The New Maths of Tuition fees

What I love about the mainstream media is its ability to generate millions of square feet of text and as many minutes of audio/video opinion, with not one badly needed fact in thet haystack of opinion.

I decided to do the blog-packet maths on Tuition fees, to add a fact or two to all the hot air.....

There are about £2.5m students in the UK today, of which about 350k are foreign and so pay, leaving 2.15 who are eligible to pay.

Let us assume c 25% are Postgrads (those buggers can pay) and that leaves us with c 1.5m

Paying for 1.5m students at £9,000 per annum is £13.5 billion.

To put this into context:

- There are about 25 million households in the UK, this is a spend of c £540 per household.

- UK GDP is about £1.5 trillion, i.e. it is about 0.75% of that.

- The Government's total spending p.a is c £650bn, ie the University funding amounts to about 2% of that.

I read that university places (anecdotally) "have doubled" in the last 10 years, ie the increase over what was apparently affordable for 40-odd years is about 1% of our GDP. Now, ask yourselves this - in an increasingly knowledge driven world, do you believe we willl need (a) more or (b) less education, and thus do you believe we will get (a) more or (b) less people educated if we charge the sort of prices that only about 5% of the households can afford to spend today on education (ie the % of kids in public school, which charges those sorts of amounts).

Incidentally, if you want a few more cynical statistics....

- Last year the UK banks paid bonusses of £40bn, ie about 3 years worth of tuition fees. This year they will do so again....

- The taxpayer loaned the banks about £1.35 trillion to bail them out, so about 0.75% of that returned every year (let's call it "interest") would pay for tuition fees.

- 100% of those voting to charge this generation for tuition fees had a free university education themselves.

- In 1944, a war-bankrupted UK decided all education would be free till 15.

In other words this is not an economic choice, it is a political choice, HMG clearly feels the funds are better spent elsewhere (like bailing out Ireland's banks - £ 4 - 7bn perhaps? ).

And by their choices shall ye know them......

(Update - quite a spirited discussion on Twitter over this article, so a few extras:

1. The reason for these charges is to make up for the money lost owing to the decision to cut state funding of university tuition fees by c 80% as opposed to the 20% average cuts overall.

2. Personally, I believe that students should pay something towards tertiary education, the current rate of £3k per annum seems "about right" and an inflation based increase would be fine. But this increase gives the UK the most expensive fees in the western world (excluding the private US colleges) which is - in my opinion - bad for "UK Plc" strategically

3. I would argue that if this goes ahead, the payments should be tax deductable as a payment of £9k NET of tax is at least £12k gross )