There’s a saying that for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. On tuition fees and student debt in England, both Theresa May and her new education secretary, Damian Hinds, are going for the “clear, simple and wrong” option.
May’s intuition is: why should students at Oxbridge and a former polytech have to pay the same £9,250 a year to study as undergraduates?
Why should someone taking an English course pay the same as someone doing engineering, when the complete works of Shakespeare are a fraction of the cost of a laser cutter? And why should someone who goes on to earn bucketloads in the City pay the same as a nurse or teacher?
The obvious answer would be to charge variable fees, but those who study the issue for at least 10 seconds quickly realise that all those cases contradict each other.
It is true that different university courses cost different amounts. That’s why the government subsidises the more valuable ones, such as medicine and engineering, so that the uniform £9,250 fee is maintained.
An English degree might be cheaper to teach than physics, but an English course at a Russell Group university is going to cost much the same as at any other university. And yet, we know that graduates from Oxford or Cambridge and graduates from newer universities tend to earn different amounts.
Ironically, the highest-earning undergraduate courses in the country are among the cheapest to run: economics degrees at Birkbeck College and the London School of Economics. It’s partly because they attract qualified students, but also because both colleges are located right next to the UK’s most lucrative employers in the City of London.
Under the current loans system, those well-paid graduates will pay back far more of their student loans than the mythical graduate hairdressers. So they do end up paying variable fees.
We don’t know what Theresa May’s review will come up with yet, but forcing down tuition fees by itself will not solve the problem of making university more affordable. Tuition fees account for less than half of many students’ debts – so cutting them still leaves a lot owing.
