If you remember, this is the opening frame of the party political broadcast the Lib Dems aired just a few days before standing for election in May. You may remember it: Nick Clegg wondered around what appeared to be the set of “I am Legend” on a day when the prevailing wind was coming from the foolscap factory wearing a jacket 8 sizes too big for him. The tagline, the message, indeed the point of the advert was “no more broken promises” – the Lib Dems are different, the Lib Dems keep their promises, it’s a new kind of politics.
Here’s the Lib Dem 2010 manifesto on tuition fees: “We will scrap unfair university tuition fees for all students taking their first degree, including those studying part-time, saving them over £10,000 each. We have a financially responsible plan to phase fees out over six years, so that the change is affordable even in these difficult economic times, and without cutting university income. We will immediately scrap fees for final year students.”
Ah.
To be fair the Lib Dems haven’t yet broken their promise. They just seem to be threatening it. The main reason for this is that it appears that higher education just isn’t affordable. Now some might say the Lib Dems should have thought of that before they promised it, but I’d rather concentrate on the substance of the argument. What is affordable?
Affordable is a question of political priority. Everything is affordable for a large enough sacrifice. It may mean cutting back horribly on other things but it can be done if there is the political will. When it comes to deciding how high a priority higher education spending should be then, it makes sense to me to look abroad: to look at what works and what doesn’t. After all Brazil thinks it can afford free university education for all and they have far bigger problems in other areas than we do – are their priorities skewed or are ours?
Here are the amounts the OECD countries spend on university education and how rich they are. It looks a strong correlation to me and the maths says it is indeed a very strong correlation (consider furthermore that the left side outliers Iceland and Italy are struggling at the moment, and the right hand outliers such as Korea are still growing rapidly). Indeed an AUT study showed that not only is there an incredibly strong correlation between our wealth and the amount we spend on tertiary education but there is an even stronger correlation between competitiveness and amount we spend on tertiary education.
In short tertiary education is about the most important thing we can possibly spend our money on. Britain has the economy it has because of its tertiary education sector. There are many other countries in the world that can do things more quickly, more cheaply and more efficiently (Britain is one of the least efficient countries in Europe – we work the longest hours of any country in Europe and yet our productivity is less than 95% of the EU average) than we can. One of only things Britain has going for it is its educated workforce, without it there is nothing really to recommend it as an economy.
Moreover it is not as if there is not room for improvement. Per capita Britain is 91st in the world in terms of the amount of money spent on tertiary education – Guatemala spends more on universities than we do. Finding the money for universities is a question of priorities; and it is pathetic that we consider university funding to be a lower priority in Britain than Guatemala.
Some have suggested this extra funding should come from the students – indeed that is the justification for uncapped fees in some quarters. That logic does not stand up to close scrutiny. The market will spend the amount it has to spend on university education. If you raise fees all that will happen is that fewer people will go to university. We know this globally, that is why the studies above ignore the amount of money put into universities by students and consider solely state spend on education.
Moreover we know, it is a matter for empirical study and not a matter for debate, that high tuition fees put off poorer students from going to university – regardless of scholarship and bursary schemes. High tuition fees fees wouldn’t just hamstring Britain’s economy by starving universities of the investment they need, they also make Britain into a two tier society where the rich are more educated than the poor.
Using the gini coefficient as a measure of income inequality and the level of tuition fees charged from this fantastic study I’ve produced this quite upsetting graph which shows just how closely the level of tuition fees a nation charges, and how unequal that nation is, are related (indeed there’s a correlation coefficient of 0.74, in statistics we’d say the odds of this relationship being down to chance are less than 0.24%).
Nations that charge high tuition fees become unequal nations; nations that don’t invest in their universities become poor nations. We may not like what we might have to do to make our universities universally affordable and the best in the world, but we have to do it. No more broken promises.
Fred Carver is a former Liberal Democrat councillor in the London Borough of Camden. He blogs on world elections and politics at Who Rules Where.
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24 Comments
one point though: Tertiary Education does not necessarily mean University let alone Degrees, but that’s what you’re only looking at.
A formatting error here, it is missing the second graph and so doesn’t make much sense. I’ve asked them to fix it
Now fixed.
