone on holiday etc, it was a bit tricky. Agree that I should perhaps have said “the vast majority of people will not have to pay anything upfront”, rather than “no-one”. But the overall point is, I think, still valid – even if more needs to be done to support retraining (and the silly rule that people who have never had access to student finance can’t access it because they’ve at some point completed an equivalent or higher degree has to go).

    @ Simon (and to continue from the previous paragraph to some extent) – what I was actually trying to say (though not sure it’s come across well enough) is that there wasn’t the space to go into the “pledge” issue. Actually, if we are able to re-define the terms of the debate (which is what the article was suggesting), people might be more willing to look at the pledge from a new perspective. We need to redefine the debate, not least to be able to do something to help in situations like the ones daft h’a’porth is referring to – simply running away and pretending the whole thing doesn’t exist (which is what I get the impression many in the party are tempted to do) isn’t going to help anyone.

  • Nik Alatortsev 28th Aug '12 - 1:29pm

    @ Steve – fair point, to some extent, except what I’m trying to say is that we need to find language which explains how the new system is different from the one under Blair/Brown. Actually talking about ‘top-up fees’ as opposed to ‘tuition fees’ helps differentiate “Labour fee system mark 1” and “Labour fee system mark 2”. The up-front fees aren’t there (for most people – see previous comment) in this “Coalition system”, which we need to explain better.

    As for the pledge, I’ve never said we shouldn’t apologise for not keeping the first part of the pledge – but I’ve always maintained that we’ve kept the second part (the “better system”). Which, again, isn’t to say that the current system is perfect.

  • The problem is that the new system is different for different people: for some it is genuinely free tuition for below average wage earners; for others – probably most – it is a graduate tax,; for the higher earners (those that end up on £80 000+) it works as a loan and if ‘daft’ is correct an insuperable barrier to those retraining.

    On reflection, it is on average more generous than Labour’s scheme, but is it affordable. I suspect that its costs will frighten future governments. When Lib Dems are out of office, I predict changes which too late will reveal the merits of the system.

  • @Martin
    On average graduates will pay £8.5 thousand more under the new system. The whole intent of the policy is to shift the costs of HE from government to the graduate. The idea is that HE will be forced to be more responsive to the desires of students/consumers. Of course the flaw is that what students/consumers will demand is easier degrees. This should be obvious to anyone who has been involved in HE over the last couple of decades and seen the deletrious effects of the limited marketisation introduced by the Major and Blair governments. One of the unfortunate effects of the political storm over the breaking over the tuiton fee pledge is that insufficient attention has been foccussed on just how terrible this policy will prove to be in educational, social and economic terms.

    @Nik
    Much as i admire your enthusiasm in defending a policy you haven’t bothered to fully understand I do rather think you need to take daft h’a’porth’s point s bit more seriously. These days few people do the same job all their life. Career-changers are not some strange odd little minority.

  • To AndrewR: you are completely correct about the basic flaw in the marketisation of HE. The effects of a ‘consumer responsive’ examination system is evident at GCSE and A levels. The result will be discredited degrees and many failing to attain the expected career advantage. If this leads to lower average pay for graduates, then the funding system will become more expensive than expected.

    I would hope that daft haporth’s is corrected (in fact I thought it had been when funding for part time degree studies was belatedly included, but perhaps not). Another point is what happens to the costs for those who wish to change their degrees after a year?

  • You get years of the degree +1 retake funded by the system. Having failed a year to illness, and (stupidly now I know how the system works) getting funding for a retake semester, I face the prospect of paying this year’s fees entirely out of my maintenance loan.

    Luckily the university is legally bound to charge me the old fees, or I would be up a well-known creek without a paddle. I have no idea how people caught in this position under the new system will cope other than by dropping out with debts incurred.

    Part time fees are covered? Well, great, but not enough universities are being “market-responsive” enough to offer more part time study options. Groups like Liberal Youth and Lib Dems 4 Fair Tuition need to continue to work with NUS and lecturers unions to highlight the inconsistencies in tuition payment assumptions and poor provision of service at universities, whatever the press resulting is.

