An interesting article in today's Independent by Frances Cairncross entitled "The way to fund our universities". She stresses the central role of universities in our society saying they have the same role now as car manufacturing had in the 20th century - which was a rather unexpected analogy for me - and are crucial producing the " raw material of a flourishing society. However this is under threat because universities act as the gateway to being middle class. Consequently tuition fees are seen "as a tax on entry to the middle class" and so are both unpopular as they stand, and impossible to increase without huge protests. This starves the universities of funds.
However she goes on to reject the graduate tax as a solution, but does so by using something very close to a straw man argument. The version of the graduate tax she criticises is a variant it would appear of the loan scheme. She does not actually describe the system she would reject in detail, but I think it is a kind of loan scheme as she says it would not work because:- 1. Graduates from the same degree course would pay different amounts. But surely this is the whole point of a fair tax in general. It taxes on ability to pay, which will of course vary between graduates. It is also true of the current system but in the odd way that the very well off and the comparitively poor pay least. It is the middle earners that pay most. 2. People who studied abroad would pay nothing. True. Which is no doubt a point of particular concern as she is Rector of Exeter College, Oxford and therefore well aware of international competition. But the great increase in tuition fees that she advocates would similarly make overseas universities more competitive. 3 Wealthier families would avoid taking out a student loan so that their children would not face a repayment bill. This is already a feature of the current system which the inverse pension scheme avoids. 4.Universities need money now, not in the future when payments start. I hope I have shown how the inverse pension scheme does overcome this problem, and allow funds to flow at once. She concludes this bit of her argument by saying the real cost of a student at Oxford is £18,000 a year. So if the scheme I favour were to be introduced and Oxford were not to continue to suffer a loss on each student, tuition fees for all, at all colleges would have to be set at 18,000 pounds. Or so it would seem. I wonder has anyone produced a table showing what the expenditure per student in each university is? More on this article later...