We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Investing in yourself is… bad? The dependably readable William Sjostrom takes an article in the Daily Telegraph decrying the fact British students are in debt and turns it on its head:
My central point remains this: why do newspapers, staffed by people who happily go into debt to buy cars and homes, write as if students are clearly worse off going into debt to pay for university education?
Why indeed?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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You don’t get it, Perry! Education is not a simple commodity like cars, yachts, or a holiday in Eastasia. It’s more like a basic human right, and poor parents should be required to pay taxes so that rich kids can go to Oxford for free. Or something like that.
(Actually I am aware that British schools charge tuition. You backward reactionaries! We proud Czechs can get an education for free, and that’s why we have the lowest ratio of university educated people in Europe).
Yes, and we Irish can also get an education for free, and that’s why we have the highest ratio of university educated people in Europe
Tomas Kohl – then you’re “aware” of a non-fact. As in most countries, parents who choose to educate their children privately pay fees. They are a tiny segment of the population. The vast, vast majority of British children are schooled without cost at state schools. They’re dire propaganda factories, but they’re free at point of delivery of said propaganda.
The reason a large segment of the media – the BBC alone is a large segment of the media – cringes at the idea of anyone investing in a college education is, the British public has been cowed by the socialists into trusting the big daddy government to provide for everything. People being expected to take responsibility for their own future is a bit of a shocker.
Dick O’Brien – so what?
Verity, I was made to believe by our media that British college students do pay non-zero fees that could be called ‘tuition.’ Can I study at Oxford or LSE for free? My sources tell me I can’t. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Dick – good for you. Perhaps the Irish taxpayers can afford what ours can’t.
the aptly named dick thinks the irish get a ‘free’ education? don’t teachers charge for their services in ireland? no, you get an education paid for by other people, that is not a ‘free’ education.
It can be bad if it’s wasted. Anyone who goes into debt enough to buy a small house, in exchange for a degree in basket-weaving or women’s studies, probably hasn’t come out ahead of the deal.
Tomas Kohl: in Britain when we speak of ‘schools’ we generally refer to institutions for the education of children under 18 years of age – Verity is referring to these when he says that they are state funded and ‘free at point of delivery’. For institutions like the LSE, Oxford, Cambridge and so on we usually use terms like ‘university’ or perhaps ‘college’, and it is these institutions which charge tuition fees.
My own opinion is that a free-market in higher education would be a wonderful thing – but it is a million miles away from the deformed monstrosity which will emerge under the government’s ‘top-up fees’ bill. Though maybe things will improve a little when the £3000 cap is eventually removed.
The comparison between students, and economically active adults who borrow, is a false one.
The adults know they have an income, they know what they can afford and how they will pay it back, and they make an informed decision to borrow for something which (often) they could do without if they chose.
Students have no income, have no idea whether they will ever have an income, have no idea how or when they will pay back the debt, and are often only just out of nappies in economic terms. That is why saddling them with five-figure debts, which frankly would frighten me even now, is wrong.
Even more wrong – and perhaps the fundamental issue in the UK – is that the state is still helping itself to our money in quantities which were supposed, among other things, to provide higher education.
Whether state provision is right or wrong is another argument, but in simple terms of moral justice the state should either provide the good they are charging us for, or stop charging us.
The argument is slightly flawed. Sure, investing £40,000 in a medical degree/engineering/a.n.other well respected degree of your choice is a massive personal investment with a high ROI.
Not sure I could say the same of a combined honours in Ancient Greek Stuidies with Politics and Basket Weaving from the University of Central Nowhere in Somewhere Unpleasant.
That’s not investment it’s just education for the sake of it.
As I’m not going to have children I’ve no real issue with some of my tax going to fund limited but high quality further education for essential skills which I’ll probably want to take advantage of, or which will make my life better/richer/easier or whatever. The current situation, however, is merely devaluing what degree mean. Which is a waste of everybodies money, including the individuals getting them.
Mike – yes, when Tomas Kohl referred to schools, I naturally assumed he meant schools and not universities.
