Abolition of higher education fees is a distinctly non-liberal idea IMO (IE making all of society pay the full cost of higher education is hardly socially just) and it would be great for the Lib Dem party to be rid of it. That may mean that some MPs leave the party (or just vote against the putative act), but probably not enough to threaten the government's viability. Graduate tax was a silly plan, too-hastily concocted by someone (Cable) who should have known way better IMO.
"Easy credit" can certainly be the result of a rigged market, or unlevel playing field, or some displacement from free market wonderfulness.It's somewhat disturbing that the officials are so ready that people just heave it onto their college debt. In the US, anyway, much of the skyrocketing costs of college the past 15 years may be due to the ease with which college loans can be gotten, then supply and demand takes over, and college inflates due to a lot more college money available. Law of unintended consequences to the "blessing" of cheaper, easier loans. See also housing bubble
Assuming this applies here, it is probably not a good idea to borrow still more.
Correct. So TopNotchingham Uni can offer degrees that cost £50,000 per year if they want to. Doesn't mean they will attract applicants, unless those applicants expect to recover the cost with future earnings. They also do not get to keep all of the increase over £6,000 but have to pay a steeply increasing fraction of it to the government. And if the uni fails to compete, its department closes. So there are market and non-market checks against HE inflation.
The Browne proposals don't do that though. Your statement is made on the assumption that aversion to the future liability (which is linked to future earnings) is a prohibitive deterrent to studying. There's little rational reason (except for regulatory risk) why that should be the case, even if the student never expects to be a high earner.
Disagreed there--this is the latest of a sequence of reforms that have passed the cost of higher education from the taxpayer to the student, starting with the scrapping of maintenance grants in the 1980s. Of course, if you are correct, then applications will slump. (They may fall--that is to be expected--as there should be at least some reduction in "frivolous" applications. Although the 2006 reforms did not reduce student demand.)
It is not just--or even primarily--about access, which in truth should be viewed as being made harder (primarily for those whose families are on higher incomes). IMO it is mostly about allowing UK universities to improve and compete. However, the number of students in higher education has tended to rise as it has got more expensive.
And the taxpayer paid for it instead. Which, given that the monetary benefit to the graduate is reckoned by the OECD (table A 7.1) to be 50% higher than the benefit to the public, was regressive.
They are state funded. IIRC German universities do not appear in the global top 50, whereas the UK ones that do are Oxbridge, UCL, ICL, KCL, Edinburgh and maybe Bristol.
The lifetime "profit" according to the OECD (not actually profit, since it is without deducting the cost) is on average 50% higher earnings than stopping at secondary education--see above post. Then there are the joys of learning on top.
I think the government is missing a trick here. Why not use the fees to motivate young people to study economically useful subjects?
E.g., those that wanted to study over-subscribed and/or economically useless subjects such as media or psychology would pay back more than those who studied under-subscribed and economically essential subjects such as physics, chemistry* or engineering.
*Obviously if such a science graduate was seduced to go into the financial sector she should be hit for the full cost of her education.
Flaky point indeed. Of course, market prices, and gains and costs, get transmitted through the system in a system where those prices aren't fixed. But that's true of anything. House prices are higher where state-maintained schools have good reputations. Earnings are higher in cities but groceries cost more too. Raising minimum wages increases inflation and prices people out of jobs. Some of these effects are noticable, some (like the last one) are sufficiently diffused that they are scarcely detectable in the data. I suspect yours would also be in that category.
