12.1.10

Tuition fees

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Just realised I’ve only been blogging about once a month. Oops. I’ve been mainly been focussing on doing my fanlistings at the moment. The wee little buttons are so cute! But anyway, the reason for today’s blog is to give my two pence on the current tutition fee plans in England.

For those who don’t know, tuition fees for English universities are currently at around £3300 a year. Even though it sounds quite a lot I personally think it’s a good deal for education at some of the top universities in the world. But recently, there have been plans announced that they will rise to £9000 a year, which has been causing loads of student protests to prevent this. These fees will very likely be brought in for 2012 entry to university, which is the year I’ll hopefully be starting university. Obviously I feel that these plans are very important to me, and the majority of people I know.

Overall it probably isn’t too bad for most students, it’s just that £27,000 is a very scary number. You can take out a loan a only pay it back once you are earning £20,000 a year. I don’t know about interest, at the moment it is minimal but that might change with the new fees. My main problem with increasing fees by 200% is that it is completely and utterly pointless.

As I said, you don’t have to pay back your loan until you are earning a certain amount. This loan is given to you by the government. So it will be a good 5 years before they are making any return at all on the new fees. And what’s more, after a certain number of years your debt will be cancelled. You won’t be paying it all back. The government expects to lose around 20% to 30% of their money on student loans, but under the new system it’s been predicted to be as high as 50%. So how exactly is this helping the economy?

Another problem I have with the system is that it puts poorer students off of going to university in the first place. I don’t think that the debt and the way you pay it off is too bad, and overall I think it’s a good investment, but if you were from a poorer background and no one is expecting you to go to university anyway, it might not seem that way. This increase in fees may make university more elite, make them seem more like it’s just for the richest. And all this for no obvious benefit to the economy.

Recently I read this article written by David Cameron, our current Prime Minister, and one of the benefits of raising tuition fees he gave was that it would drive up the quality of our universities. But I don’t see how the quality of teaching will be better. There will be massive cuts to universities meaning they won’t be better off with the higher fees, it’s likely they’ll have even less money to spend. And seeing as there is going to be a two step system, with £9000 a year for the best universities and a £6000 cap on the worst, surely this will just create a massive divide in the quality of university? Wouldn’t this just put off poorer students from going to our best universities even more, making them just a playing ground for the richest?

I think that the rise in fees won’t be a complete disaster, but it certainly isn’t improving things. The main reason given by the Tories to introduce these fees is to help reduce the deficit and national debt, and I really don’t see how they will do this. I’m not a poorer student, but I’m not well off either and these fees probably will affect my future. I’ll be paying off that loan for a long time. Some cynics are saying that all this is because lending money to students looks better than giving money as a teaching grant to universities in the government’s spreadsheets, and to be honest I’m inclined to agree.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11735254