  • daft ha'p'orth 28th Aug '12 - 5:46pm

    @Martin
    No, the fact that part-time fees are covered does not benefit ELQ students, although it has had an effect on them, since it has resulted in a massive fee increase for providers of distance learning undergrad courses, who are understandably seeking to offset the loss of HEFCE funding by milking as much as possible out of the SLC. The Open University, for example, has put their fees up from around £1200-1400 to a flat rate of £5000/year full-time equivalent, and seem to be hoping to attract first-time students who can pay through SLC loans.

    ELQ students are, in the vast majority of cases, not eligible for SLC loans. To give you an idea of the sort of circumstances that can lead to this, both of my parents took an OU degree some years before ELQ legislation arrived. One already had a healthcare-related qualification that is now considered to be equivalent to degree-level study, and the other had already studied at a university, but failed at the time to achieve a degree. If they had left it until now to begin their OU degrees, neither of them would be able to afford it, since they would not be eligible for a loan from the SLC and could not afford to pay the current fees.

  • Matthew Huntbach 28th Aug '12 - 5:59pm

    daft h’a’porth

    You, sir, are the latest in a long string of commentators who have not sufficiently researched this situation. I respectfully suggest that you look up a few useful terms, like ‘ELQ’ and ‘retraining’, and perhaps spend some time on thestudentroom searching for terms like ‘SLC’ and ‘ELQ’ and reading threads like this one. Then, when you have a better idea about the sorts of situation that people are actually dealing with as a result of your tuition fees, you may be in a better position to understand what the Lib Dems have wrought.

    No, they were not “wrought by the LibDems”. They were introduced by the previous Labour government. They were greatly increased by the current government which is five-sixths Conservative. The Liberal Democrats are not in a position to achieve 100% of what they want. Admittedly, our position has been made much worse by a foolish leadership which has exaggerated what we can achieve in our current situation, using such damaging lines as “75% of our manifesto implemented” which people have read as us agreeing with most of what this essentially Conservative Party government is doing.

    All we can do is bargain at the edges, which is what was done with tuition fees. We made a bad policy slightly better, which does not at all mean we regard it as an ideal policy, or (despite that terrible and damaging line – I wish that all who used it were to publicly apologise to party members for it and offer to resign all positions of power in the party) 75% of an ideal policy.

    Sure, I very much take your point that it has hit hard certain groups such as those you mention. This does not mean, however, as you have suggested elsewhere, and as many others have suggested, that all but the very wealthy are completely excluded from higher education. So therefore it is not wrong to correct this misassumption, as it is so often made and so perhaps causing young people not to apply when they would be entitled to a loan which would cover their costs. The Liberal Democrats pushed to make the conditions of this loan generous. I would very much have preferred higher education to be free to the student as was the case when I received my degree, but the people of this country have not elected politicians who are willing to support the tax rises necessary for that. Democratic politics is about achieving a compromise, what we have here is a compromise. If there were more LibDem MPs and fewer Conservative MPs it would be a compromise more in the LibDem direction. But we have an electoral system which twists representation in favour of the biggest party and against third parties, therefore the LibDems are weak. If the people of this country don’t like what that results in, then they shouldn’t have voted two-to-one in favour if that system, as they did last year.

  • Paul

    Just looked at Nationwide and you are correct that there is something for the student loans. As you say they are looking at a % of your net income to calculate the amount they will lend based on a standard interest rate.

    I also again would like to commend Matthew’s post above as it is a more coherent defence of the LD position that many others

  • Malcolm Todd 28th Aug '12 - 9:33pm

    With regard to mortgage assessments, the point (often badly made) is that they don’t count as a loan — that is, it makes absolutely no difference how much you owe, only what your monthly repayments are, which depends on your income. So in that respect, it works exactly like a tax. (Not really a “graduate tax”, though, unless they cancel your debt if you fail to graduate.) That’s an important distinction, since for a recent graduate (in most cases) the amount they have to pay has not been increased by the increase in fees (and will be slightly reduced by the rise in the threshold).
    However — if you make a reasonably high-earning start to your graduate career, and given how difficult it is for first-time buyers to get a mortgage at all, it’s quite possible that under the old system you would have paid off your loan by the time you applied for a mortgage and that under the new system you won’t have done. So for those students there will be a reduction in their ability to get a mortgage. A fairly piddling reduction in comparison with the demands of 30–40% deposits, probably: availability of mortgage finance at a high percentage of the property value looks like being a much bigger problem than the effect of student loans.

