Paying for university

[TheAnimus]

Was it not harret harmen who asked why the dustman should pay for the doctor to study.....

I honestly worry that people are void of simple rational thinking.

[badass]

The point is that someone has to pay for the universities, and I struggle to see why it's not reasonable to expect those benefiting most directly to pick up a chunk of that cost, and the more they benefit, the bigger the chunk.

I agree with that to a point, however I don't see why someone that does surfing studies as a degree and then bums around for the rest of their lives should be funded by the taxpayer.
Perhaps some degrees such as this should have an up front cost with a reduced means tested tax afterward whilst the degrees that maintain the UK's competitiveness don't have the up front cost. That would mean no free rides for the waster degree pupils, and those that make the most of their degrees and can afford to pay the most, do.
What I will add however is that anything Clinical and NHS related, all Degrees should be free both from tax and from up front costs. TO pass many of the degrees, the undergrads must do NHS work anyway. Anyone that's worked for the disorganised mess called the NHS will tell you that's payment enough.

[BobF64]

http://www.toptenz.net/to-10-useless...es-degrees.php
With the exception of number 1, that's the kind of crap that needs to go.

Why not Art History?

Surely thats one of THE most useless.

I mean just buy a copy of "Art History for Dummies" (yes it does exist) and you probably know enough to get your own BBC4 series about Art.

Other than that, Universities the world over have changed from places of learning to places that generate income, hence all the "tard" courses that mean people study there for almost no practical purpose.

That said, some believe that having a degree shows youre capable of independent working and thought.

Which begs the question, why not just offer degrees in that instead?

[Blitzen]

Scotland manage to pay for people's tuition fees, and it seems to be working here. That said nothing ever gets done by the local council so maybe the money is wrongly allocated.

No...English tax payers pay for Scottish tuition fess.

[Konan555]

Why not Art History?

Surely thats one of THE most useless.

Get rid of Art History? What do you suggest that royals study for their token degrees then?

[nibbler]

No...English tax payers pay for Scottish tuition fess.

Already fixed this on previous page.

Why not Art History?

Surely thats one of THE most useless.



That said, some believe that having a degree shows youre capable of independent working and thought.

Which begs the question, why not just offer degrees in that instead?

Art is worth lots. It's a fact. It is also important cultural documentation. Should we let idiots who have no idea what they are talking about own all the expensive art to hang as trophies on their walls? Art should be kept in museums where curators can care for it and do administrative work such as labeling etc. I hardly see that as useless.
Then again you're talking to the son of an art historian so i guess i'm biased.

[Powderhound]

Already fixed this on previous page.



Art is worth lots. It's a fact. It is also important cultural documentation. Should we let idiots who have no idea what they are talking about own all the expensive art to hang as trophies on their walls? Art should be kept in museums where curators can care for it and do administrative work such as labeling etc. I hardly see that as useless.
Then again you're talking to the son of an art historian so i guess i'm biased.

Well, surfing no doubt contributes greatly to the Cornish economy and is a major cultural phenomenon.

[Saracen]

....

But an additional graduate tax is unfairly discriminatory. If, as we are lead to believe, those with a degree get better jobs than those without, then they will be paying more tax through the progressive taxation system.

....

It'd discriminatory (in the technical sense of discriminating between, rather than against) but I'm not so sure that it's unfair.

Person A goes to uni, gets a degree and ends up earning £150k a year as a result. That degree course has cost the state (i.e. taxpayer) to provide. But person B goes from school to an apprenticeship, becomes a plumber (or whatever), learns a trade, works hard, starts a business and succeeds and ends up earning £150k a year as a result. Both will pay according to the (slightly) progressive income tax rates, but one has cost the taxpayer thousands and the other hasn't.

Is there not an argument that those that benefit from uni education should at least contribute towards the cost incurred by having it provided?

And, if they're going to contribute, then it seems fair that those that benefit most contribute most.

What doesn't seem fair is for someone to graduate, get a socially desirable and valuable job, perhaps like nursing, and end up with the same £30,000 millstone round their neck that a doctor, accountant or lawyer earning several times that amount has.

So .... if you have a degree and end up earning £150,000 or more as a result, does it not seem equitable to pay more, and have the nurse earning £30,000 paying less? After all, both have to fund families, pay rent, or mortgage, etc.

