Following the debate for and against university fees, LSE lecturer Tim Leunig gives his take on that contest.
What are the benefits of going to university?
Going to university is profitable for individuals, on average, and for any given A-level grades. Although a handful of degrees (e.g. medicine) are particularly profitable, once you take into account A-level grades, most subjects are equally valuable (classicists earn more than media studs grads because classicists generally have better A-level grades).
Second, the “profitability” of going to university remains even as graduate numbers have increased. This tells us that demand for graduates is elastic: if you create more of them, employers will hire them on graduate salaries, and the country becomes richer.
Third, post-1945 technology has been “skill-biased”: its use has been greatest in countries with high skill levels and the biggest beneficiaries have been those with highest skills.
This suggests that the optimal number going to university will continue to increase, both at undergraduate and MSc levels. 80% of people whose parents went to university go to university themselves, and it is possible that the optimal proportion of the population for university is as high as 80%. It is certainly much higher than today’s levels, which are low by world standards. We need a policy that stacks up for more people going to university.
Given skill-biased technology change, increasing university education reduces income inequality, since otherwise demand for graduates will outstrip supply, causing pay rates for already well-off graduates to rise. Increasing university numbers will increase national income, and reduce income inequality.
Fees do not deter
As Julian said, entry to university is almost background-blind. Those with good A-level grades from top, middle and bottom are almost equally likely to go to university. The current fee structure is not deterring anyone from going to university, even though lots of people claim it would have deterred them and will deter others.
There are very few kids from poor backgrounds at university because schools are managing to overcome the educational effect of poverty (poverty itself, low aspirations, poorly educated parents, lack of role models).
If we believe that no-one should be enslaved by poverty, ignorance and conformity, it follows that addressing schools’ failures to overcome social background is a or even the pressing concern.
Furthermore, in that fees do not put kids from poor backgrounds off going to univ, and given that those going to univ are disproportionately affluent, moving money from this group to fund the pupil premium is both liberal and progressive.
Finally, the only way we can increase the numbers going to university, is if our schools prepare more university-ready students. That does mean a big step change in school results, which will cost big money, but has the potential to break the intergenerational poverty cycle.
Local universities
As Paul Holmes says, poorer students often choose to stay at home and study locally. The obvious solution to this would be lower accommodation prices (for which house-building is the best solution so that rents fall).
That said, part-time students, those who are married, have kids in school, etc, will want to go to a local university, and we should celebrate “mainstream universities” who cater primarily for such groups. Going to a local university is not necessarily a sign that the system has failed.
Graduate degrees
We need to think seriously about graduate level courses. Many students pay LSE £10-£15k for a one year MSc (plus London living costs) because those courses enhance their earnings. Since we recruit by word of mouth to a large extent, they must be right! Yet the British government funds virtually no MSc students. (Hence LSE has lots of British undergraduates, and few British MScs). Both our party and the government needs to think about how we are going to fund 10%, 20%, 30% of people through a graduate degree.
University funding levels
British universities are dramatically underfunded. It doesn’t affect LSE that much, because we have non-EU undergrads and postgrads to cross-subsidise EU undergrads. Providing one textbook for every nine students (have you seen the price of law textbooks?), videoing lectures, paying copyright fees to scan readings and put them on line, keeping class sizes down, providing specialist software, and yes, paying faculty who are actually good enough at their subjects to teach them at university level is expensive. The debate nationally about raising fees is in the context of that debate. If the govt decides to double fees it will be because they know that universities that don’t have as many foreign students as we do cannot provide a decent university education on their current budgets. What is the Liberal Democrat answer to this? Saying that we can sort-of afford to abolish the current loans for the current students does not mean we can afford to abolish loans to fund universities at sensible levels, for sensible numbers of students.
Follow @LibDemVoice on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
My first column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy
The Crud economy, and the rationale for industrial strategy
Embrace the Elephant!
Going the extra 3,540 miles!!