@Sandra F a good point but I think we can assume a directly proportional relationship and I don’t have acess to the raw data to scrub
Useful piece. What’s worse is that the way things are coming forward are unnecessary and appear to be driven by raw coalition politics – ie to force the Liberal Democrats to agree to high tuition fees. I am sure Vince believes he has achieved a good deal in creating a progressive graduate contribution system and in some ways he has. However it seems the revenue that will now be branded as “tution fees” is in fact capitation funding that has been withdrawn via the CSR. So an answer is to restore something like capitation funding to universities equivalent to 6k per student. Allow variable fees up to 3k with restrictive conditions to discourage them – as is proposed now for 6-9k. Then retain an equivalent level progressive graduate contribution for graduates to contribute to capitation funding as well as tuition fees. It’s more than a sleight of hand because families with poor numeracy will, as you say, be deterred by the thought of fees of 6-9k and loans built on the back of those. And it restores the principle of paying for education by capitation not fees.
I’m not quite sure what people expect from Nick and the rest. They didn’t win the election but instead are there moderating the Tories on everything and putting a hold on the Right Wingers. Can you imagine what the current strategies would be like without them.
There would be an alternative way of moderating the Tories. They have four policies with no holds barred for every one of the Lib Dems.
I am passionately against tuition fees but you cant blame Nick for them being increased. This is a five year plan and only 6 months into it. Steady as she goes. Years 2, 3 and 4 will be the most important.
Fred – a wee, gentle reminder that tuition fees don’t exist in Scotland, and I think are also different in NI and Wales, so your second graph should only be for England only.
@Sandra F I’ve looked back and I owe you an apology – although It means that I am right. Ignore references to Tertiary education: they came from a study I was looking at but in the end didn’t use. All the figures above actually refer to spend on university education.
@KL as a Scot I am mortified and cannot apologise enough. Naming England as the UK is a fault in the report I cited, but I repeated it.
@ Fred – we didn’t win the election, we got about 23% of the vote. However, parties that do want to increase tuition fees (Labour and Conservatives) won a huge majority of the votes. So what are we to assume?
Fred you’ve either been a bit naughty here or misread the data.
Your first chart for example, based on the OECD ‘Education at a glance’ data (although you do not say which year), shows the combination of both public and private spending on education, not as you say later “the studies above ignore the amount of money put into universities by students and consider solely state spend on education.” The US and Korea for example invest substantially more in tertiary education privately than from state transfers. Hence the high share of GDP shown.
The same is true of the figures in the AUT study you cite. Although what value there is in a study written in 2000 based on 1997 data is even more of a question, given the point you are trying to make.
And you certainly cannot draw the conclusion “tertiary education is about the most important (presumably meaning in respect of growth) thing we can possibly spend our money on. ” from the data you have presented. Or
“One of only things Britain has going for it is its educated workforce, without it there is nothing really to recommend it as an economy.” Whether or not the second point is correct, it says little about the value of HE investment by the state versus people contributing themselves.
“If you raise fees all that will happen is that fewer people will go to university”… so how do you account for university enrolment rising after fees were introduced and higher enrolment levels in the US and Korea than the UK?
The link you provide as apparent proof that poorer students are put off by fees, from a single magazine article based on a single sociology study in 2003 concludes “Surely, further rises in debt are likely to put even more low-income students off university.” To which the answer is no… it didn’t… and low-income student enrolment continued to rise.
The final graph shows not much. You’ve cherry picked a handful of countries from one year and shown a correlation. You cannot conclude from that “Nations that charge high tuition fees become unequal nations”, nor the converse. Particularly not when most ‘free’ education involves regressive transfers from non-graduates (typically less well off than average) to graduates (typically more well off than average).
And if your second assertion “nations that don’t invest in their universities become poor nations” is correct the evidence you’ve presented would suggest copying the US and allowing uncapped fees, is by far the better route to prosperity than relying on tax and spending…
“What is affordable?”
Well, we’re basically talking about who pays here, not the size of the bill. The student will pay more, so that the taxpayer can pay less. If “the nation can’t afford it”, as the coalition pretends, why on earth should it help to shift the bill away from rich Dads and load it onto their poor sons and daughters?
It’s right to say that the issue of debt putting people off studying is a matter for investigation, but all the linked piece did was ask school leavers why they weren’t going to university. But this could be correlation rather than causation: the same kind of people who are debt-averse might be the same kind of people who woulnd’t go to University anyway.
Studies looking at the background of students actually in University has found that the percentage of students from less advantaged backgrounds has gone up from 25% to 29% since fees were first introduced.