I can't see why those earning more, for life, shouldn't pay a bit more, for life provided it's matched to ability to pay. We do need to recognise that some socially valuable jobs (nursing, teaching and many others) increasing require advanced levels of education without having the same material benefits as business, law or, like me, accountancy. It seems logical that if you benefit, you contribute to the cost, but that those that don't benefit anything like as much financially shouldn't shoulder anything like as much of the financial burden. After all, we're apparently short of nurses but I'm not aware of a desperate shortage of either lawyers or accountants.

All in al, I guess all I'm saying is that the more money your earn as a result of a degree, you more you should expect to pay back and that having a degree should result in a cost, because it pretty much has to these days. But, some people with degrees put back into society and "pay" for their degree in other ways too. So where we have socially valuable but not (generally) especially well-paid jobs like nursing or teaching, it's not unreasonable reflect that those people pay back by taking jobs we desperately need done but that don't pay well.

Pay for the benefit according to ability to pay, but keep one eye on that cost both being reasonable, and socially just.

Another potential advantage of a graduate tax is that if the cost is amortised over a lifetime of earning, it's not anything like as great a burden as trying to pay off a large loan in the early years, not least because almost everyone tends to earn more as their career progresses. Under a loan system, the worst part of paying off the debt occurs in the early years where (subject to a minimum level) you can least afford it, whereas with a tax that kicks in based on earnings, the higher your earnings, the larger the element of contribution so it tends to happen later in life when the ability to pay a bit more is higher, and you don't have the millstone of a large debt.

We have to keep the rates of any such tax realistic, in relation to cost incurred, and it has to be socially fair, but the principle seems to be better (as in fairer) than up-front fees funded by a ruddy great loan.

[Saracen]

I agree with that to a point, however I don't see why someone that does surfing studies as a degree and then bums around for the rest of their lives should be funded by the taxpayer.
Perhaps some degrees such as this should have an up front cost with a reduced means tested tax afterward whilst the degrees that maintain the UK's competitiveness don't have the up front cost. That would mean no free rides for the waster degree pupils, and those that make the most of their degrees and can afford to pay the most, do.
What I will add however is that anything Clinical and NHS related, all Degrees should be free both from tax and from up front costs. TO pass many of the degrees, the undergrads must do NHS work anyway. Anyone that's worked for the disorganised mess called the NHS will tell you that's payment enough.

I agree, certainly to the first para.

Two reservations, though.

First, given that surfing is an extreme and minority example, I'll widen it to "less useful" degrees. But who determines what's useful and what isn't? And where are the lines drawn? It might set a dangerous precedent to let politic8ians decide what we can study.

Second, I agree about the bumming about bit, but there's a point at which the cost of administering a bureaucracy to prevent something exceeds the benefit from preventing it. Take winter fuel payments. The only reason I can see, personally, for that being universal is that the cost of administering a means testing system exceeds the amount saved by doing so. But short of that, why should the taxes of someone earning £20,000 go to paying a fuel allowance to someone earning £100k, just because they're older than an arbitrary age? This is where I fundamentally part company with some aspects of what we now have as a welfare state. Welfare should, in my view, only be paid to those in need, not automatically to the elderly, or to those with kids, etc. Two professional people earning £100,000 each can damn well afford to raise their own kids and if they can't, they need to cut back of their lifestyle somewhere else to pay for it, not expect a helping hand from those earning a quarter of what they do. That is a disgrace. It might be an off-topic disgrace, but it's a disgrace.

[TheAnimus]

What about those like my sister, who have been schooled at great expense (4 years at uni) graduated, but decided that her degree was more a novelty, and has yet to earn more than 15k a year?

She deserves to be made to pay for her schooling, she has squandered it by doing roles that would not require it?

[BobF64]

Art is worth lots. It's a fact. It is also important cultural documentation. Should we let idiots who have no idea what they are talking about own all the expensive art to hang as trophies on their walls? Art should be kept in museums where curators can care for it and do administrative work such as labeling etc. I hardly see that as useless.
Then again you're talking to the son of an art historian so i guess i'm biased.

Oh Im not saying that art or art historians are useless and unnecessary.

Im just saying that you dont need a degree in it to do it.

But the, thats also true of a great many other "useful" degree courses, because the courses themselves dont necessarily teach real world applicable skills.