Got the message? #dundeewestend
Tom Arms
Rob Parsons
Richard O'Neill
Paul R
Alex Macfie
47 Comments
Am totally with you on underfunding. The issue is not whether we can afford to remit fees (at their current level or otherwise) but whether we can afford to pump in not just the fees, but double the fees plus double the current basic funding unit.
Incidentally the latest received wisdom from UUK and CUC appears to be that government, despite previous plans to tighten funding (we had been told that the only new money we’ll get is if we engage employers directly in funding courses) is that in the recession our state funding will at least be protected but possibly rise in the “Keynsian splurge” because keeping people off the dole and doing something usefull (reskilling) is better value.
Accommodation is a problem. And capital starved universities are still wanting to flog halls to the dedicated halls corporations whose aim is to squeeze “between £5,000 and £7,000 per year” out of each room, whilst halls developed and run by universities themselves only have to “wash their face” in terms of return.
double the fees plus double the current basic funding unit.
…and our policy decision will be regarded as unrealistic if we only focus on remitting the existing fees and do nothing about this chronic underfunding. We have to be more imaginative. There’s no harm in wanting to find a mechanism for making sure people can access HE needs blind but we have to be absolutely clear when making that decision what it implies for public funded budgets.
“Going to university is profitable for individuals, on average, and for any given A-level grades.”
Following this logic Tim, you presumably also favour fees for A-level students.
In the prevailing state of welfare, the issue of tuition fees surely boils down to a simple question of where we draw the public funding line, rather than the more principled question of whether or not such funding adds value to society – and is thus rightly and fully funded from the public purse.
Of course, Andrew, in a more egalitarian society (one in which the playing field is more level and economic participation by all easier to achieve) then the answer is yes. The evidence from the developing world is that people make best use of an education when they have had to explicitly pay, even a small amount, for it. Indeed evidence I saw at the Libertarian Alliance conference suggested that educators themselves take a greater personal interest, as well as parents, in private schools (even to the extent that, for example, in India, in private schools teachers tend to accept less good rewards packages than the state school ones and yet still choose that route).
So yes, in that ideal world (which I mentioned in the original CentreForum article on thsi yesterday) not merely A levels, but lower level schooling, ought to be paid for more explicitly by the users and their families!
“As Julian said, entry to university is almost background-blind. Those with good A-level grades from top, middle and bottom are almost equally likely to go to university.”
You are making a major assumption in your logic that there is not a link between aspiring to go to University, fear of debt and working hard to get good A Levels.
Certainly when I went to college to do my A Levels (as one of a very small proportion of the cohort in the north eastern working class town I grew up in) the vast majority had no intention of going to University and therefore didn’t take A Levels.
Those that took them but knew by second year that they wouldn’t be going on had less incentive to work hard for them.
So while your statistics, on the face of it, suggest that fees don’t deter, it may actually be a lot more complicated than that.
“Second, the “profitability” of going to university remains even as graduate numbers have increased. This tells us that demand for graduates is elastic: if you create more of them, employers will hire them on graduate salaries, and the country becomes richer.”
Do you have figures for this? Because from my personal experience it strikes me as complete bollocks. When I was a checkout supervisor at a supermarket, a good third of my staff had degrees and another third were working towards them. This is hardly graduate level recruitment. Or maybe I’m just bitter because I have a degree (and postgrad) and have never had a job paying much more than minimum wage…
Jennie, I have a feeling that your perception is right insofar as “first destination returns” have shown an increasing gap between graduation and achieving a “graduate job”. But the interpretation as to why is mixed and many suggest it is just more careful and deliberate choice amongst graduates themselves, and the emergence of a sort of a “post graduate gap year/half year” culture before people decide where they want to settle down.
A typical pointy-headed article totally detached from the real world. The claim that:
“The current fee structure is not deterring anyone from going to university”
is simply gibberish.
I thought this man was supposed to be intelligent, even if we accept his lack of political sense?
