Student loans

Are student loans a good idea?

Certainly as they are implemented in the UK, they serve no one well. The level of tuition fees is set too low to fund Universities properly. (The under funding of higher education gives the lie to Blair's 'Education, Education, Education'. Schools might have done well under Labour, but Universities have not.) Yet they are set high enough to discourage some students from applying to University, particularly those who have a higher aversion to taking on debt or less experience at doing multi-year cost/benefit analysis - and that is primarily the children of the less well off.

In short, we have a classic Nu-Labour half a hard on situation (as in there is nothing worse than...) Either fees need to raised very substantially, so that at least Universities are not losing money on every undergraduate educated. Or England needs to follow Scotland in ending the experiment with loans, with a more-than-matching increase in government spending on Universities.

The quality of teaching in English higher education is falling; contact hours are declining; and equipment is often laughably bad. The only thing that will fix these issues is money. If we want as many students in University as we have at the moment, someone is going to have to spend more. And even if we don't, accepting that the Blairite push to higher numbers was overdone, then the spend per student needs to increase. If it doesn't, the English University system will keep getting worse.