Although, this opinion piece is focused on the problem with post-secondary education in UK, & a little bit on US (for comparison purposes), I would say that's the condition of education, & consequently society, mostly everywhere in the world.
Everyone loves to talk about how education is important for everyone in today's society & how education is the key for future economic stability for the nations & financial independence for the individuals. BUT, what no one talks about is how education is keep becoming expensive & jobs are keep becoming dependent on personal & professional networks than mere education.
Education is definitely important & must be attained by everyone. But how can a poor student, & most students are from poor family backgrounds (thanks to the world economy), pay already-exorbitant & ever-increasing school fees? Except a few countries around the world (& you can probably count them on your fingers), most countries have / are cutting their education spending, & hence, education institutes are constantly increasing their fees, which in turn, reduce the chances for a poor student to ever break the cycle of poverty he/she is thrust into & become educated & financially independent.
The fees are increasing because of several factors:
1. Governments at all levels are cutting their education funding. Governments, however, are more than happier to keep increasing their military funding. So, the finite financial power a government has, is being diverted towards making it easier to kill a human than to educate a human.
2. Government officials are being controlled by rich & powerful elites of the country. These elites want a stratified society where masses of poor are at their behest to do their work while they enjoy their days sitting in their golden chairs.
3. Taking the second point further, those rich & powerful elites might have become so rich & powerful through a finance-based economy. For instance, Wall Street has made quite a few individuals rich & powerful in US. Now, those individuals want more & more people to take out loans & hence, get trapped in the continuing & unending cycle of debt. Since, the younger generation keeps being shown the dream that if you get more education, you will one day join those powerful elites, the student enrollment keeps increasing. More student = more student loans, which in turn, helps those rich elites become ever more richer & powerful.
4. Education institutes are becoming more a business than a place to share knowledge. Profit & loss are becoming the focus of the education institutes than increasing the level of humanity through education & hence, making a better society, at the national & global levels. In this quest of making more profits, professors are being given contract jobs with minimum-level wages, while students are being charged ever higher fees.
To make matters worse, & as the opinion piece also mentions, that the earning power of new generation also keeps getting worse & worse. So, the education costs is increasing, which require bigger & bigger loans, but the wages are not keeping up with those education costs either, so it takes longer & longer, decades in most cases, for new graduates to pay off those debts.
As the opinion piece further mentions, education is becoming more "what can I study which will get me more money" instead of "what can I study which will make me a better human". For instance, arts education is being derided for graduating out people who are becoming a drain on the country, since they are not considered useful in money-making professions, whereas, education in Information Technology, Medicine, Engineering, & Business for instance is emphasized because graduates of these faculties have a higher chance of making more money than arts graduates. That's, of course, is creating more graduates with silo mindsets, who are focused more on making money, in any way they can, instead of students who want to love learning their whole lives & want to pursue a more well-rounded education.
Job market is also becoming more network-based than education or even skills-based. Since, education institutes have become "degree-granting industries", they are graduating more & more people with degrees, regardless of whether the society needs those degrees or not. So, a country, & even the world, is ending up being flooded with people with degrees. Every other person is an engineer, an MBA, an accountant, a marketing expert, a communications master & whatnot. Since, there are a finite number of businesses & employers, hiring is being done more on the basis of personal & professional networks than pure merit of education & skills.
All of these factors are resulting in a society, on a national & international level, where more & more graduates are frustrated & depressed with increasing debts & decreasing incomes, an ever-increasing gap between rich & poor, more & more people with multiple degrees but either unemployed or less-than-ideal employment, & a society with siloed mindsets due to the unavailability, & unpopularity, of a rounded education than a quick money-making education.
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In 2015, English universities are spending £800m on promoting access for disadvantaged students as the quid pro quo for increasing their fees to £9,000 – a patchwork quilt of scholarships, fee-waivers, induction & remedial courses & building links with communities & schools to appeal to students from poorer backgrounds. It seems to be working. Analysis by the recent final report of the Independent Commission on Fees (which I chaired) shows that over the past 5 years the proportion of students from disadvantaged homes has risen markedly.