Jock, I’m thirty. One of the girls on my checkout bank was in her sixties. It’s not about “deciding where you want to settle down” it’s about taking the first job that comes because you have no money whatsoever and then immediately regretting it, because once you take a minimum wage job you are completely unemployable at any level above minimum wage due to having settled for less.
“This suggests that the optimal number going to university will continue to increase, both at undergraduate and MSc levels. 80% of people whose parents went to university go to university themselves, and it is possible that the optimal proportion of the population for university is as high as 80%. It is certainly much higher than today’s levels, which are low by world standards.”
Is it possible to offer any evidence for any of these assertions?
It’s a huge leap from the rather self-evident proposition that it’s beneficial to have a skilled workforce to the conclusion that it would be “optimal” for up to 80% of the population to attend university.
Jennie: The figs for Scotland can be found here: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/11/28151648/50 – scroll down to the very end, it is the last line.
The govt thinks that there has been a slight fall in the GWP: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2006-01-09d.38167.h
It may strike you as “complete bollocks”, but that is what the data say. I am simply reporting the evidence!
CCF – I think the point that Tim was making is that if, with a steadily growing proportion going into HE, we see a consistent trend of 80% of graduates also going on to HE, it suggests on the face of it that that proportion can benefit from HE.
Even with consistently growing number the graduate premium remains, backing up Tim’s argument that demand is elastic – ie the more graduates you have, the more the economy expands.
Now I would argue that that also helps make the case for the state paying for tuition – in the long run it more than pays for itself through increased tax revenues from those higher salaries.
The Scottish figures are seven years out of date, hon. That’s a LONG time ago in terms of 50% of the population going through university, and the commentary box says that younger graduates tend to be under employed and then MAKES AN ASSUMPTION that things will get better once they pass 25.
Interestingly, I graduated in 99. Nobody has ever asked me what my employment history is for a government study…
Liberal Neil
Sorry, but I don’t understand your first paragraph. What is “a consistent trend of 80% of graduates also going on to HE”?
Obviously, the fact that graduates on average earn more than non-graduates tells us absolutely nothing about whether the number of graduates is “optimal”. Assuming there is still an element of academic selection in university admissions policies, that’s almost bound to be the case provided there’s a positive correlation between income and academic ability.
“Providing one textbook for every nine students (have you seen the price of law textbooks?)”
Straw man stuff this.
Legal textbooks aren’t more expensive than for any other subject. Even highly regarded adademic textbooks cited in court (Treitel, Smith & Hogan etc) are around the £35 mark.
What are expensive are practitioner texts – however I doubt anywhere provides those at the ratio of 1 for 9 students. My university Library had one copy of such books for the whole department and didn’t seem to be criticised for this.
I very much doubt that any student uses Chitty on Contract as their starting point for learning contract law.
There may be more of a point with on-line databases – but I suspect those operate at a considerable discount to the commercial rates
Just to look at the politics of this for a moment.
1. The current fees policy is a signature policy.
2. We ahve recently ditched other signature policy’s like the 50p top rate. Iraq is of faded relevance.
3. Other signature policy areas like the enviroment and civil liberties have tory tanks on our lawns.
4. new signature policies like the green switch 16p rate and £20bn of savings have yet to bed in.
None of thee points is an objection to droping the fees pledge per se but they are an arguement for caution. We aren’t a think tank we are a political party. Droping one signature policy should only be done in conjunction with a review of everything else.
Your argument on local universities is completely illiberal. Universities offer different courses, and if a poorer student’s local university does not do the course they wish to study, they have less opportunity to success than their richer peers.
For instance, a budding physicist from a poor background in Reading. Is the Lib Dem message to be “tough, you aint rich enough”?
I think Neil hits the nail on the head… Analysis of the statistics only works in the way Tim proposes if the idea that ‘university isn’t for me’ doesn’t deter people from getting as far as A-Levels. I’m not sure the cold, rational analysis of cost-benefit of a university degree and a university debt is typical in all 17-to-18-year-olds.
