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A degree of difficulty as parents count the cost of universities
I WOKE up yesterday morning to the sound of Higher Education Minister David Lammy on the radio, waffling about how there was "an important debate to be had" about the future of university tuition fees. That is true, but his pointless and bland offering contributed little to any such discussion.
Nonetheless, as the parent of a first-year student at a Scottish university, and of a sixth-form student, I quickly tuned in to the discussion, which was based on a BBC survey of universities, revealing that two-thirds of vice-chancellors say they need to raise tuition fees, suggesting levels of between 4,000 and 20,000 a year. By now I was really sitting up.
More than half of the VCs interviewed want students to pay at least 5,000 per year, or for there to be no upper limit. The current cap is 3,500.
Even with current fees in Scotland being just under 3,000 for students not originally domiciled there (the locals go for free), and adding in costs for accommodation and subsistence, my daughter's five years will cost upwards of 55,000.
Not all of this is debt she will carry with her. We're paying a substantial amount, and student loans cover the rest. She's lucky enough to be doing a course (medicine) which hopefully will enable her to pay off her debts reasonably quickly.
She will, I guess, be one of the graduates whose earnings help to push up the much-bandied-about-average figure of around 300,000-400,000 as being the amount graduates will receive over a lifetime over and above the earnings of non-graduates.
Just organising ourselves financially to support one student in the family has been an exercise in creative thinking and some cut-backs. Now we have another daughter considering her options. While she's accumulating prospectuses and looking at required grades, we hear news of potentially horrendous hikes in fees, and feel we're starting to look at the whole business through slightly different lenses.
We keep bumping into young people we've known for years in the neighbourhood, finding that a surprising number of them have "boomeranged" home to mum and dad, bringing their very good degrees from decent universities with them.
One, a first-class classics graduate, is sitting at a reception desk at a hospital; another, with a fine qualification in electronic engineering, is a (temporary) filing clerk in a bank, and an Oxford English graduate is working part-time as a lifeguard at a suburban swimming pool.
Yes, there are all sorts of debates to be had among politicians and academics – about equity of opportunity and Tony Blair's "50 per cent by 2010", the need for proper funding of universities as seats of learning and research institutions, and our standing in the world as a well-educated and influential nation.
But there's also an important debate that needs to take place, too, about why people go to university at all, and another about the future shape of the higher education marketplace. The Government has long been engaged in creating it, and the philosophy has already created certain attitudes on the part of consumers.
One in four students drops out; some who stay, even at very good universities, say they have so few hours' tuition that they wish their course could be done more intensively over two years, with higher tuition fees but less overall debt. Why isn't that an option? A marketplace creates customers, and those students and parents are now looking for a sensible, flexible exchange.
The more of a marketplace education becomes, the greater the divide will be between universities offering degrees that are relatively cheaply obtained and those that are valued more highly from institutions that charge more and generally impress more.
Another consideration is that, with 40-something per cent now going to university, a mere first degree probably won't tempt some employers to take our children. As has been the way with the introduction of the A* grade at A-level, the next step will be that of those who do to go uni in the future, many more will probably think about doing a four-year masters degree to give them an edge.
The possibilities are endless, and some of them are endlessly depressing and expensive. Somehow, somewhere, in all of this the price tag has become too important, and the quality of education is lost in discussion of who will foot the bill.
What isn't being discussed much, and it ought to be, is the social stigma that has developed in some circles about those who do not go to university, and why some employers ask for graduates for jobs which plainly don't require that kind of education. Why can't we remove the stigma by putting more money and status into more top-notch vocationally-based alternatives to university?
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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