In any case, the ‘Graduate Premium’- the amount that getting a degree nets you that you wouldn’t otherwise have got on average (perhaps £120,000), suggests that not going to University because of debt-fear is not a rational position to take. This is especially true under Vince’s proposed system, with its higher threshold and graduated payback.
@Andy Mayer. If I’ve misunderstood the data my apologies, but I don’t think I have. Besides surely if your contention is that the data is inaccurate you need to provide an alternate dataset. Going through point by point:
The first set of data comes entirely from the AUT study, as I hope I made clear – all I’ve done is show it in graphical form.
Yes I did miss in the small print that private funding is included too but I feel my point still stands as I feel the amount the private sector will invest is fairly constant and thus it is state funding that provides the variable. I say that further on as you say – if I’d read the small print more closely I could have been clearer but I feel the point still stand.
Besides the US and Korea are outliers on the graph so if we accept your argument my correlation is even stronger.
No I cannot say with any certainty anything I have said based solely on the data I have shown here: that is the nature of the blog format. However I can state my argument and present data that supports it. Again I would genuinely welcome it if you would present data which points to an alternate conclusion
It would have been better to find a study more recent than 2000 but I lack the resources to produce my own and whilst I did find more recent studies which point to a similar conclusion:
http://bdeduarticle.com/index.php/component/content/article/textbook/27-uncatagorized/education-and-finance/46-uncatagorized/27-the-relationship-between-education-index-and-gdp-index
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=9562&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/224/
But none were as directly relevant or as easily graphable.
“How do you account for university enrolment rising after fees were introduced and higher enrolment levels in the US and Korea than the UK?” is a good question. What do you think? I’d say in the UK it is as a result of a Government policy which has been heavily pushing up enrolment. I still maintain there is a finite limit that can be raised privately. As for USA and Korea, I genuinely don’t know, and would genuinely be interested in your theories. But I would not wish to follow the examples of countries which we have established are outliers in all the bad ways (high income inequality, low education sped to GDP ration).
There are several studies that show that high tuition fees put off poorer students from going to university. I chose that one because it comes from an impeccable source, the Economic and Social Research Council. There are others, take for example this University of Leicester study:
http://www2.le.ac.uk/ebulletin/news/press-releases/2010-2019/2010/09/nparticle.2010-09-20.5884706788
Meanwhile studies that show that students are not put off by high fees normally either a) look at the last 5 years in the UK (and there is a world of different between £3000 and £9000) or b) conclude with the fairly massive caveat “when combined with a progressive repayment system”.
The final graph is not cherry picked. It’s surprisingly difficult to get accurate information on how much fees in various countries are so I was grateful to the Educational Policy Institute study I cite for providing it for 14 countries which they chose (not I) I assume randomly. I then just looked up the gini coeficcients for these 14 countries. For a random sample not in my control it’s a very strong correlation. Again, please try and disprove it.
Finally no I don’t want to be the USA because income inequality matters to me just as much, maybe more, than our national wealth.
Sadly the statement “To be fair the Lib Dems haven’t yet broken their promise. ” just like all the other clever rationalizations of the situation just won’t wash. We said to students “We promise to scrap tuition fees,” before the election. Now we are promoting the exact opposite – a massive increase. All this intellectually ingenious wordplay around the situation may salve a few people’s consciences, but they are all just games with words.
Lots of voters support Labour and the Conservatives almost by instinct, because each portrays the other as anti or pro two or three key touchstones. Our instinctive support base is much lower, but we have been building on it steadily over probably forty or fifty years by explaining to people our position and the people who support us do so because they are prepared to listen to our arguments, and trust us to deliver. In one fell swoop we are going back on our word to a large number of young people (including those who have been at university since tuition fees, but who think “There but for the grace of God go I”). Many of these people will never trust us again, and it will cost us massively in future elections.
Those foolish enough to think they can argue their way out of the problem will be sadly disillusioned. Those of us who remain to pick up the pieces and start building again will not easily forgive.
@Fran yes but one of the key findings of the ESRC report is that aversion to university because of risk of debt cause by high fees is not rational but happens anyway .
Moreover if the percentage of students from less advantaged backgrounds has gone up from 25% to 29% since fees were introduced (I assume you mean 1999) surely that is because during that time the government pushed university enrolment up so high? After all if 100% of people went to university then 100% of people from disadvantaged backgrounds would go to university.