The entire concept of getting in debt was something I was taught to avoid growing up – “neither a debtor nor a borrower be”. That cultural resistance to a “borrow now, profit later” market-style education is anecdotal but, I believe, real.
Another wholly appalling part of the current regime is that it judges 18-year-olds (i.e. adults) on the basis of their parents’ wealth. In my case, my LEA paid fees because my parents’ income was low, but how is it fair that peers with richer parents are assumed (by the state) to have free access to their parents bank accounts?
We shouldn’t, of course, throw the baby out with the bathwater: Tim and Julian both make good points on the need for stronger intervention in schools that are failing the most deprived communities, and imbedding cycles of deprivation. I just don’t accept that this is an alternative, rather than an addition, to funding HE places from taxation.
“British universities are dramatically underfunded. … If the govt decides to double fees it will be because they know that universities … cannot provide a decent university education on their current budgets. What is the Liberal Democrat answer to this? Saying that we can sort-of afford to abolish the current loans for the current students does not mean we can afford to abolish loans to fund universities at sensible levels, for sensible numbers of students.”
Tim, I’m sure you have identified a real problem there. But must we assume there is no good solution? What would we be recommending if we found out that British state primary schools were dramatically underfunded? Would we say that there was no alternative but to bring in massive fees?
Why don’t you tell us what you think the true costs are, and what assumptions you are making? Then we can decide what is practicable.
And if you are assuming we should be pushing 80% of the population through three years of graduate studies at your establishment, might we perhaps suggest that this is where money could be saved? Do you really want to teach Baby P’s guardians about the finer points of quantum theory, and do you think it will serve any useful purpose?
We don’t, after all, make anything very much in this country any more. We rely on invisible financial earnings, and those have just become a whole lot more invisible! We could be in danger of producing vast numbers of over-educated people with no ability, no motivation, and nothing at all productive to do!
Sorry, but I don’t understand your first paragraph. What is “a consistent trend of 80% of graduates also going on to HE”?
You are quite right, I meant to write ‘80% of Graduates’ children’
And I didn’t argue that this meant that 80% participation was ‘optimal’, but that it was, on the face of it, evidence that ongoing growth in the proportion going to HE may well be sustainable.
The fact that we continue to see graduates earning, on average, well above non-graduates, is evidence that the growth in HE has not hit a point where it is not a good investment.
Liberal Neil
Thanks. I probably should have been able to work that out, with the help of Tim’s article.
But I’m really not convinced that any of this demonstrates that it’s a good investment from the country’s point of view to put such a high proportion of its population through a university degree course.
(Given that it is doing that, and that consequently employers view a degree as a prerequisite for nearly half the jobs going, it may be a worthwhile investment from the student’s point of view. But is it really desirable that so many should be constrained to make that investment of time and money?)
How many jobs really require the worker to have studied in higher education for three years? 50% of the jobs in the market? 80%???
I reckon it’s a much smaller proportion – essentially those involving teaching and research. And I reckon that if we’re really talking about people acquiring the skills that are needed in the workplace, it could be done far more efficiently – in terms of time and money, for all concerned – by providing directly relevant training, rather than putting people through a three-year academic course right at the start of their working life, that may have virtually no direct relevance to their future employment.
That’s not to say that I don’t think university courses aren’t both enjoyable and beneficial. They would probably be both enjoyable and beneficial for anyone who wanted to take one, and in my ideal world everyone would be given the opportunity to do so. But I think that for most people they have only an incidental connection with acquiring skills that are actually useful in the workplace.
Tim, I don’t think you’re being entirely honest here. Part of the reason you want that money is to fund your writing of research papers. The general public don’t seem aware that university staff spend half their time doing that (I’m sure you, like I, spend a lot of time in September trying and failing to explain to acquaintances that, no, we’re not “going back to work soon”, actually we’ve been working hard all summer).
