The tale of the 8.9%: Why I left the education system

Just under a year ago, I faced a pretty monumental decision.  At the age of seventeen, I had to weigh up two contrasting options for my future.  In September 2012, I could have chosen to remain within the stable borders of the conventional education system, but stack up a minimum £27,000 of debt.  My alternative was to enter the world of work and search for a modest income, whilst youth unemployment soars.

Granted- not life or death- but a tough decision for anyone to make, let alone someone who was yet to purchase a pint.  I was not the only one who had to make this choice.

I grew up, like many others my age, thinking of university as the natural bridge from the education system to the world of work.  It wasn’t a necessity, but the sensible final rung of the ladder.  I don’t know when this single thought began to spread.  What I do know is that, by the time I was in school, it was comprehensively entrenched into the system.

It had turned into a competition between colleges for the highest percentage of students taken in by universities.  This, in turn, transformed the way Sixth Form establishments functioned.  If you ask a principal for a specific student’s name, I guarantee most would struggle.  If you ask a principal for the precise number of their pupils that began university last September, I guarantee almost all could tell you on the spot.

Many commentators had condemned this culture to hell on a speedboat, but it never quite made it.  Instead, it hit a brick wall shortly after I began college, on 3 November, 2010.  On this day, the Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, delivered a statement to the House of Commons.

He declared that, from September 2012, fee-paying university students “in exceptional circumstances” would face “an absolute limit of £9,000”.  He made regular reference to Browne report of the previous month, specifically to a recommendation to remove a cap on fees completely.  Reading through Mr Willetts’ statement in isolation, you could be forgiven for thinking he was introducing a policy as uncontroversial as giving free lollies to toddlers.

He wasn’t.  Within a week, students would hit the streets, and government approval ratings would plummet.  It was one of the first major post-election cutbacks.  The individual decision was frustrating.  The fact I could see, and (to a degree) sympathise with, the reasoning behind it made it even worse.

Financially, at a time when the national deficit was undeniably high, the decision was understandable.  Politically, after one of the Coalition partners won their highest electoral vote share ever with a pledge to abolish student fees, the decision was exasperating.  Personally, as a member of the academic year group which the decision would affect first, the decision was just confusing.

The government took a beating, and the Liberal Democrats were tortured.  Labour’s Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills, Gareth Thomas, immediately responded to Mr Willetts’ parliamentary statement by describing it as “a tragedy for a whole generation”.  His words seem timid when compared with those of others outside the chamber.

The Coalition’s defence was consistent throughout, and a reasonable point.  Alongside the hike in fees this September will be a reformed system in which they are paid.  A ‘progressive graduate contributory method’ was the catchy title given to it at the time.

If this system had been introduced by the Coalition in isolation, without the tripling of student fees, the Lib Dems would probably have been congratulated.  But it wasn’t.  Furthermore, it was a pretty poor counter-argument to the key point that they had majorly broken a primary election promise.

The system used by young people to pay off up to £27,000 worth of debt in the UK may well be the best in the world, but it’s still £27,000 worth of debt.  Most graduates from the intake of 2012 will owe more in thousands than they have lived in years.  At the age of seventeen, this single fact was enough to put me off university, at least for the time being.

As it turns out, I was not alone in choosing this option.  Last week, UCAS announced that overall UK university applications for this September have seen an 8.9% year-on-year drop since 2011.  In England, that drop is as high as 10%.  That’s about 50,000 eighteen year-olds looking for work from September, whilst the youth unemployment rate remains at over a million.

It is undeniable that the raising of tuition fees will fundamentally alter the upper end of the education system.  What the government described as an “absolute limit” of student fees in “exceptional circumstances” will be charged by 68% of universities in September.  It has recently been estimated that the average university student will be paying £8,700 per annum, leading to a total cost of £26,100 over three years.

The specific financial results of this policy have no doubt already been calculated.  The political implications, particularly for the Liberal Democrats, will inevitably be unforgiving and brutal.  It is impossible, however, to conclude how such a wide-reaching policy will affect future British society and culture.

Come to think of it, that would make a pretty good dissertation…

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• 1maia

  No, the universities won’t close. It’ll be like in america – huge numbers of private universities, most of whose students fail (they have failure rates like 90%, in the UK if 10% of your students fail – totally fail, not leave with an HND – you’re considered the pits) but are huge money-making ventures for the student-loan selling companies who own them, as if you fail or drop out, you still owe the debt and you’re cheaper. They don’t care if you pass. (Their prey are the lower classes too ignorant to know the good from the bad universities.) As Hayek said, market asymmetries = unhealthy markets, not the healthy ones you anticipate. Also, most university income in this country is 1 from the government, awarded for doing famous research, and 2 from foreign students, attracted by your research fame. So the clients are not ‘most students’ – UK students are an annoying cost, not a plus, with the rare exception of poly-style places like Salford University who target the local working class and whose selling point is their ex-students’ high employability – the clients are a small elite. For them, the best outcome would be a small number of extremely expensive elite universities with almost no teaching, easy to pass degrees, no UK students except the rich, which sold ‘a top-ranked university education’ as a product. Not a university that didn’t make a profit but produced skilled industry-ready workforce to lead high-skilled industries. I was, until last year, completely unaware that it was universities like Salford and courses like wildlife conservation, logistics, french with linguistics and fashion design that actually produced students with extremely high employment rates who nearly always entered high-up in their chosen profession. So i think you are right, but i think there is a myth about which universities and what courses are ‘effective’ and ‘elite’ which i bought into and i think other people still do.