Disadvantaged people are coming from a lower starting point, so if you increase enrolment it will help with your figures on disadvantaged people for a bit. £1000 may not even be enough to put them off, you still might get an improvement for a few years with a £3k fee, but do you honestly believe your going to get sustainable year on year improvements in the number of people from disadvantaged backgrounds going to University for nearly £10k a year?
Before getting a degree, I lived for a couple of years on less than what was later introduced as the minimum wage. University means a better living, and sure beats working for a living. I struggle with the idea that people believe a capped, means-tested, limited lifespan debt isn’t worth it. I do understand debt aversion but would question the assumption that the best way to respond an irrational response is to simply accept it instead of challenge it.
There are two basic options to fund the larger scale of tertiary education required today. The students can pay for it over a long time following graduation (tuition fees, grad tax, loans), or everybody pays for it (general taxation). Tertiary education is an unusual public service in that there is an identifiable minority who enjoy direct and exclusive benefits. The excluded deserve a better argument than, “It’s good for everybody overall, so I’d like you to contribute to my several years of comparatively carefree living.”
With the small minority of voters to whom the tuition fee pledge was an important election issue, I can understand the disappointment in the Lib Dems. It was a promise made and broken. Nonetheless, it was a blatant sop to the Lib Dem core vote. Matters of fiscal policy deserve serious treatment. The Lib Dems had absolutely no chance of getting the Chancellor’s job, but did have a very real chance of getting into power. In a national election, never make a high profile promise to a minority of the electorate on an issue where you will have no control.
The lesson to the members is never to ask such a thing of politicians again. Clambering up to the moral high ground and throw fruit just doesn’t impress anyone. I don’t believe one single person outside of the Lib Dems is surprised to find out that Clegg and Co turn out to handle the pressures of power in exactly the same way as politicians have everywhere since time immemorial.
As for the content of this article?
– The spending figures are not purely state expenditure. The “strong correlation” in the first graph is not so much a straight line as an amorphous blob – any halfway competent statistician could tell you at a glance there is at best a weak correlation. It’s easy to pick out examples where one factor varies wildly as another stays constant e.g. Canada/Iceland, Mexico/Switzerland.
– The “competitiveness” score is a ridiculously complicated figure produced by an extremely expensive business school with a vested interest in justifying high fees. A “correlation” to a score derived from eight pages of variables is severe abuse of statistics and language. Given that many variables to mix to my hearts content, I could produce any correlation you paid me to.
– It is utter nonsense to claim higher fees means fewer people go. The US, whose fees are off the scale, ranks 7 out of 13 for participation, and practically the entire table is in the 20-25% range despite significant variation in cost. Clearly other factors are far more important.
– It verges on the bizarre to suggest that after many decades of British economic development, it is the recent introduction of top fees that has produced our inequality. That goes beyond confusing correlation / causation to Orwellian levels of turning reality inside out.
These are consistently dishonest manipulations of statistics.
Education is important. It deserves a far more respectful treatment than this. People who spend a lifetime on minimum wage might even expect that people who demand that degrees are paid for, take the time to demonstrate they are put to good use.
…by 2016.
@Keith Browning
We expect Nick to keep his word. He cannot achieve the Lib Dem policy but he should be able to be trusted to vote against the increase. If you campaign under a tagline of “No more broken promises” then you need to keep your promises.
It may be symbolic to vote against it, but the day he either abstains or (more likely) votes for the increase he becomes a liar.
An excellent piece, Fred.
A related point, actually implied by the first graph, is that despite all the eye-catching world-class private Ivy League universities everyone thinks of when people mention America, the backbone of the American university system is a large world-class public university system – and one that is properly funded in a country where taxation is less than half that of the UK.
And I couldn’t agree more that this is a debate on tertiary education, not just universities – often it’s the shorter, cheaper, more vocational courses which are every bit as relevant and as good value for money as the full degree courses.
“you need to provide an alternate dataset” – Go to the OECD and look at the Education at a Glance datasets
http://bit.ly/chHYWB This is also where the AUT will have got their data… back in 2000
“the amount the private sector will invest is fairly constant ” – The 2010 OECD data contains an index of change between 2000 and 2007 for private and public expenditure. The average change for public is 127, for private it is nearly double that at 201. This presumably related to the large number of countries adopting and increasing fees in that period.
“the US and Korea are outliers” – If you took the US and Korea from your graph, you would as Jonathan notes be left with a blob.