... If 12,000 more students from poorer homes are enrolling at university than 5 years ago, that hardly compensates for the collapse in part-time student numbers, falling by 152,000 over the same period. The principal cause is fear of debt, a trend that will be accelerated by the ending of maintenance grants in the budget. While part-time numbers are holding up in Scotland, Northern Ireland & Wales, which don’t charge £6,750 for part-time courses, they are plunging in England, which does. Part-time foundation degrees, certificates & diplomas of higher education are people’s second chance, especially for the over-25s, who represent four-fifths of the drop. The number of mature students doing full-time degrees is also falling. Together this represents one of the biggest setbacks to social mobility in modern times.
The notion that Britain’s students are simply shrugging off debts that by 2020 will be approaching £50,000 as universities index fees to inflation, bringing them near to £10,000, is far too optimistic. Today’s 16- to 18-year-olds are beginning to worry as much about debt as their older peers. A ComRes opinion survey commissioned by the Sutton Trust reports that 78% of young people were concerned as potential students about the cost of living, 68% by high tuition fees & 58% by having to repay student loans. They are right. The US is often quoted as the country whose system of student funding most cloesely corresponds to England’s, but because of generous scholarships in private universities & very low fees charged by many state universities, only 70% of US students graduate with debt, which in any case only averages £22,750. In Britain, all students graduate with debt almost twice the US level.
Already in the US there are grave concerns about the social implications. Couples are waiting longer before they marry; the birthrate is falling; home ownership among under-40s is plummeting; & the rate of small business formation by young people is decreasing. As loan default rates rise, the whole exercise threatens to become self-defeating.The consequences in England promise to be more pronounced. Property prices in relation to income are much higher & graduates shouldering student debt are in no position to save up the huge deposit needed to buy a home. Moreover, the fee regime is interacting with a collapse in young people’s real wages – down more than 10% since 2008.
Britain is in the process of creating the most stratified, least socially mobile, cruelly unfair society in
its treatment of the young in the advanced world. The over-50s, rejoicing in the untaxed capital gains they enjoy from buying property a generation ago, will help their own kids, but are not asked to help anyone else’s. As in the US, family formation, the birthrate, home ownership & small business startups are all beginning to be affected & parents will work far into old age to try to help their children. All this to ensure that the allegedly malevolent state is shrunk.
Worse, the debt is structured so that the compound interest rate effect of not paying it off early makes it even more onerous, an effect vastly more likely to hit students from disadvantaged homes. Yes, more are getting to university but, with a few exceptions, not the top ones whose degrees are most valued by employers. Students from advantaged neighbourhoods are 10 times more likely to go to a Russell Group university than those from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. So not only do students from poorer homes have parents not rich enough to be able to help them, their earning power will be less. George Osborne’s legacy, ranging from relaxing inheritance tax to allowing parents to leave their pension pot to their kids & eliminating maintenance grants, will be a society in which the rich are better able to help their indebted children, while the disadvantaged will be left as bottom-tier citizens, renting homes while engaged in a lifelong struggle to repay their student debt. Three-quarters will be paying off loans in their 50s.
And as in the US, default rates are rising. The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills now thinks that 45% of the loans for full-time students will never be repaid, along with 65% of loans to part-time students; the taxpayer will pick up the bill. Indeed, the default rate is now so high that the system is nearly as costly as the low-fee regime it replaced. Meanwhile, universities are finding that more students want to do degrees more likely to deliver high salaries; little by little, they are being transformed from centres of rounded academic teaching & research excellence across the gamut of subjects to high-class employment agencies.
Is any of this what we want as a society? Is it so important that the state consumes only 35.5% of GDP rather than, say, 37% that we are prepared to sacrifice social mobility, entrench class, lower home ownership, enslave a generation to debt & diminish the idea of the university? At the very least, average debt levels should be no higher than those in the US, with many more concessions for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. This is too big a cause to be marginalised as that of the “left”. It is everyone’s – & time mainstream politicians spoke up.
