I’ve always hated the word ‘Progressive’. Not so much because of what it means – I recognise that the current political zeitgeist is one which favours redistributive taxation and I am nothing if not somebody willing to be carried along by the wind of political fervour. No, I hate the term because of its disingenuity, because it is a policy which piggy-backs on a politically palatable word. When a politician claims to be progressive they are said to be in favour of ‘progress’, instead of wealth redistribution. If you’re not progressive, then society as a whole will not progress, so goes the logic.
So when Aaron Porter addressed our Student Union Council about the NUS’ proposals for a progressive system of tuition fees, it set alarm bells furiously ringing. The NUS Vice President (Higher Education) called it a ‘Blueprint for an alternative higher education funding system’. I call it a blueprint for disaster.
The proposed scheme is for students to be charged based on, according to the NUS, the “benefit they obtain from higher education”. Up-front fees would be abolished under the NUS’ system, and fees would no longer be fixed. Basically, the better the job you get upon leaving university, the more fees you will pay. Instead of paying off a loan, you will be making sustained, increasing payments over a fixed term of twenty years. At 22 (or later, if you graduate later), graduates will begin to make contributions into a newly set-up trust fund until they reach the age of 42, with their contribution linked to their earnings. As you progress in your career and earn more, your contribution to tuition fees will increase, and vice versa.
This ‘progressive’ notion is a plan which forms the cornerstone of their ideas for university funding. Porter argued that “I don’t believe, under the current system, that it is fair that a high flying lawyer pays exactly the same for their university degree as somebody who decides to become a nurse”. Instinctively we might agree. Intuitively we could think that a progressive system of tuition fees might make sense, before we contemplate the implications of just what the NUS is proposing, and what our Student Union Council unanimously voted to support.
Porter used an example of high emotional resonance. We instinctively sympathise with the nurse, and we ask why the lawyer shouldn’t have to pay more – we judge the tuition fee argument by our feelings for the jobs in question, specifically that people should be penalised for becoming hard-nosed businessmen or hawkish-lawyers, and that we should reward people for humanitarian pursuits. The problem with these instincts is that they ignore the point in question, which is that if you succeed at university, the NUS wants you to pay more for the same product received by your less successful peers.
A slightly less morally loaded example can best illustrate this point. I study politics, and I may like to go into journalism. I have done work experience, my portfolio is solid and I have written in various publications. I’ve written at Impact Magazine for over a year, and I’m currently in a position of responsibility there. Now I would think it fair to expect to get a better job in the field of journalism than somebody who had studied politics and not done the same amount of extra-curricular work. However, if I did get a better paying job than them, by the standards of the NUS proposal I would have ‘benefitted’ more from my degree and would thus need to pay more for it. I would be penalised for having worked harder.
When students attend university to study a certain course, they are all paying for the same product – an education from the university in their chosen field. We’re all grown-ups now; if we choose not to make the most of our opportunity here then that doesn’t mean we should pay less because we have ‘benefitted’ less. If somebody is very talented, works very hard to get a first class degree and gets a better job than somebody with a third, they shouldn’t be penalised for taking more from their degree. They have earned their pay, and the NUS has no moral right to propose that it be cut.
If the NUS are allowed to have their way, high achievers will merely find themselves subsidising everybody else’s education. The proposed system is absurd, and it isn’t in keeping with one of the fundamental ideas behind university life – that high academic achievement is rewarded. Penalising success is a dangerous play, especially when it comes to education. The NUS is trying to play at social engineering with a very tenuous mandate, and I only hope they enjoy a similar level of failure to last time they tried to influence tuition fee policy.
One Comment
Pretty much agree with you on this. The NUS proposals would create an incentive structure rewarding mediocrity and taxing excellence.
The only benefit of the proposals is their psychological impact. Prospective students – and particularly the working-class population the NUS claims to be so concerned about – will with this system not be frightened away from university by the perceived ‘burden’ of high debt. However, I see no reason in principle why we could not institute this ‘go now, pay later’ system WITHOUT the scaled contribution scheme (i.e. everyone pays later in a non-loan manner, and everyone pays the same).
In the long term a better scheme would probably be the reverse of what the NUS proposes. It makes sense to offer low-fee plans and scholarships to economically useful courses (e.g. engineering, green tech, biotechnology) while maintaining (or more likely extending) higher fees on the majority of degrees. Combine this with greater subsidies to the former (i.e. instructing universities that they’ll have far greater net funding for offering such courses), and you would have a much more productive university system.