Tomas Kohl – Unlike American students, who are motivated to wring every last ounce of value out of their university educations because they have paid for them, British students are heavily subsidised by the taxpayer, who has sensed a desperate need for more people with degrees in the History of Surfing, Angling for Tots and The Life of Gloria Steinham. Blair’s ‘top-up’ fees just means that students are being required to at least make a tiny contribution.
Andrew Duffin, American students don’t know whether they’ll get employment that matches their degree either, but they have the optimism and confidence to invest in themselves and try to make it happen. The British collapse in a little damp puddle of tears and hold marches and student strikes and go out and get plastered.
However, I do agree with you that the government has no business extracting taxes from the public for ‘higher education’. Whether to pursue higher education is a personal choice and the government has no legitimate role in it.
Not sure I could say the same of a combined honours in Ancient Greek Stuidies with Politics and Basket Weaving from the University of Central Nowhere in Somewhere Unpleasant.
..which courses are a feature of ‘free’ university education. Given a free market in higher education one would be in a better situation to determine the depth of students’ commitments to such courses.
The vast, vast majority of British children are schooled without cost at state schools.
Well, verity, I wouldn’t say its entirely without cost. 😉
Frank: indeed – as a postgraduate (social sciences – don’t ask) due to finish Uni for good next summer I’ve come to the conclusion that it was the biggest fucking waste of time as far as finding something you actually want to do goes (though maybe it will have some minor job-finding value). People interested in studying ancient Greece should stock up on Penguin Classics and figure it all out for themselves – which is pretty much de facto what you would have to do at Uni anyway except you won’t have all the exam and coursework bullshit.
R C Dean – I was trying to take a clear shot and not hamper my point with qualifiers. I was eschewing obfuscation.
Whether one is borrowing for a house or an education, they will have to labor in the future to pay it back. That is all that credit really is, possessing now and laboring later. It should be irrelevant what for as long as someone is willing to voluntarily risk not being paid back.
All this of course is turned inside out and upside down in a State of entitlement and special treatment. In a free, uncoerced, society no one is entitled to shelter or an education. Someone may offer to supply one or the other, or the financing for either, as they see fit, based on their own choices.
The article’s bollocks anyway. I worked for Bradford University until 1999, and there’s no way you could rent anywhere for £35 or buy a pint for a pound even then. Maybe in 1993 when I moved there, but today? That’s preposterous.
A friend of mine was warden of one of the halls of residence and as such had access to figures for students’ spending habits. The little tykes were always complaining that they couldn’t afford the recommended course texts, but that was due to the (on average) thirty quids’ worth of beer they guzzled down their pieholes every week. I’m not denying students their right to get reeking drunk three nights a week (hell, I did it myself) but I do object to hearing them wailing piteously about how hard up they are over their fifth pint of Strongbow.
Up-front, market-based fees financed through loans and savings should be levied. All government funding and involvement in tertiary education should cease. This would have any number of beneficial effects, the two most salient of which being the end of PC meddling in Universities’ admissions procedures, and the precipitous decline in the number of idle halfwits doing degrees with ‘Studies’ in the title. Far too damn many people are going to University as it is, and New Labour want to bump it to 50%. I’d say that a maximum of 7-8% of people are capable of handling the rigours of a true honours degreee course. Maybe another 10% are up to the task of a tertiary qualification such as an HND. The rest would be much better off getting a real job straightwaway, instead of frittering away three years at someone else’s expense, only to emerge to find that you have a piece of paper that says you are marginally less competent to stack shelves in Waitrose than the kid who left school at sixteen.
This won’t lead to ‘skills shortages’. Market-based provision of university education would serve to broker the needs of industry. I can readily envisage loans being offered at more attractive rates for students wishing to pursue a degree in science or engineering. Non-vocational subjects such as English literature might become less attractive, but that’s too bad (besides, the way most arts subjects are taught today, a degree would seem to be a positive hindrance). If, as the anti-fees people say, a university educated workforce is a positive externality, then the market will compensate for that. If it isn’t, I can’t see any reasonable argument as to why someone working in a car factory should subsidise his neighbour’s child to study a subject with no positive return to the economy (still less one which will later enhance his neighbour’s child’s income).