[nibbler]

Top be fair: my dad is an art historian but studied classics

[Bugbait]

All in al, I guess all I'm saying is that the more money your earn as a result of a degree, you more you should expect to pay back and that having a degree should result in a cost, because it pretty much has to these days.

So what about those that generate an income by skills that have little or no relation to their degree? In these cases the degree is not the source of the income but the person themselves. Would they be exempt in your proposal?

[Terbinator]

Philosophy is on that list But what do they know, it was a list conjured by philistines, clearly

TBH, I don't have any issues with the so called 'grad tax' but the social mobility argument is an interesting one.
But I also don't have a waifu, sprog or a house to look after so I'm currently not earning and thus not losing a portion of my bread winning on top of the loans i theoretically will pay back, which when thought about can be seen as a bit of a shafting.

[Saracen]

So what about those that generate an income by skills that have little or no relation to their degree? In these cases the degree is not the source of the income but the person themselves. Would they be exempt in your proposal?

I take the point, but no. The cost of making any such scheme adapt to that level of individual detail would I suspect, be prohibitive, whereas a basic system whereby graduates pay a grad tax based on income would be relatively simple. Depending on how they implement it, it could be as simple as a change to the tax code .... you graduate, and a flag goes on the account to add an adjustment to the tax code, and the existing system implements the rest. And our tax system is complex enough without trying to implement that level of granularity.

What about those like my sister, who have been schooled at great expense (4 years at uni) graduated, but decided that her degree was more a novelty, and has yet to earn more than 15k a year?

She deserves to be made to pay for her schooling, she has squandered it by doing roles that would not require it?

As with the above point, there's a granularity issue. It's relatively easy to determine whether people have a degree, and what they earn, but far harder to start attributing whether the degree contributed or not.

I'm not a policy maker and I'm not trying to represent this as a finished, polished piece of detailed policy. I'm simply making the point that it seems fair to me that if you got a degree paid for by the state and then go earn to earn a high income, you should :-

- pay for the degree
- pay more if you earn more, and pay less if you don't earn much.

I leave the nuts and bolts details to the policy wonks that actually design the system, and I'm not suggesting that it'd be exactly as I've outlined, merely that this principle seems fair to me, at least, in the majority of cases. But what we don't want is a system so complex and bureaucratic that it's another job creation scheme for the public sector. We've had too much of that already.

[Spud1]

The big issue here is that if you add a futher graduate tax (something which I am vehemently against), then you risk making the time and effort spent getting a good degree almost worthless.

It's a totaly myth that a graduate will walk in to a £150k a year job, the difference is no where that huge for the majority of people. I think the average starting wage (london excluded) is around the £20k mark, with many graduate schemes only starting people on £18k a year. Thats not much in the grand scheme of things. You will then progress if you are bright enough, and not everyone is, and could well be on £30k-£40k by the time you are 30..after that it depends on what industry you are in, you are then past the barrier of entry to employment and your experience counts for much more than any degree. At that point you are on the same footing as a non graduate.

My point there is that a graduate tax does not make sense - your higher earning potential is, in the vast majority of cases, only at the start of your career, and not later on.

We already have a tax system which taxes those who earn more (and taxes them a huge amount - over 50% of your salary goes on various state deductions when you earn over the £44k threshold), and if you are talking about adding MORE tax to this, even another 5%..its really debatable whether its worth it for most people. I would certainly have thought twice about it. The ONLY situation where it could be even slightly viable is if this tax went away when you have paid back the cost of your tuition - ie if it were like a loan. That is the system we already have though..as you are "taxed" as a % of your earnings to repay your student debt. The fact that current proposals state that you would pay it forever is totally unacceptable, and this would drive any sensible student out of the UK for their education.

With all that said however, I do agree that the system we have in place at the moment is not perfect and it needs to be improved. People do need to pay for their education and we cannot expect the government to pay for all of us to go to university. I favour a modification of the current system personally, whereby the student loan is not given out as cash, but its paid directly to the university. The government lends the money to the students to pay the university for their fees, rather than paying for the TVs and drink (**stark generalisation I know,no offence to hard working students). The further issue then is how do students survive with no money...well I don't think that is the governments concern. That should be a matter for the parents, or the students themselves. I worked part time (16-18 hours a week) as a student and still came out with a good, 1st class degree, and tbh i'd expect any student to be able to do the same if they are not out partying every single night.