I’m sure you can put up a good argument as to why you should be funded to spend half your time not doing the job most people think you do. But I think you ought to admit to it.
Matthew: LSE gets less of its income from UK undergrads than pretty much any other univ. We have enough non-EU students, and enough fee-deregulated MScs that the funding of UK ugrads is not a big issue for us. My arguments are not out of self-interest: I am already paid (largely) to do research, and (secondly) to teach PhD students (of which I have 5), MSc students (supervising about 10, teaching 12), and undergrads (supervising about 8, advising about 10, and lecturing and class teaching about 275).
I enjoy my job, and have never hidden my love of research. But I could not teach as well as I do if I was not research active. I am not “admitting” to spending time on price winning research, some of it state funded, I am proud of it. And students are prepared to pay to be taught by me and supervised by me.
One thing that increased revenue would bring is an increased emphasis on teaching. Over the past decade univs have chopped contact hours dramatically, because the choice was to let good staff leave as pay fell relative to other occupations, or to allow them to do less teaching. I hope that that will change.
Tim and Matthew,
My father was a university lecturer, from 1948 up until his forced retirement in 1980. He was more conscientious than all of his colleagues, but even he stopped going in over the summer. On the occasions that he did, my mother would say something along the lines of “I bet you’ll be the only one in today”.
Tim, you strike me as being the sort of guy who is highly intelligent, has studied all the statistics, has read all the right books . . . and yet at the end of the day, simply hasn’t got a clue.
Jennie:
Do you prefer this one? (p. 13 is the most appropriate)
http://www.dius.gov.uk/consultations/documents/Higher_Education_at_Work.pdf
At some level we have to use the evidence of past grads because assessing the wages of those who graduated in 2007 is pretty difficult: many of them are not yet established in the labour market (gap years, grad degrees, etc).
The results are survey based, so the fact that someone has not asked you does not invalidate the results. They have never asked me either. Nor has an opinion pollster ever asked me a q either. That’s life!
As I understand it, income is not a good predictor of whether people stay on to do A levels either: again GCSE results are a better predictor. So I don’t think that the evidence supports the idea that lots of kids with good GCSE results drop out at 16 because they think univ is expensive.
What the evidence does support is that bright kids from poor backgrounds often do very badly at school. That demands real effort to correct, and real money. We could just raise taxes to pay for that, and for more higher ed. Or we could spend the £20bn in savings that we have not found again. Or we could get serious and be a party capable of entering government.
Finally, would it be fair to raise taxes on grads some of whom had paid fees, in order to save others from having to pay the fees? I think I would be pretty unhappy if I had to pay my own loan off and pay more taxes for others to escape the loans. We have no money to cancel the existing debt so presumably LD policy is that some people should pay twice for univ education. That doesn’t sound fair to me…
“The results are survey based, so the fact that someone has not asked you does not invalidate the results. They have never asked me either. Nor has an opinion pollster ever asked me a q either. That’s life!”
I shall consider my head duly patted and go on my way, I think. It’s no wonder I ended up a lowly barmaid; clearly I am incredibly stupid.
Sesenco,
I don’t want to say too much as I am posting under my real name, this is a public website, I am employed as a university lecturer, and I don’t want to damage my relationhsip with my employer.
However, things have changed very much in the university sector since 1980 when your father retired, and I can assure you the days when being a university lecturer was a stress-free job where you could work short hours have gone. I came in just at the tail end of those days, so I have seen the changes.
I know from Tim’s record that he is an excellent university teacher as well as a respected researcher, so if what I said came across as any sort of criticism of him, it wasn’t meant to be.
What has happened is that university funding works on the basis of flat level of fees per home student and a fixed allocation of home student places, plus top-up funding based on the research record of each department in the university, plus whatever you can get overseas students to pay and you can have as many of those as you can recruit.
One of the consequences of this is that in some institutions (not naming any names) there can be a bit of a gung-ho attitude to recruiting overseas students i.e. don’t ask too much about whether they are suitable for the degree, just ask if they are willing to pay.