It can be bad if it’s wasted. Anyone who goes into debt enough to buy a small house, in exchange for a degree in basket-weaving or women’s studies, probably hasn’t come out ahead of the deal.
All the better that the taxpayer not foot the bill!
Having been at University for 5 years now, i can confirm the simple fact that the press are obsessed with -that high fees are causing more debt for students.
That said, there are a number of individuals whose complete mismanagement of money and general laziness contributes to that debt amount. While fees are high, my PGDip LPC trainee solicitors course was £7,150 for 10 months, but there was not one person on that course slobbing about, its an investment that needs to pay off.
Having said that, my LLM fees will be around £4,000, but the true cost is £11,000 for the year. So yes, I am asking for £7,000 of taxpayers’ money (although I’ve paid a lot too!).
But people, i can assure you that no one would lend me £11,000 with what I have as security for a loan of that amount. But don’t worry, because the Government will be finding more ways to steal my future earnings and pay for the old folks who paid this money for me now.
..which courses are a feature of ‘free’ university education.
They’re a feature of “mass market McDonalds” style “free” university education. They didn’t use to be.
I do feel churlish getting annoyed about this. When I got my engineering degree it cost me fairly little. I worked hard, but had a good time, beer was £0.60 a pint, rent £16 a week and a week’s shop was around £10 – I could just about do on a £30 a week budget for everything.
Of course, when my older brother did his degree in 1977, beer was £0.21 a pint, his hall bill was covered by his grant and he had a great time.
Then again, I pay more in tax in a couple of months now than I was in debt when I graduated.
I wish that was a universal situation…
I just bought a new computer, spent about 2500 dollars on it. I think Iwill need it for future, you know education business. So I guess there are some stuff that you can buy spend money for you:)
Quoth Peter Sykes:
“I can assure you that no one would lend me £11,000 with what I have as security for a loan of that amount.”
You’re training to be a solicitor. From an actuarial standpoint you are therefore a pretty good risk. I have no doubt that were you studying in a market-based tertiary education system you would find any number of lenders willing to offer you a nugatory sum like £11,000. That’s £200-odd a month for five years at 5%, or £70 p.m. for 15 years.
Let’s put it another way. Does anyone seriously think that the introduction of market pricing to the study of professions such as law or medicine would lead to shortages in the numbers of people taking up those professions? If that were the case, why are there so many bloody lawyers in the US? Perhaps the equilibrium level of demand for some professions would alter as the costs of loan repayments were factored into salaries, but that’s what markets do: match the supply of a good to its demand to set a price level.
OK, that’s fair enough for professions such as law, engineering or accountancy. But what if you want to study archaeology, or art history, or mediaeval poetry? How are you going to get a loan for that? But that’s begging the question that you have a right to choose your career path and have it paid for by someone else. If you truly, deeply want to study Sanskrit, then all power to your elbow. But don’t expect to do it on my dime. Maybe society in general, AKA, The Market, will decide that it needs a certain number of theologians. This demand, for a given supply, will set the equilibrium price it’s willing to pay for them. Any shortfall should be made up for by the aspirant scholar. As soon as you start saying, ‘but what sort of a society would it be if we didn’t have art historians?’ you are presuming to speak for everyone else. If people want art historians, they will buy them. If they do not, they will not, and it is unconscionable to speak (and spend) for them.
There’s no way that full, unfettered market-based fees could be introduced in a big-bang fashion, but parents need to be weaned off the idea that the State will subsidise their little moppets’ college days. Perhaps there’s room for some form of ‘stakeholder’ savings facility, but when all’s said and done, if you want to go to university it is unreasonable to expect a third party to pay for it.
That should be £90 p.m. for 15 years. Still chump change.