Will Hutton is principal of Hertford College, Oxford
Everyone loves to talk about how education is important for everyone in today's society & how education is the key for future economic stability for the nations & financial independence for the individuals. BUT, what no one talks about is how education is keep becoming expensive & jobs are keep becoming dependent on personal & professional networks than mere education.
Education is definitely important & must be attained by everyone. But how can a poor student, & most students are from poor family backgrounds (thanks to the world economy), pay already-exorbitant & ever-increasing school fees? Except a few countries around the world (& you can probably count them on your fingers), most countries have / are cutting their education spending, & hence, education institutes are constantly increasing their fees, which in turn, reduce the chances for a poor student to ever break the cycle of poverty he/she is thrust into & become educated & financially independent.
The fees are increasing because of several factors:
1. Governments at all levels are cutting their education funding. Governments, however, are more than happier to keep increasing their military funding. So, the finite financial power a government has, is being diverted towards making it easier to kill a human than to educate a human.
2. Government officials are being controlled by rich & powerful elites of the country. These elites want a stratified society where masses of poor are at their behest to do their work while they enjoy their days sitting in their golden chairs.
3. Taking the second point further, those rich & powerful elites might have become so rich & powerful through a finance-based economy. For instance, Wall Street has made quite a few individuals rich & powerful in US. Now, those individuals want more & more people to take out loans & hence, get trapped in the continuing & unending cycle of debt. Since, the younger generation keeps being shown the dream that if you get more education, you will one day join those powerful elites, the student enrollment keeps increasing. More student = more student loans, which in turn, helps those rich elites become ever more richer & powerful.
4. Education institutes are becoming more a business than a place to share knowledge. Profit & loss are becoming the focus of the education institutes than increasing the level of humanity through education & hence, making a better society, at the national & global levels. In this quest of making more profits, professors are being given contract jobs with minimum-level wages, while students are being charged ever higher fees.
To make matters worse, & as the opinion piece also mentions, that the earning power of new generation also keeps getting worse & worse. So, the education costs is increasing, which require bigger & bigger loans, but the wages are not keeping up with those education costs either, so it takes longer & longer, decades in most cases, for new graduates to pay off those debts.
As the opinion piece further mentions, education is becoming more "what can I study which will get me more money" instead of "what can I study which will make me a better human". For instance, arts education is being derided for graduating out people who are becoming a drain on the country, since they are not considered useful in money-making professions, whereas, education in Information Technology, Medicine, Engineering, & Business for instance is emphasized because graduates of these faculties have a higher chance of making more money than arts graduates. That's, of course, is creating more graduates with silo mindsets, who are focused more on making money, in any way they can, instead of students who want to love learning their whole lives & want to pursue a more well-rounded education.
Job market is also becoming more network-based than education or even skills-based. Since, education institutes have become "degree-granting industries", they are graduating more & more people with degrees, regardless of whether the society needs those degrees or not. So, a country, & even the world, is ending up being flooded with people with degrees. Every other person is an engineer, an MBA, an accountant, a marketing expert, a communications master & whatnot. Since, there are a finite number of businesses & employers, hiring is being done more on the basis of personal & professional networks than pure merit of education & skills.
All of these factors are resulting in a society, on a national & international level, where more & more graduates are frustrated & depressed with increasing debts & decreasing incomes, an ever-increasing gap between rich & poor, more & more people with multiple degrees but either unemployed or less-than-ideal employment, & a society with siloed mindsets due to the unavailability, & unpopularity, of a rounded education than a quick money-making education.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 2015, English universities are spending £800m on promoting access for disadvantaged students as the quid pro quo for increasing their fees to £9,000 – a patchwork quilt of scholarships, fee-waivers, induction & remedial courses & building links with communities & schools to appeal to students from poorer backgrounds. It seems to be working. Analysis by the recent final report of the Independent Commission on Fees (which I chaired) shows that over the past 5 years the proportion of students from disadvantaged homes has risen markedly.