The other is that there’s a perverse incentive to put all effort into improving the research rating and none into doing good teaching, because research rating brings in extra money and good teaching doesn’t. University lecturers can no longer take long summer holidays, because if they aren’t churning out research papers and grant applications, or supervising full-fee paying MSc students who do dissertations over summer, management has ways of making their lives unpleasant.
Tim is hinting at chopping contact hours because, by and large, spending more time with your students is less profitable to the university than spending more time writing research papers. I agree with Tim that it’s good that university teachers are proven experts in their field shown by active research in it, but I feel quite strongly that the perverse incentive has now way overbalanced things, and the public ought to know that and ought to be angry about it.
Part of the reaspn why good teaching counts for so little is that students tend NOT to make their decisions on university places after careful consideration of the particular degree programme they’re interested in. Rather, they will make their decision on the basis “University X is better than University Y, so I’ll go to University X if I can get the grades they require”. They might look at the university league tables, but the ranking on these and university reputation in general is based largely on research profile rather than quality of teaching.
I think this applies most strongly in the middle ranking institutions where the students are weaker than at the top-ranking, so require more teaching support, but the pressure on academics to pull the ranking up to the top level by churning out high quality research – too specialised to be of much benefit to the weakish students – is particularly intense.
Naming no names of institutions, of course.
Tim
“Do you prefer this one? (p. 13 is the most appropriate)
http://www.dius.gov.uk/consultations/documents/Higher_Education_at_Work.pdf”
But, as I said, the fact that graduate salaries are higher on average proves absolutely nothing about how many people should be taking a degree course.
If the state selected the 40% most academically able students and sent them on a 3-year skiing holiday, no doubt it would later be observed that the skiers’ salaries were, on average, higher than those of the non-skiers …
Just to take the first paragraph of this article : “What are the benefits of going to University ? ” It argues that they are consideable for the individual but almost more so for the wider society and economy. It suggests that the optimal figure might be as high as 80% A staggering figure. This begs a serious of questions.
1. If there is huge societal gain why are we so keen on individualising the cost? You are in effect arguing for Private Squalor , Public Affluence in this policy area.
2. If we currently sending c45% of people to University and think the potential optimum might be as high as 80% what about basic behavioural psychology ? Is charging inividuals more or making it cheaper/free more likely to encourage such a huge sift ?
3. finally I don’t much like the implied non sequitar in all of this. thats because a service will be used by 80% of a society it is therefore unaffordable. thats an arguement against any kind of universal provision. the NHS, the military, roads, street lighting.
“Finally, would it be fair to raise taxes on grads some of whom had paid fees, in order to save others from having to pay the fees? I think I would be pretty unhappy if I had to pay my own loan off and pay more taxes for others to escape the loans. We have no money to cancel the existing debt so presumably LD policy is that some people should pay twice for univ education. That doesn’t sound fair to me…”
I am sure that particular problem could be dealt with fairly easily by allowing those paying off a loan to credit that against tax.
CCF – “But, as I said, the fact that graduate salaries are higher on average proves absolutely nothing about how many people should be taking a degree course.”
You are quite right that in itself it far from proves the case.
I do not take the view that it is sensible for the Government to set an artificial target of the percentage of people that should go to University.
I do think it is likely that steady growth in the proportion that go to University is sensible, and that this will effectively pay for itself in the long run.
There is certainly no evidence that we have hit a ceiling on the sensible proportion of people going to HE.
I can beleive that at some point the proportion going on to HE will be very high, in the same way that the proportion of young people staying on after 16 has grown massively over recent years to the point where it is the norm.
Liberal Neil
“I do think it is likely that steady growth in the proportion that go to University is sensible, and that this will effectively pay for itself in the long run.”
It will only pay for itself if three years of academic study improves people’s abilities to do their jobs to such an extent that it makes the huge investment of time and money worthwhile.
