[Blook]

Theresa May has called for a freeze on tuition fees and has cancelled the plans for raising the maximum charge on tuition fees from £9,250 to £9,500 for 2018-2019. Theresa also wants to raise the minimum payback threshold from earning £21,000 ($28134.96) per year to £25,000 ($33494.00) per year. She hopes from this to bring some relief to the worrying students in England that are "just about managing".
May is doing this after a staunchly defending a policy that raised the charging to £9,000 a year, saying "What we expected to happen is that there was going to be a range, a diversity in the system and that we'd see Universities offering perhaps offering shorter courses, that we'd see Universities offering courses under the maximum fee, that hasn't happened, we've got to look at it again."

Read about it for yourself here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41456555 - BBC News

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 76181.html - The Independant

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politic ... 47746.html - London Evening Standard

Would love to hear some thoughts or discussions on this, this is my first posted topic so go easy on me ;D

[Decky]

It seems incredibly moronic and naive of her to belive that the unis wouldn't just charge the maximum they were allowed the charge. When Labour first tripled tuition fees from £1000 a year to £3000 everywhere charged the maximum they were legally allowed to charge their customers. Why would someone be dim enough to think they would act otherwise the next time that fees were tripled? Usually I would suspect dishonesty when a statement that far from reality is made but with the Tories it is immposible to know, maybe they actually are that out of touch with reality, who knows?

Also the threshold thing is false, it is done as an average. So even if you don't earn anything near the threshold in a year you only need to have one good week with a bit of overtime and you will pay out of that weeks pay even if you earn nothing even close to the threshold in that year or ever.

[Heisenberg]

She didn't "call for a freeze on tuition fees". The Conservatives were planning on tripling them again, but she has just realised it wouldn't be a good look and has decided against it. Like everything the Conservative Party does these days, it is a move utterly devoid of anything resembling a principle.

That said, I think it's overall "neutral". It's good not to be saddling people with even more pointless debt before they begin working, but the real problem is that we still hold to the insane idea that 50% of the population need to go to university. Inevitably, the result has been lower educational standards, an explosion of mediocre institutions laughably called "universities" and offering courses like hairdressing management, while genuine higher education institutions are left relatively underfunded. This is what you get when you base your education policy on vapid Blairite slogans, rather than the pursuit of academic excellence.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

An interesting aspect of this is how much the return of university education varies in OECD countries:



Here's how the OECD calculates the costs:



Source. The article is about NZ but also makes more general points, e.g. how the discount rate used for lifetime earnings influences the returns:


The OECD uses 2%.

[B0ycey]

All essential or high demand qualifications should be free. Perhaps that might stop your fear of poor nations losing their doctors @Kaiserschmarrn. Charge for over subscribed qualifications. How many psychologists, photographers or painters do we need?

[Kaiserschmarrn]

All essential or high demand qualifications should be free. Perhaps that might stop your fear of poor nations losing their doctors @Kaiserschmarrn. Charge for over subscribed qualifications. How many psychologists, photographers or painters do we need?

It's not really my fear, but a fact that the UK, for example, has acknowledged when it comes to recruitment from non-EU countries.

I completely agree that certain qualifications should get preferential treatment and be subsidised. At this point I'd scrap funding for much of the humanities which are not only a financial drain but, as far as I can see, are producing nothing of value to society whatsoever. They seem to be little more than therapy sessions for people who don't want to grow up while at the same time inflating their ego by giving them the impression that they are intellectuals who produce valuable research. In the worst cases, they are producing outright subversives on an unprecedented scale.

As @Heisenberg mentioned, there's also an inflation in qualifications that require a degree and so-called universities. I'm sure that makes the statistics about tertiary education look good, but it's an incredible waste of public and private funds.

It's really not that difficult. Support and subsidise excellence at the individual and academic level and, as you say, qualifications that have objective value.

[snapdragon]

It makes no difference whatsoever to the majority of students. Whether they end up owing £50,000 or fifty mllion, they still end paying back the same amount according to how much the earn.

Students from well off families who pay the fees upfront will no doubt benefit, which is typical Tory policy.

I'm not really sure how it works these days. Despite the fact my eldest daughter's friend's father was a well off business owner. she didn't have to pay a penny in fees because she lived with her mother who didn't work.

She could and did claim the yearly grant of £1000 which she used as pocket money.

Hopefully that loophole has been closed.