Interesting Links for 25-11-2014

[andrewducker]

• Probably my favourite "Unknown Pleasures" T-shirt
  (tags: t-shirts art space funny music )
• Alert: New Anti-Porn Censorship Law to Arrive 1st December
  (tags: porn censorship UK )
• The 3-Word Tweet That Cost a Politician Her Job
  (tags: Twitter politics class Labour UK )
• Are nurses getting 1% pay rises or 4% pay rises?
  (tags: nhs pay UK )
• NASA Will

Comments

[steepholm]

Yes, the loan system is effectively an extra 9% income tax on graduates who earn 'middle-class' incomes - except of course for those with rich parents, who can pay the loans up front and save themselves bags of money in the process. It's a useless way for the Government to raise money, but it does give graduates a huge headache, even before they try to save for an impossibly inflated house deposit, think about kids, or any of the "normal" stuff their parents took for granted. And before any Liberal Democrats tell me that a 9% hike in income tax isn't very much, I'd like to ask why, in that case, they aren't suggesting it across the board, as a way to wipe out the deficit at a stroke. How would that play, do they think?

And of course Labour are no better. They, like the Liberal Democrats, tripled fees when they were in power, after promising not to do so.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I agree that it's not the world's best solution. I'd like to see some investigation into how other European countries manage their system to allow for cheap (or free) university education.

It still, for most people, leaves them better off than they would have been under the previous system, and I'm in favour of that.

[steepholm]

What do you mean by "the previous system"?

It's a question of priorities (not many other countries are paying for Trident). I find it strange that the country could afford to give me free education plus a maintenance grant in the late 1970s, when it was so much poorer, but can't now fund the necessary the education of the graduates it needs for its own economic survival.

[wildeabandon]

About 50,000 people graduated in 1970, 80,000 in 1980, 350,000 in 2011.

Source: www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/sn04252.pdf

[andrewducker]

The previous student loan system it replaced. The one that this comparison is with:

[cartesiandaemon]

that's an increase of 20x the number of people going to university... I think that it's a worthwhile investment in the future

I'm really not sure how to think of university. I think it's some combination of "good for us as people to socialise with a variety of people and learn things that might be useful in some way" (good) and "an expensive system of patronage that ensures that middle-class jobs tend to go to middle-class people" (bad).

I'm not sure how many people actually _use_ the knowledge in their degree in their job outside academia or related work -- I think that's getting more common with more vocational courses, but I don't assume that more university education makes us actually makes a more productive economy.

[skington]

I work in IT and my politics and philosophy degree doesn't help me intrinsically, but getting better at thinking about stuff analytically is something that has definitely helped me at work.

[cartesiandaemon]

Yeah, likewise with maths. But I'm not sure if it helped *more* than four years of software engeineering experience.

[steepholm]

The expansion of student numbers under Labour was far too great, in my opinion, and that certainly didn't help. (I remember banging on about that on LJ at the time.)

Another possibility would be to introduce a graduate tax that applied to all graduates (since we all presumably continue to benefit from our graduate status), and not just the new ones. The fact that this was not even considered is just another instance of the way that the young are screwed over by the old (or more specifically the middle-aged) in this country.

[andrewducker]

I agree about student numbers. Knowing what I do now, I'd say that in an ideal world I wouldn't have done a Comp-Sci degree, I'd have done an industrial training course of some kind - lasting a couple of years, and teaching good programming practices and computer knowledge, but bypassing the theoretical bits that aren't needed for most jobs.

Of course, that would mean an education system that actually thought about what the country needed, and the best way of delivering it.

A graduate tax that affected people who already had student loans would be tricky, and probably unfair. To be honest, it should probably be a tax on everyone, along with less places at university, and better vocational education/training. In an ideal world.

[naath]

It does leave most people paying less per month than the previous system; and assuming you don't actually pay it off entirely before the 30 year limit that means paying less overall.

It leaves anyone paying upfront paying more. Some of those are the very rich, about whom I do not give a toss (and probably they don't give much of a toss about 9grand anyway). Others are those who are for some reason ineligible for the loan (for instance if you already have a degree), who either have to borrow on more usual terms or save up - I have many more tosses to give for those people.

It also leaves anyone who is seriously debt-averse much more worried about the whole prospect. You have to have a certain amount of comfort with the financial system in general to believe these promises; and a lot of people with little money have little trust in said system.

But overall it doesn't actually seem to have put people off attending university; so it can't have been all that bad.