Fee increase

[palmer1984]

My main worry is not that HUGE DEBT will stop students from going to university (though that is a concern). I'm worried that students will go to university to do degrees that don't actually lead to well paid jobs. £40000 in debt when you end up being a secretary or a bar manager is really pretty awful. Despite having a degree at a reasonably good university I'm doing a fairly low paid non-graduate job.

Comments

[sashajwolf]

Well, bear in mind the plan includes raising the threshold at which people start repaying, charging no interest where people have not yet reached that threshold, increasing maintenance grants, and raising the cap beyond which you don't get a grant. One calculation says that anyone earning less than £33k after graduation will be better off under the new proposals than under the current system. So there's actually quite a lot there to help people who end up in those sorts of jobs, even if the Coalition goes straight for the Browne proposals with no further improvements (and there are quite a few improvements being discussed internally at the moment.)

[ciphergoth]

Do you happen to know if the repayment threshold is sharp or gradual ie if someone who is a pound above it pays back a great deal more than someone a pound below it?

[sashajwolf]

I'm not sure that level of detail's been published yet.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Since the loan repayments are so low, it ends up being a regressive graduate tax: the less you earn, the more you pay over your lifetime.

It's also the first move in privatising the public debt as a form of balance sheet misrepresentation. Rather than have the government borrow £40k, make the students borrow it instead.

I have the opposite worry: that degrees that don't lead to well paid jobs will be taken up only by the children of the well off, and the idea of university as an academic rather than vocational institution will be corroded.

[http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/id/config.php]

It's progressive up until the point where you pay back the whole loan over your working life, then regressive from there on up. The worst hit are the middle earners. Setting the interest rate to inflation seems the only fair way to me, that'd make it progressive then flat.

I don't think this is the first move in privatising the public debt - they've been selling off student loans for years. What it's doing is increasing the amount the government gets for them due to the real rate of interest.

My worry is that graduates will only do well paid jobs leaving an even bigger starvation of candidates for other useful but not so well paid activites, research, startups etc. Had I had a £40k debt I'd never have changed job for a lower paid but more interesting one.