  • Malcolm Todd 28th Aug '12 - 9:37pm

    Oh and of course, if you are one of those students who isn’t eligible for a loan, then having to shell out an extra £18k for fees will make a hefty dent in your ability to put together that deposit, whether or not you’re a first-time buyer. Some people clearly have been badly shafted by this — a minority of students, of course, so it shouldn’t be parlayed into a general attack on the system, but it’s a minority that we should be greatly concerned about, and daft ha’p’orth is quite right to point it out.

  • Richard Dean 28th Aug '12 - 10:17pm

    The change in higher education funding does not affect only the young. I am nearing retirement and started a law degree at the Open University. But the fees tripled after my first year, due to government action. This prevents me from continuing into the second year of the course.

  • Malcolm Todd 28th Aug '12 - 10:35pm

    Indeed, Richard. This is forgotten too often. (Some might question the value of pensioners taking degrees – where’s the public benefit to justify public spending? They could be right –in a way that Oscar Wilde would have recognised straightaway…)

  • Richard Dean 28th Aug '12 - 11:03pm

    I’m afraid I have no idea what Oscar Wilde’s opinion on this was. But everybody benefits when the population as a whole becomes more educated, and clearer in its thinking. And there may be questions of rights involved, as well as public benefit.

    Anyway, there may be significant public benefits. Pensioners with a clearer idea of politics and history and economics might make voting choices that are more beneficial to the country than they might otherwise be. Pensioners with marketable technical and managerial skills and an interest in applying them might help the young in supporting their increasing demographic burden. Pensioners with interesting work might tend to have higher morale and lower health support needs. Pensioners with educational skills can help teach. And pensioners have information and outlooks that can be valuable too.

    So please don’t write us off just because we are older than you!

  • I don’t want to be relentlessly negative about the student fees stuff.
    But every argument goes the same way.
    tripling the fees mean you are paying three times as much, whichever way you look at it. Unless of course you are not earning enough to pay it. In which case you might as well not have gone into higher education in the first. . Plus can anyone else sense a future debt mini-crisis here?

    And then there is the woe an thrice woe argument. We had no choice. We had to do it. It’s nothing to do with us Guv. We had to do what the Tories wanted to save everyone from letting the Tories do what they wanted.

    Can’t we just move on. Keep schtum, and leave it at that. And concentrate on making sure Gove is brought to book for the current exam fiasco or something. At least this would give youngsters the option of higher education before he tries to reintroduce knickerbockers, quills. and compulsory chimney sweeping for the less academic.

  • Mohammad Rahman 29th Aug '12 - 7:08am

    When I read blog posts like this, i really wonder if bloggers actually speak to ordinary people on the street. Who are the Lib Dem voters? Generally speaking, they are likely to be ‘middle class’ (comfortable financially, but have to manage things carefully), and educated to a higher degree level (and therefore have similar aspiration for their children). They (and their children) have been affected by tuition fee most. No point of comparing with Labour or Cons – people liked Lib Dems because they were different.

    I realised one thing working in psychiatry for 8 years, no matter how you couch it when you have to section someone, there is no getting away from that inevitability. Therefore, instead of using weasel words, i now admi to my patients, that its probably not pleasant, but i have to do what i have to do, and move on. So, i think, instead of ‘tackling the critics on your term’, Lib Dems should just say whenever this topic comes up ‘Sorry! We screwed up, and we screwed up big time. Our calculation was entirely wrong’ and move on.

    I have written before, and i’m saying it again, Lib Dems should accept the inevitability that they will almost disappear in the next election, largely due to the tuition fee issue. Therefore, they should seek to a form of return in ?2020. By trying to fight battles like this for 2015, they will only make the voters more bitter and therefore loose2020 too.