But given you’ve got old data, I took the liberty of running your analysis on the 2007 OECD dataset. For % spent on Tertiary education versus capita per head (2007 in both cases), the R-squared value is 0.04, i.e. no relationship at all between prosperity and spend on higher education in the OECD. There is a higher value between public spending and growth 0.21 than private -0.01, but this is primarily driven by outlier Chile. Without Chile the three numbers are 0.09, 0.12, 0.01.
The other studies you link to in your follow-up comment.. the first shows the link between all education spending and wealth, not a great surprise and not a comment on tertiary education. The second is mainly about the developing world, in particular it’s about the importance of private provision of education in driving development. Your third is about democracy and primary education spending in Africa, relevance?
On “pushing up enrolment”. I’m not sure what you mean by this. The government can’t force people to go to universities, they choose to if they meet the entry criteria and are not put off by the fees you oppose. The original point of fees was to generate additional revenue to drive capacity, but the criticism of them was specifically that they would drive people away, hence the capacity would not be filled. This has proven not to be correct.
The ESRC is a government funding body, not a source, and your original article was a theory paper by someone who secured one of their grants speculating there would be problem, not an analysis showing there has been.
The strapline on your second more recent research is “Higher Tuition Fees will not kill demand for degrees”
I don’t know if you’re not reading the stuff you’re linking to Fred, but this is the opposite of your point.
Disproving your second graph is rather like spending time analysing the links between the decline in pirates and rise of global warming, there’s no logical link or causation beyond the obvious that high taxing, high spending countries tend to redistribute more than those that do not. Within that HE spending is trivial.
The data the OECD provides on fee levels is also something of a mess, varying between types of institutions, with bursaries and repayment mechanisms muddying the picture further. We can conclude from both points that making such correlations is somewhat spurious.
On your last point about inequality mattering more than wealth I suggest you read this from those zany right-wingers at Liberal Conspiracy
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/09/15/does-more-equality-mean-lower-growth-does-that-matter/
“We said to students “We promise to scrap tuition fees,” before the election.”
Andrew Suffield:
“…by 2016.”
Ah – so trebling university fees now is just part of a cunning six-year plan to do away with them!
Thank goodness for that. Just for a moment I thought the Lib Dem parliamentary party was a bunch of duplicitous bastards.
@Jonathan I think we can disagree without calling each other dishonest. It’s not polite or accurate.
It’s not so much an amorphous blob as a clear crescent moon to me. There will always be outliers and indeed some who would disagree with me have come on here to explain away the outliers (which was nice of them). However whilst we might have a greater or lesser degree of apophenia the data is quantifiable – this is a 0.776 correlation with a p value below 0.01
True the spending figures are not purely state expenditure, that is an error I apologied for earlier in the comments. As I said earlier in the comments the point still stands as the state can far more greatly influence the amount we spend on universities than the market can (I may have over stated the point before but it still stands)
I think your views on competitiveness do rather a disservice to the discipline of economics. The errors you suggest would be highly indicative of a flawed methodology – I very much doubt the IMD apply flawed methodologies. The IMD aren’t here to defend themselves butt I assume hey do peer review. It’s true that we do have a bit of a “who will licence the councils bar?” dilemma when it comes to finding academic treatments on the effect of academia but fortunately academics are more objective than politicians.
Besides that is just one study. I’ve linked the three more and there is a growing economic consensus around the issue. Indeed just now I was reading this month’s Foreign Affairs and right there on page 8 Joseph Nye (no lefty he) devotes three whole paragraphs to the consequences of the relationship without feeling the need to cite a source for the relationship itself- so proven does he believe the relationship to be.
Higher fees make fewer people want to go to university. Of course it is not that simple, of course other factors come into play. But higher fees do make fewer people want to go to university – it’s right there in ESRC and elsewhere.
I feel on inequality / fees you are a) misquoting and b) getting things the wrong way round yourself. I showed a correlation, I did not imply causality. Inequality is the product of many governments doing many things wrong. However this direct correlation across continents does suggest that a) raising fees won’t make our society more equal and b) is indicative of a government that is going astray and will seek to build a more unequal society.
@Andy Mayer I’ve acknowledged that I oversimplified (and made a genuine error for which I am now apologising for the fourth time) on the private/public thing. I still maintain that the state can effect a sea change in the amount we invest in Univerities far more easily than the private sector.
