Tuition fees
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you for downloading the More or Less podcast from the BBC. You can find out more about our programme on our website. But before you do that, here's Tim Harford.
Hello and welcome to More or Less, speaking truth to power, armed only with a slide rule. This week, the US Supreme Court weighs in on the subject of statistical significance. How could we resist? And we speak to a man who thinks progressive taxes are unfair. And of course, there's the response to last week's item on cutbacks in Trumpton.
Last week's dismissal of Dibble from the Trumpton Fire Brigade has provoked widespread concern and anger in Trumptonshire. There's been a Twitter campaign initiated by Mr Clamp and Miss Lovelace to bring back the Trumpton one and to sack Treasurer Harford, whose actions have been described as being motivated by narrow economic dogma. Meanwhile, there's anxiety about the former fireman's state of mind. He was last seen, drunk and disorderly, near the bandstand.
The great dibble controversy refuses to go away. But first, the other side of university tuition fees. During the last series, our reporter Wesley Stevenson immersed himself in this debate, calculating that about a quarter of students will pay back less than they would have done under the old system, and that about half of students won't have to pay back the full value of their loans. Now let's think about the other side of the equation. Not how much students pay, but how much the taxpayer pays.
Hi, Wes. Hi, Tim. And yes, some think the government might end up paying a lot more than it bargained for. The Guardian reported that the new university system might cost the taxpayer an extra billion pounds each year beyond what the government had anticipated, which starts to raise the question that it might even cost the taxpayer more than the current system. At least that's what our listener Chris Bissell reckons.
I'm not surprised the new system doesn't save the taxpayer as much as one might think, given you'd already found that many students won't be paying their fees back in full. But it seems bizarre that the new system asks so many students to pay £9,000 a year and might still end up costing the taxpayer more.
Well, it would be, but it may be a little too early to say. As each university announces how much it will be charging next year, we will get a better picture of how much this might cost. At the time the new fee structure was announced, the business secretary, Vince Cable, said that the £9,000 fee would be the exception. But as universities have announced what they're going to charge, this looks less likely of the... 39 that have declared so far, 27 have set the maximum fee. So it's no wonder The Guardian says it's going to cost a billion pounds a year more than expected. But when this was put to David Willetts on BBC One's politics show, he said this.
When you look at all these, behind these specific reports of headlines... I mean, London Met, which is a very large university with tens of thousands of students, they're coming in at about six. The University of Aston, which is a much smaller university, it has talked about a top price of nine, but it's about a tenth of the size. So when you look at the average, you have to take account of these sorts of factors, and it's still very early days.
So when we think about these fees, we need to think about the average fees per student, not per university. So if David Willits is right, then some large universities will charge low fees and bring down the average. OK, well, fine, but he gave just a couple of examples, so is there enough information out there to find out whether those examples are actually typical? Well, we had a look at the claim about the average, and if you average out the fees by the number of students, as Mr Willits would prefer, the average fee actually goes up slightly to around the £8,500 mark.
Well, hang on, that's the opposite of what David Willis was saying, right?
Yeah, kind of. I mean, he's right to say you should average out across students, not universities.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:22
2
How will the new tuition fee system affect taxpayers versus students?
6:22–12:51
3
Which universities are charging the £9,000 maximum and how does that change the average fee?
12:51–24:29
4
How much extra might the government have to cover because students won't repay full loans?
24:29–28:03