• 1maia

  Don’t talk to me about the more competent government, living in Italy i was shocked how good ours was, but after living in Holland i was so embarrassed about our squawking prima donnas of politicians who do nothing but put their hands in the till, lie all the time and are incompetent to boot. I mean, you can steal and be an extremely hard working, effective employee (i’ve seen it, honest!). In italy, it at least feels like it would go against their whole culture (not normal italians, who work hard and are honest, but the official or state culture) to be competent – the corruption must be staggeringly obvious and completely stupid – but, oh god, the private depths of shame if you spend some time in germany or holland. Perhaps that jobhunting trip to Scandinavia is better for being an unreachable dream after all….

• 1maia

  Excellent point. Go to an obscure university – your aim is to learn by the immersion technique, as a foreigner you will always pay ten to a hundred times the price stated by locals or guidebooks (unless you are black, when you can pretend to be from Africa) so Beijing, Shanghai etc are for the rich. Plus, unless building sites and asthma are your thing (you think you’re not asthamtic? Wait until you’ve tried a lung-diet of concrete dust (building sites) and visible lead particles for a few weeks – i learnt something about myself i never guessed, as did about a third of the class!) you don’t need to live near one decent museum you can see in a day. Pay a hundredth of the cost, stay somewhere nice, study any old subject you think you can bear and pass, put up with being stared at or even stroked, and return with an employable skill. Best pared with logistics or linguistics or Chinese accounting (that would be a killer combo, license to print money, i think) or business or something, as all Chinese students speak English and there are a few billion of them, so the competition is a bit too stiff for anyone who wants a translation career just from learning Chinese. (As opposed to, say, a skilled translation career like translating literature, but there isn’t much of that. Most of what there is is old stuff, and that means studying old Chinese scripts, language etc.) Perhaps more employable and almost as cheap would be an Eastern European language, as their import markets are so poorly served that anyone prepared to import slightly better quality at slightly lower price would make a killing, they have many unexported highquality products the world ignores, and unlike Chinese, people aren’t rushing like lemmings off a cliff to learn eg Slovak or Polish in the daft belief it’ll make them rich. Arabic is good for employment with intelligence agencies, Russian is best (all our Western firms are desperate for a foothold in their market) but neither is cheap to study in

• 1maia

  True. I read a year back that 85% of EU students, who by law must receive the same loan, disappear back to Europe and never pay it back. The higher tuition fees will exacerbate not improve this, and leave the government with even more unrecoverable debt. Because everywhere teaches english as first foreign language, in London at least there are an extremely high number of EU students.

• 1maia

  I disagree. The ‘more intelligent’ is the top 5% – the next 80% are bunched together and the average, leaving some poor sods in the bottom 5%. I don’t want to just fund the class genius to do research. I think we should have universities which benefit society by teaching the non-geniuses (i’ve never seen the top 5% not go into research or the diplomatic corps, although my experience is limited to about 20 people) the advanced skills to transform and lead high-skilled industries.

• 1maia

  It makes sense if you see it as an investment that produces someone with unique skills that they apply in the economy to keep us profitable within the world (we can hardly compete on cheapest wages anymore, despite my clear remembrance of Thatcher’s vow to do just that). If they don’t, or the course doesn’t allow them to, or they mostly decide to emigrate to america and earn a hundred times what they can here with the same skills (doctor), then it doesn’t work. Also, certain skills, such as dentistry and engineers/architects who know how to build structures that don’t collapse on their occupants, may not benefit us economically but rather come in handy in other ways/have a non-economic benefit, and are too advanced to learn at A level.

• Peter Clarke

  I don’t see state aid for higher education as being at all an “investment” as the recipient can and does emigrate to where wages and living conditions are better.

• Sick_As_A_Dog

  Aaah! But we have the apprenticeships these deceitful ba—rds keep referring to, always avoiding mentioning where the poor conned young people will get a non existent job, in non existent industries that are needed to offer ongoing employment and training, including day release further education which is something I never hear mentioned by any political party whatsoever.

  When I did my electrical engineering apprenticeship between 1961- 67 in Hertfordshire, apart from hands on engineering training, I also got one day and two evenings a week at a further education college, to go with my training in engineering.

  Now these young people are offered a six month carrot simply to get them away from the unemployment numbers, there are no jobs for six month qualifications other than washing floors of filling supermarket shelves. This is a disgusting, but typical Tory ploy to con young people off the high unemployed numbers whilst ensuring the bankers and Hoorae Henry’s continue to roll in £millions from the same working families as well.

• http://squizz.myopenid.com/ Squiggle

  Your numbers are way off. For a local Australian student in a commonwealth-supported place (the most common situation), the annual fee varies from ~$9,500 for the most expensive courses (e.g. medicine) to ~$4,500 for a course in a national priority area (e.g. mathematics, science). A standard three year science degree thus leaves the student with a debt of ~$13,500, not ‘hundreds of thousands’. See https://secure.monash.edu/scsd/sca/?year=2012 for an example from a top tier (Group of Eight) Australian university.

  Overseas students subsidize local students, and do not compete for commonwealth-supported places.