David Gillies – Totally brilliant post and says it all. Oddly enough, the United States doesn’t lack for lawyers – no! really! it’s true! – even though they’ve all had to finance themselves through college! And there art historians by the bucketload writing dissertations, hiring out as consultants, getting teaching jobs, writing books popularising art history.
As David Gillies says – if you can find a market, go for it and may the wind always be at your back.
If you can’t, don’t expect people who get up every morning in the depressing drab of December and are in their cars to go to work, or on their 7:37 from Milton Keynes into Euston, or are out running wheelies to the garbage truck while it’s still dark, or people stacking the shelves in Tesco at 1 a.m. to finance your young dreams. This is the cut-off point. This is the point where teen-age morphs into real life.
The market will decide whether it wants you. That’s the hard truth and socialist ideology poisons the well.
David-Great post, and sums up the whole affair.
The idea of mass education is something that I’m still quite miffed about. Time was a degree actually meant something, be it a degree in Eng Lit. or engineering. Rigor and intellectual honesty being the key traits that a graduate should have. And going to university was an honor in itself.
Then somehow something started rotting. People started seeing higher education as a right, not an earned privilege. Higher education became massed higher education, and the number of degrees suddenly exploded. And as any economist knows, too much forced supply, and the value of the good/product(degrees/graduates) declines.
A total revamp of the university system is required. No more creeping of the humanities and even worse and useless subjects into the hard sciences, engineering, law, and a few others. No more conferring of the term ‘degree’ onto courses that lack sufficient rigor and intellectual honesty, and even less applicability in real life and industry.
For the record, I just attained a 2nd class honours degree in chemistry. I just feel mad whenever I meet somebody who attained a first class degree in whatever from some shitty overseas university who can’t even spell correctly in essays and produce proper sentences in normal conversation.
TWG
In theory, the idea that student pay for their education is of course true. The problem is that the return on investment is greatly reduced because of taxes on income.
What the current government is trying to do is to charge students for their education, whilst simultaneously charging them again through taxes when they graduate.
Only a combination of low taxes and personal responsibility can work. Otherwise the responsible people will pay twice.
In response to David Gillies:
£11,000 to me is far from nugatory, but I take your point that if it was a true market based system, i would probably be able to find a lender willing to stump up the cash.
Indeed there is no shortage of lawyers, but a considerable proportion of those lawyers have had all the funding provided by the state in the days of grants, when they are from considerably wealthier backgrounds than myself.
Sorry to bang the ‘poor disadvantaged student’ drum, but I am limited in my capacity to buy the materials to do the course and keep up with fee payments. I don’t want handouts, but fees are heading in the way that only people with inherited wealth and wealthy international students are able to afford to go, despite their lack of skill as a lawyer. And people wonder why so many lawyers don’t seem to know what they are doing.
It’s not a real loan anyway. You only have to pay it back if your income is high enough. No bailiff will come round from HMG to seize your widescreen TV. If only Barclays made small business loans on those terms.
Peter Sykes – well cry me a river.
May I suggest you follow the example of American students and get a job?
Verity:
I work 20 hours a week during term and full time during the holidays. It is not enough to raise £11,000 by any stretch of the imagination. If you want to question my commitment to raising the capital, why not ask other students who are in their late 20s and yet to work a single day in their lives.
The are no ‘student loans’ available at postgraduate level from the cruddy state. The best loans available are from HSBC, but they, in the current state of play, would still not lend me £11,000.
I’m just saying how things are, I’m against grants, and I believe that each should pay what he can, but fees are such that the most intelligent students lose out.
Peter Sykes, I was interested in your comments – and pleased to hear that a Brit was actually working his way through college – until you hit the phrase “cruddy state”. By which I assume you mean the cruddy taxpayer?
Not good enough for you? Those cruddy taxpayers better shape up smartish if they are to measure up to the wishes and demands of Peter Sykes!