... If 12,000 more students from poorer homes are enrolling at university than 5 years ago, that hardly compensates for the collapse in part-time student numbers, falling by 152,000 over the same period. The principal cause is fear of debt, a trend that will be accelerated by the ending of maintenance grants in the budget. While part-time numbers are holding up in Scotland, Northern Ireland & Wales, which don’t charge £6,750 for part-time courses, they are plunging in England, which does. Part-time foundation degrees, certificates & diplomas of higher education are people’s second chance, especially for the over-25s, who represent four-fifths of the drop. The number of mature students doing full-time degrees is also falling. Together this represents one of the biggest setbacks to social mobility in modern times.
The notion that Britain’s students are simply shrugging off debts that by 2020 will be approaching £50,000 as universities index fees to inflation, bringing them near to £10,000, is far too optimistic. Today’s 16- to 18-year-olds are beginning to worry as much about debt as their older peers. A ComRes opinion survey commissioned by the Sutton Trust reports that 78% of young people were concerned as potential students about the cost of living, 68% by high tuition fees & 58% by having to repay student loans. They are right. The US is often quoted as the country whose system of student funding most cloesely corresponds to England’s, but because of generous scholarships in private universities & very low fees charged by many state universities, only 70% of US students graduate with debt, which in any case only averages £22,750. In Britain, all students graduate with debt almost twice the US level.
Already in the US there are grave concerns about the social implications. Couples are waiting longer before they marry; the birthrate is falling; home ownership among under-40s is plummeting; & the rate of small business formation by young people is decreasing. As loan default rates rise, the whole exercise threatens to become self-defeating.The consequences in England promise to be more pronounced. Property prices in relation to income are much higher & graduates shouldering student debt are in no position to save up the huge deposit needed to buy a home. Moreover, the fee regime is interacting with a collapse in young people’s real wages – down more than 10% since 2008.
Britain is in the process of creating the most stratified, least socially mobile, cruelly unfair society in
its treatment of the young in the advanced world. The over-50s, rejoicing in the untaxed capital gains they enjoy from buying property a generation ago, will help their own kids, but are not asked to help anyone else’s. As in the US, family formation, the birthrate, home ownership & small business startups are all beginning to be affected & parents will work far into old age to try to help their children. All this to ensure that the allegedly malevolent state is shrunk.
Worse, the debt is structured so that the compound interest rate effect of not paying it off early makes it even more onerous, an effect vastly more likely to hit students from disadvantaged homes. Yes, more are getting to university but, with a few exceptions, not the top ones whose degrees are most valued by employers. Students from advantaged neighbourhoods are 10 times more likely to go to a Russell Group university than those from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. So not only do students from poorer homes have parents not rich enough to be able to help them, their earning power will be less. George Osborne’s legacy, ranging from relaxing inheritance tax to allowing parents to leave their pension pot to their kids & eliminating maintenance grants, will be a society in which the rich are better able to help their indebted children, while the disadvantaged will be left as bottom-tier citizens, renting homes while engaged in a lifelong struggle to repay their student debt. Three-quarters will be paying off loans in their 50s.
And as in the US, default rates are rising. The Department for Business, Innovation & Skills now thinks that 45% of the loans for full-time students will never be repaid, along with 65% of loans to part-time students; the taxpayer will pick up the bill. Indeed, the default rate is now so high that the system is nearly as costly as the low-fee regime it replaced. Meanwhile, universities are finding that more students want to do degrees more likely to deliver high salaries; little by little, they are being transformed from centres of rounded academic teaching & research excellence across the gamut of subjects to high-class employment agencies.
Is any of this what we want as a society? Is it so important that the state consumes only 35.5% of GDP rather than, say, 37% that we are prepared to sacrifice social mobility, entrench class, lower home ownership, enslave a generation to debt & diminish the idea of the university? At the very least, average debt levels should be no higher than those in the US, with many more concessions for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. This is too big a cause to be marginalised as that of the “left”. It is everyone’s – & time mainstream politicians spoke up.
Will Hutton is principal of Hertford College, Oxford
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