  • I agree that we need to face up to this and have a narrative that is ours, just saying nothing or ‘stopping digging’ isn’t a viable option, our opponents will be sure remind the voters with glee. OK, so we did do the best thing we could under the circumstances, and its a better outcome as a result, but no one out there knows that and they are not going to stand still and listen whilst we explain(- least of all believe us). When miners are trapped in a collapsed mine shaft the rescue doesn’t involve directing attention to a calamity elsewhere, however deserving the likes of Gove might be, nor is it about blaming the lack of a safety assessment of how we got into this mess, but by having a very clever bit of equipment for getting us out of the hole. In other words ‘yes we made a mistake there, but this is what we propose to do about it..’.
    It will involve ensuring that entry to any form of tertiary education is free, with the cost shifted to the tax system. As Richard says, the whole of society benefits when the population is better educated, hence our principle is that the cost should not be laid at the door of the student. If Steve Webb can come up with such a brilliant solution to our confused pensions system, then perhaps he should be set to work on this one. and yes, we also need some creative thinking on the words that we should all use to promote the way forward, if we are to avoid being left in the mine, as some would wish.

  • Oh dear, here we go again.
    In the real world this year’s university intakes have signed contracts for student LOANS, from the student LOANS company, every legal document they have agreed to refers to a loan. You can call a smoking gun a banana but it is still a smoking gun as far as the law is concerned. To those of you who keep this argument going that we now have a better system, It was until we removed any early re-payment charges, Any person who knows they are going directly into well paid profession or into the family firm will pay or get the loan paid for them as soon as they have finished. This then begs the question who is actually going to pay for the running of the loans system? This is answered by the fact that the terms and conditions of the loan can be changed at any time. The working class will end up paying for the education of the working class.

  • Sorry meant to say “The working class graduate will end up paying for the education of the working class student.”

  • It is now time to form new Lib Dem policy re. Higher Eduction funding in the UK. Why are we not discussing this, the future, rather than harking back to the mistakes of the past?? Let’s look at Europe (and wider) and take from other systems the best and most appropriate for us. Austria, Sweden and many other university funding systems really have a lot to teach us. We can win back hearts and even minds by proposing a better future for our unoiversities and their students and we can do it NOW rather than waiting for the past to be forgotten in 2020.Perhaps all those Lib Dem MPs who spent holidays abroad can use their knowledge to help us form a really decen HE policy for 2015. I went to France and Austria and the latter’s funding system impressed me.Austria, of course, does not have the albatross of nuclear weapon maintenance hanging round its neck.

  • Janet :- “Why are we not discussing this, the future, rather than harking back to the mistakes of the past?? ”

    Because this is not a mistake of the past, This is going to be a mistake for at least the next 30 years, until the debt is written off. This is a mistake that is only just starting this September for this years students. These students with their whole voting life ahead of them. And they will blame us for not putting the safeguards in place to ensure they are not shafted in the future with the changes to the T&C’s which everybody knows must happen if it is to be self funding now that the early payment charges have been removed,

  • @Janet King
    Any future plans will simply be ignored by the public until there is an admission that they were let down in the past. Why trust anything that is said on HE funding when so many pictures of Lib Dem candidates and MP’s can be seen holding a pledge that was broken so easily?

    In avoiding a proper apology (which for many will now be too late) Clegg has damned both himself and probably his successors to being mocked as untrustworthy for years to come….

  • Fees are fees, not a tax. They’re regressive above ~35k earnings, meaning that highly paid graduates pay less as a proportion of their lifetime earnings. The coalition rejected a graduate tax in favour of fees for two reasons: (a) ideology – the amount owed is related to the price of the course and not the ability to pay – the marketisation of HE – and (b) an accounting trick to ‘reduce’ the deficit – loans are an asset on the government’s balance sheet.

    Under the new system, graduates will have 27k plus interest less to pay towards a mortgage over their lifetime (unless they end up working in MacDonalds in which case they wouldn’t be looking at a mortgage anyway). Arguing that it doesn’t affect mortgages is idiotic in the extreme. These are educated voters you’re dealing with, not imbeciles.

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