15 Comments

• Woodpecker 4th Dec '07 - 10:52am

  I think there may be a problem with the volume. Or is it my hearing aid…?

  In anycase, to answer what I suppose is Stephen’s question… “no”.

• Alix 4th Dec '07 - 11:25am

  Ha. Good luck targeting this alumna. I suppose I’ve got a couple of spare cans of basics range chopped tomatoes they could have.

  Seriously though, Chris’ answer, which I thought better, was essentially that university fundraising should get its act together. Stephen, is that logical advice or the impatience of a businessman ignoring realities?

• James Graham 4th Dec '07 - 11:44am

  Huhne answered the full question, Clegg didn’t. Both however gave themselves plenty of wriggle room to abandon fees at a later daye.

• Paul Graham 4th Dec '07 - 12:11pm

  Thank goodness Nick didn’t answer the question – he is very wisely leaving this issue open to review (and for the party to decide!). The only really compelling argument against tuiotion fees is that they further add to the burden of an already financially burdened generation. Personally, I would prefer to see cuts in the standard rate of tax and the abolition of stamp duty for first-time buyers than continuing with unsustainable levels of state subsidy to universities (and greater independence of universities from the state is also a strong argument in favour of tution fees). Unfortunately, here in Scotland we are stuck with the present statist approach.

• Alix 4th Dec '07 - 12:23pm

  To be fair, Chris also left the question open to review. He said that priorities should be reassessed at the beginning of every parliament, but he didn’t believe the time had yet come to change on tuition fees. Where I think he scored more strongly than Nick is that the second half of his answer addressed the foreign competition problem.

  Gyaaaaah, please do not fall into the error of assuming that abolishing stamp duty thresholds makes any real difference to most first time buyers. This is something of a hobby horse of mine.

• Geoffrey Payne 4th Dec '07 - 12:38pm

  Harvard, Princeton and Yale get massive donations from very rich graduates of these universities because that is how make it more likely that they can get their children into these places.
  The US has a culture of cronyism on a scale far greater than our own.
  I do not think we can copy that in this country, and I do not see how we can compete with them from private sources.
  If it could be done in the UK, it would have been done by now. There is no philosophical reason why the other 2 parties would not implement such policies otherwise.

• Unexpected Tiger 4th Dec '07 - 12:42pm

  I’m not sure I see the relationship between ‘competitiveness’ and fees. I can only think of two things that’s referring to..competition for international students, the whole point of which is that it pays for itself, and for the best research, which is supposed to benefit the country as a whole, not the students, and should therefore be paid out of general taxation.

• Tristan Mills 4th Dec '07 - 1:09pm

  We should abandon our tuition fees policy.

  Personally I think that we should remove all state funding from universities. It makes them far too beholden to the government and encourages students to undervalue their education. (This is not, I suspect, a popular policy amongst LibDems, and does raise some problems – I’d like to sort out some poverty issues before going quite this far…)

  The greatest benefit of university education is the recipient, not society as a whole (if anything can be attributed to such an amorphous entity) and with the current devaluation of a university education society benefits less and less from each degree.

  There are many models of funding which don’t need any state interference.
  One model I like is for lenders to buy ‘shares’ in a student, taking say 10% of earnings over the average non-graduate’s wages until the loan is paid off.

  I’m sure there’s others I’ve never thought of and any system would have a number of competing ones, what is needed is for government to step aside though.

• Sam 4th Dec '07 - 1:13pm

  ‘The greatest benefit of university education is the recipient, not society’

  True for some but not for all.

  The problem with the charging fees is that the graduate who goes on to be a social worker or nurse owes the same debt as the person who goes on the be a merchant banker or company director.

  I would much prefer some form of graduate tax that means that those who end up earning large salaries pay back more than those who go on to do less well paid but socially important work.

• Julian H 4th Dec '07 - 1:40pm

  I fail to see the social benefit in the three years that I spent playing pool, drinking too much, reading the occasional novel and flirting with the blonde in Shakespeare seminars.

• Stephen Tall 4th Dec '07 - 1:41pm

  2 – Alix: Chris’ answer, which I thought better, was essentially that university fundraising should get its act together. Stephen, is that logical advice or the impatience of a businessman ignoring realities?

  It’s a part of the answer, but it isn’t a real solution (and I suspect Chris knows it).

  The Oxford college I work for last year raised £725k in donations, c.10% of total income. However, it lost £800k on teaching undergraduates – so we didn’t even cover our losses, let alone pay for the bursaries etc which are needed to enable poorer students to come in the first place.

  US universities are much more successful at fundraising for all sorts of reasons (culture, tax rates etc) – but the big advantage they have is that they don’t have to make a loss on their teaching.

  Ultimately, the choice is this: you can have poorly-funded universities which don’t charge fees (cf continental Europe), or properly funded universities which do charge fees (cf US).

  Interestingly, though, the average tuition fee in the US is lower than in the UK. And of course participation in tertiary education is higher.

• passing (well, virtually live-in) tory 4th Dec '07 - 1:49pm

  It is a pity that everyone is concentrating on undergraduate funding. The point where the US system really beats the pants off the UK is in POSTgraduate education; both in terms of funding and structure of courses (of which, in the typical UK Ph.D. program, there is bugger all), and this is a subject that hardly attracts any attention whatsoever.

• Kevin 4th Dec '07 - 2:13pm

  The ultimate choice that Stephen tries to create in 11 is a false one, unless of course no-one has the political will to stand up for free education and well-funded universities.

  It would be more than a shame, if having identified a real vote-winning policy, we were to abandon it so cravenly. And we would, deservedly, be more than hard-pressed to defend many of our 2005 gains.

• Sam 4th Dec '07 - 3:57pm

  11 Stephen – how much do Oxford colleges spend on teaching each undergraduate compared to other universities?

• passing tory 4th Dec '07 - 4:10pm

  Kevin,

  Of course, the US system effectively does this. To go to college in one of the top schools you either have to be very rich or very clever (or be willing to take out a very big loan). I can’t recall the precise number of kids who go to Harvard on scholarships but it is high (60%?).

  Now, it is up to you whether you decide that in this approach the rich kids are subsidising the poor or whether they are buying advantage, but as a system it does seem to work quite well, and it does produce well funded universities free from the problems of state control and with a reasonable level of access for those who are less well off.