Just think how much directly relevant training – throughout people’s careers – could be provided for the cost of a three-year university course.
Surely we should be looking at the evidence in a hard-headed way, not just going along with the trend?
Jennie: I wasn’t trying to patronise you, my apologies if it came over that way – it was late, I had worked a long day. I don’t suppose you were trying to patronise me by calling me “hon” earlier, either. I was just trying to point out that survey based evidence can be accurate.
I agree with Matthew that middle ranking univs are under a lot of pressure, and so are their staff. No offence taken.
CCF: The point is that you compare people with qualifications X and a degree, with people with qualifications X, to try to overcome this. It is the best we can do. If we were sending too many people to univ, you would expect that the premium would fall. It hasn’t, that is the evidence.
We could fund univs by higher taxes, but taxes would have to rise quite a lot. If we spent the same % of GDP on univs as the US – which has a better access record than we do – then we are not talking about a couple of billion. You double the numbers and treble the fees, and you are talking big money for tax payers to find. One advantage of the market is that it is easier to provide both low cost univs – like US community colleges, which do a great job, and top notch research univs like my own. Having a system where everything is free and pretends to be equal is just a lie, and deep down we know that a 2:1 from one univ is not necessarily the same as a 2:1 from another.
Off to lecture…
“The point is that you compare people with qualifications X and a degree, with people with qualifications X, to try to overcome this.”
But that too is a meaningless comparison. Applicants without a degree won’t even be considered for many jobs, in the current set-up. And of course people who choose not to go to university have very different career aspirations from those who do.
It may be the best comparison you can do, but it’s so deeply flawed that you’d be better not bothering. It certainly doesn’t prove anything.
But I think the perception that “the more people who go to university the better” is so ingrained now, that it’s pointless trying to question it.
I’ve had a look at LSE’s library catalogue. It reports they only have one copy of the latest edition of Smith & Hogan (Crim law textbook c.£35) so hardly a 1:9 provision.
Tim,
“You double the numbers and treble the fees, and you are talking big money for tax payers to find.”
First of all – yes but, most of us don’t believe you should double the numbers. So that’s a bit of a straw man argument.
As to raising or trebling the fees so as to fund unis properly – well maybe. How big is big money? Are you able to produce some sort of costing or is that too much to ask?
Just to be clear: the LSE buys 1 copy of every textbook that faculty define as essential. If Hywel has found a book that we only have one copy of, then obvously no lecturer at LSE has defined it as essential for a particular course. I have had the library buy >10 copies of a book before, that I wanted my students to read for just one week of a course (at £55 a go): I work in a univ that will do that, pretty much no matter the price of a book. We can do that because we have a lot of high fee students. Other univs cannot do that: faculty are expected to work around the books in the library.
CCF: You say that there are lots of jobs for which you now need a degree. I would argue that this is because a degree helps you do the job! Otherwise why wouldn’t those firms offer the jobs to anyone who had an offer from LSE? They don’t, so unless you think every graduate employer is stupid, it seems to me that your argument is logically flawed.
David: you can have any number you like! If you want the current low and declining quality of univ education then stick with current fee levels. If you want LSE levels of funding, multiply by 5-6 per student. Pick your quality and we can tell you the price! There is no “correct” price per se.
CCF – I agree with you that we need to look at the evidence, and that we should look at whether academic courses or training approaches work best.
But all the evidence that I am aware of so far, from here and abroad, suggests that the steady expansion of HE seems to help long term economic development.
The ongoing existence of a graduate earnings premium supports that view, even if is doesn’t prove it.
Tim
“CCF: You say that there are lots of jobs for which you now need a degree. I would argue that this is because a degree helps you do the job! Otherwise why wouldn’t those firms offer the jobs to anyone who had an offer from LSE? They don’t, so unless you think every graduate employer is stupid, it seems to me that your argument is logically flawed.”