Sorry, Peter, I do see that you are someone who at least has some motivation, but you are hooked on the government tit. You think British taxpayers have somehow got themselves into a position of financing your ambitions. You are not owed a tertiary education. With respect, you are an adult. No one owes you a damn thing.
I hope you make it through, because you seem to be more motivated than most British students who, in all their thousands, seem to feel they are a rather exciting addition to British civil society.
The workaday British taxpayer owes you nothing for your young dreams. But I wish you well.
Verityh:
I agree that I’m not owed anything, nothing annoys me more than people who think that its a human right that you should have to fund my education.
All I ask for is some help, some level of contribution that I can pay back at a later date. At undergraduate level, this is beginning to work in the UK, but at postgraduate level, the loans are just not available for the level of fees that are demanded. Maybe if the government allowed a truly free market in education, this problem would not arise, as market forces would push the costs of fees down.
There is nothing wrong in charging the true cost of fees, as students would in theory learn the lesson of life and quite rightly learn that you have to pay for what you use. However, the truth so often is that the parents pay the costs, and the student continues life with the nanny state mentality, having not contributed a penny to their own education.
I’ve had to make ends meet, and I know that I am at an advantage overcoming barriers that give me a greater determination to suceed. A shrewd business sense of watching every penny and making the best use of money develops which puts the poorer student at an advantage over the parent/state funded student.
That said, it is just getting to the stage with fees where students are hitting brick walls, where the true value of freedom is being undermined by the fact that intelligence counts for nothing in education, just the size of your wallet.
Peter Sykes – Thanks for your reply and you are correct when you say that education in Britain should be (I would say must be) deregulated. That such morally corrupt and obessive individuals as Gordon Brown & Co are in a position to wreck the entire educational structure of a nation in order to pursue their private King Charles’s heads is spine chilling. The Exchequer should have absolutely no place in financing eductional institutions – which would automatically remove its power to dictate to them.
Such financing should be done by student fees and endowments from alumnae. And I would go so far as tax breaks. End of story.
You are right, the free market would bring fees down in some institutions. And even the very expensive ones, like the Ivy League and others in the US, would have enough in endowments to be able to make genuine grants to the unusually able.
Have you considered going to the US to finish your education?
I’ve not considered studying in the US, but its the cost of living that puts it out of sight as an option, rather than the fees.
However, as I have an English law degree, it would be possible to work as a lawyer after a conversion course in the US, but, the powers that be have made so that only New York and California would allow me to work without a US law degree.
The silly thing is that I could practice in another EU country with much greater ease, even though they have a civil law system as opposed to the common law system as in the UK and the US!
Peter, the cost of living is around a third cheaper in the US. Britain and the EU are horrendously expensive compared to the rest of planet Earth.
Also university education is much more flexible. You can go to college for a couple of terms and then drop out for the following term to earn more money, or do an internship, or whatever, then go back, even if it’s to a different university. Your credits follow you.
Peter if you are good enough get a company to sponser you through university. If you are not good enough no wonder you cannot get the sponsership. If this is the case find something better fitting your talents.
klu01dbt – that is a very amiable solution, but then I expect Peter would have to sign a contract to work for that company for three or four years, probably on a reduced salary to repay the debt. Doesn’t this sound a bit too like free enterprise for a Labour government to approve? Someone stepping outside their loathesome university system? They would claim it was indentured servitude, or slavery, even, and outlaw it.
Of course, capitalism always finds a way … and it’s a great solution for clever, ambitious people who are having trouble financing their own education.
the cost of living is around a third cheaper in the US.
That entirely depends on where you live in the US. There are certainly places where the cost of living is a third of the amount – New York and California (mentioned before) are not 2 of them.
Err…
” Doesn’t this sound a bit too like free enterprise for a Labour government to approve?”
no, it’s been going on for years. Talk to some engineering students.
Dick O’Brien wrote – “Yes, and we Irish can also get an education for free, and that’s why we have the highest ratio of university educated people in Europe”
Apparently that education doesn’t extend to basic economics, or even common sense, otherwise you’d know that education does not become free simply because it is funded by tax receipts.