If you remove USA and Korea you don’t get a blob you get a crescent moon with a correlation coefficient which will now be above .776 and a P value even further below 0.01,
OECD thank you, a useful resource. Could we compare like for like please? What’s the correlation coefficient and its p value? I do accept R-squared is low for one year, this could be the start of an evidence based discussion, which would be nice. But what in your methodology suggests you should drop Chile?
The three studies do refer to education in the round, that’s why I refer to the AUT study. But are you really suggesting the corollary of your position which is that the amount we spend on education has a huge impact on our economy except at the University level where it has none?
The source is an article published in ESRC’s in house magazine, we’re nitpicking here.
Yes I’m reading the articles, but I’m reading beyond the self serving headline’s of the University Vice Chancellor. Look at table 1 in the Leicester study – for every thousand pounds fees go up 1% more people from lower SEGs stop going to University.
Again I think my second graph shows a) this is indicative of a society gone wrong and b) it’s hardly going to help is it?
Liberal Conspiracy make the classic argument for unfettered growth. I prefer Sen’s view that for liberty we need to increase capabilities for all. Blueland might have a higher GDP than Redland but what of the capabilities of people in Blueland and the people in Redland. And how many of Blueland’s people were enslaved by lack of capability for the sake of future GDP?
There are various studies to suggest why income inequality is more important than wealth generation:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.153.3845&rep=rep1&type=pdf
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/reprint/96/12/2145
“I still maintain that the state can effect a sea change in the amount we invest in Univerities far more easily than the private sector.”
This is quite a different political point and one not supported by the general trend across the OECD in the last 20 years to move to more personal contributions.
“What’s the correlation coefficient and its p value?” The data is there if you want to play with it and update your article with something more recent than 1997.
In respect of Chile it’s an example of how much difference one country can make, a robust relationship would be a little stronger than that. This is similar to the problems highlighted with the Spirit Level analysis of inequality trends; picking years and countries yields very different results.
“But are you really suggesting the corollary of your position” No I’m rejecting the assertions in your article
“incredibly strong correlation between our wealth and the amount we spend on tertiary education”
“tertiary education is about the most important thing we can possibly spend our money on. ”
“for every thousand pounds fees go up 1% more people from lower SEGs stop going to University.” – this isn’t quite right. the data is skewed between £3-6k showing a 5.3% rise, £6-10k a 0.6% rise versus 2.9% and 0.4% for higher SEGs, 3.6% and 0.5% overall. It would be interesting what qualitative reasons drove the decisions.
But the punchline from the study is if fees were to rise from £3-10k, a maximum 1 in 25 potential students might be put off, around 1 in 20 from poorer backgrounds. But even that is misleading, not all fees will rise that high and price sensitivity varies by course, so the actual numbers will be much lower and dependent on what actually changes.
Flip that around in five years time, assuming the study is broadly accurate and anti-fees activists will need to argue that billions must be spent to scrap fees in order to incentivise enrolment for a tiny handful of students.
As for your other points they are political and somewhat misleading. The capabilities approach is principally about what capabilities people need to engage in society and achieve their potential. That supports equity of access to higher education based on merit and fair repayment schemes. It doesn’t say much about whether state funding is better or worse than fees.
Correct me if I am wrong but if higher education actually works then students would be paying more tax anyway and therefore pay for their education that way. If this cannot now be afforded then perhaps there are too many students getting degrees, or income tax should be higher for everyone.
Students all ready pay for their education in the following ways…
1. Through paying more tax after graduation having got a higher paid job.
2. Through their time and hard work through the achievement of their degree.
3. Through taking time out when they could be earning a proper wage, or indeed receiving benefits which they would not have to repay.
4. Through repaying their loan for living costs, which if they were on the dole they would not have to repay.
Now the Government wants them to pay for a fifth time i.e. through repaying excessive fees!
The only way to fund students in higher education is through the immediate return of grants or a benefit at a higher level than you would get if you were on the dole. It is ridiculous to penalise people over and over for trying to get the skills that the country will need in the future to flourish.
As for the Liberal Democrats who supposedly opposed fees. It is funny how they have abandoned everything they believed in as soon as they saw that if they did so they could get into power.
As someone who voted Liberal Democrat for the first time I feel betrayed by what was done. If I had thought in my wildest nightmares that my vote basically counted as 1 for a Conservative Government I would never have done it. I certainly will never vote Liberal Democrat again and I am sure many of their voters will feel likewise.
Even if the Government is ultimately deemed to have been a success I shall still never vote Liberal Democrat again. I won’t be able to trust them.