Of course I _didn’t_ say that there were lots of jobs for which you “now need” a degree. I said there were many jobs which wouldn’t be offered to anyone without a degree.
Surely it’s not that hard to work out. If 40% of the population have degrees, 40% of jobs will be viewed as jobs suitable for those with degrees. If it did ever happen that 80% of the population had degrees, then inevitably something like that proportion of jobs would be viewed as degree-level jobs.
None of that has anything at all to do with how much three years’ academic education actually helps people do their jobs.
The unsurprising facts that graduates earn more than non-graduates, and that for many positions employers prefer graduates to non-graduates, tell us nothing about how useful degree courses are, let alone what proportion of graduates is “optimal” .
Liberal Neil:
“But all the evidence that I am aware of so far, from here and abroad, suggests that the steady expansion of HE seems to help long term economic development.”
By all means post some of this evidence.
CCF: If you are right, why don’t the employers who currently employ grads offer jobs to people who just have univ offers? On your model these people would be just as good as grads. And firms could pay them a bit less than a regular job for the first three years (thus increasing their profits) but rather more than they get as students (thus increasing their wealth). My students are often very, very job focused. If they could get a “graduate” job in the City at 18, they would take it.
My answer is that they are not as good at “grad jobs” when offered the place at univ as they are when their leave univ, and that is why employers prefer LSE grads to people who have offers from LSE. We teach them stuff that makes them better at their jobs.
Tim
It’s sounds as though you’re talking about people who are employing economists. Well, obviously they are going to want their employees to have degrees in economics!
What I’m questioning is whether half the jobs in the country – or even perhaps, heaven help us, four fifths of the jobs, as you suggest in your article – really require a university degree.
To be concrete, for which of the following groups in the standard classification of occupations do you think education to degree level is necessary?
4 Administrative and Secretarial Occupations
5 Skilled Trades Occupations
6 Personal Service Occupations
7 Sales and Customer Service Occupations
8 Process, Plant and Machine Operatives
9 Elementary Occupations
If your “optimal” percentage of the population going to university were really 80%, it would have to take in most of those.
CCF: Any job that employers prefer to pay a graduate higher wages to do, rather than to employ the same person prior to them going to univ, with the wage gap sufficient to make it worth that person going to univ.
What other answer did you expect from an economist? 🙂
(PS Since I teach historians, I mainly talk to the employers of historians, not economists)
Tim
I don’t think your answer is a very sensible one to the question of “which jobs is a degree necessary for?”, but let’s go along with it for the sake of argument.
You didn’t say which of the occupational groups I mentioned satisfied your criterion. Do you know which? Are there any data on how the “graduate premium” varies between the groups? Obviously an average figure over all graduates doesn’t give you the answer.
Tim,
What do you think the typical employer would say if the Government offered to provide all its bright young staff with three years academic training in analytical skills, technical writing, etc etc, absolutely free of charge?
That’s why taking on graduates makes business sense!
Of course, the employer might very much prefer to just take the money that graduate education would have cost, and then do his own training. We don’t offer him that choice, so, we don’t find out if we have wasted our money.
My father is a University professor who I know for a fact would not possibly have been able to attend university himself if it was not for the student grant he got, nevermind having to pay fees.
Most interestingly to me the university he works for has not increased the amount spent on teaching students by any significant amount since fees were introduced. The money seems to being spent on hiring additional administrotors to do tasks which used to be done by academics (meaning the tail is definitely wagging the dog) and on building superflous buildings.
The university are also concentrating on improving research as they are assessed on the quality of their research and paid for it based on the outcome of the assessment but there is no real assessment of the university’s teaching quality.
To me the fatal argument for tuiton fees is that the government’s own figures suggest that graduates would pay far more in additional tax due to the supposed ‘salary boost’ given by a degree than the cost to the government of paying for the degree. It is of benefit to the economy and society to have graduates and IMHO this is something which is best paid for by the government not the individual if we are to have true equality of oppertunity for all.