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The use of terms like ‘loan’ and ‘debt’ to describe student finance are completely misleading, argues Professor Dorothy Bishop
In February 2018, the House of Commons Treasury Committee published a remarkable report entitled ‘Student Loans’. A response by government, added on 11 May, reveals little engagement with criticisms raised by the committee, though it does note that the Department for Education (DfE) has embarked on a major review of the system, which will report to government early in 2019.
It’s clear that those involved in the review will have their work cut out for them. Among the numerous issues raised by the committee report, the misleading use of terminology was of particular concern.
Usually, when someone takes out a loan, they receive money up-front, which they are subsequently obliged to repay on agreed terms of interest. However, the student loan system is intentionally designed so that a substantial amount of debt will be written off. Repayments are due only when the graduate’s income exceeds a certain level, with the debt in any case written off after a period of years.
As the committee notes, this is unlike any other kind of loan, and could indeed be viewed instead as a system of grants coupled with a graduate tax.
A point that is omitted by the Treasury Committee is that, whereas a graduate tax would be expected to apply to everyone with earnings above a certain threshold, the current system ensures it is paid only by those who took out a student loan: graduates whose parents were wealthy enough to pay their fees and maintenance costs up front would not be liable. It is not easy to find figures on what percentage of students this applies to: this report gives current figures in aggregate sums loaned, though it notes that in 2011-2012, 79% of full-time English-domiciled students had taken out a tuition fee loan, and 73% a maintenance loan.
The terminology of loans puts potential students off studying
A point made by one of those advising the committee was that even experienced economists find the current system complex and confusing, and use of the term “loans” is a barrier to comprehension. It’s worth quoting in full the advice to the committee from Martin Lewis, who runs Money Saving Expert:
“The Government must get rid of the language of debt. It is simply misleading. Calling the current system a ‘loan’ makes it more difficult to explain and puts potential students off. Using the language of debt means people unnecessarily fixate over the total amount they borrow and interest rates, rather than the rate of repayment which is arguably most important. […] Reforming the language to a graduate contribution system would help prevent people being put off from studying, or making ill-informed financial decisions, such as using savings to pay their children’s tuition fees to ‘save them from a lifetime of debt’.”
In a similar vein, Lord Willetts remarked:
“Saying, ‘If you are in a well-paid job, you will be paying back the cost of your higher education’, is not like a student getting into debt and having to service it. We are all trapped in that language, and I very much regret it. It is a very misleading picture.”
Maintaining the fiscal illusion
So why is the term “loan” used? One reason is presumably that many voters may find the idea of a “graduate tax” unpalatable. But there is more to it than that. It seems that the confusing language was deliberately selected to make the government’s finances look better than they are: what the report refers to as a “fiscal illusion”. This is because in the National Accounts, a loan is treated in a different way from other forms of spending, meaning that the unpaid debt – which is a design feature of the system – does not count in the deficit. As the report notes:
“Due to the National Accounts accounting rules, there is no impact on the deficit when student loans are issued. As such, shifting the vast majority of all higher education spending into loans that are written off in 30 years has shifted nearly all higher education spending out of the deficit. ……. Based on the current RAB charge, £6–7 billion of annual write-offs are missing from the deficit. This figure is approximately equivalent to excluding the entire NHS capital budget from the deficit.”
In their response to the report, the government simply reiterate information already contained in it, and state: “In … the accounting treatment of student loans, we trust that we have given a full account of the rationale for our approach.”
In a brief blogpost it is possible only to scratch the surface of the report: it covers a wide range of topics, including the collapse in part-time students, the distinction between loans for fees vs maintenance, and the creation of perverse incentives in our higher education system. Let’s hope that the complacency that comes across in the government’s initial response to the report is replaced by some serious recommendations for change in future, to ensure both that our universities are funded in a sustainable manner, and that students can get a fair and comprehensible deal.
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Discussions about how to improve access for less advantaged students show no sign of abating – and subject-level TEF comes under attack from the Russell Group
‘Relax A-level grades for some medical students’
BBC, 24/05/2018, Katherine Sellgreen
Academic entry requirements for medical degrees should be relaxed for students applying from the worst UK secondary schools, researchers say.
A study from the University of York says these students should be able to drop one or two A-level grades.
Subject-level teaching excellence framework plans ‘flawed’
Times Higher Education, 24/05/2018, Anna McKie
Higher education groups have said proposals to measure “teaching intensity” and grade inflation at UK universities are “flawed” and should be removed from future plans for the teaching excellence framework.
In its submission to the government’s consultation on the subject-level version of the TEF, the Russell Group says that the plan to use the number of teaching hours and class sizes as a measure of quality would misinform students and “risks undermining institutional diversity”. This is because different aspects of learning, such as working independently, are important but difficult to quantify, the submission says.
Oxford faces anger over failure to improve diversity among students
The Guardian, 23/05/18, Richard Adams and Caeliann Barr
Oxford’s glacial progress in attracting students from diverse backgrounds has been revealed in figures showing that more than one in four of its colleges failed to admit a single black British student each year between 2015 and 2017.
Oxford University involved in Twitter row with David Lammy
BBC, 23/05/2018
Oxford University has apologised to David Lammy after retweeting a post labelling his criticism “bitter”.
The original tweet, sent by a student, was in response to the Labour MP saying Oxford was “a bastion of white, middle class, southern privilege”.
Oxford’s Wadham College: Diversity drives standards up, not down
The Guardian, Richard Adams, 23/05/2018
While many Oxford colleges struggle to admit a diverse range of undergraduates, Wadham College stands out as showing what can be done when a college’s leadership and governing body are committed to the cause of widening access.
While some colleges such as Mansfield, Somerville, St John’s and Lady Margaret Hall have also developed innovative access schemes, Wadham’s commitment can be measured in the 68% of state school students it admits, compared with its neighbour, Trinity, admitting just 41%.
Geography finds its place among elite
The Times, 23/05/2018, Rosemary Bennett
The geography degree has replaced Classics as the favourite choice of the privileged, admissions figures from Oxford University suggest.
Only 12 students from disadvantaged backgrounds are on its geography course, less than 6 per cent of the total. Of the 204 students on the course, 192 are from the three higher social groups and more than half of those are from private schools.
Are the humanities in crisis? If they are, how can we save them?
Times Higher Education, 23/05/2018, Matthew Reisz
Rob Paige, provost emeritus of Arizona State University, has spoken of “indicators of clear and present danger to the humanities”. Yet Blaine Greteman, associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, has argued that “the humanities death watch for the past 60 years” is marked “both by its recurring character and its disconnect from objective fact”.
Six times as many new medical students from London as from north-east
The Guardian, 22/05/2018, Press Association
There were more than six times as many students from London taking up places to study medicine and dentistry last year as there were from north-east England, analysis shows.
Greenwich University fined £120,000 for data breach
BBC, 21/05/2018
The University of Greenwich has been fined £120,000 ($160,000) by the Information Commissioner.
The fine was for a security breach in which the personal data of 19,500 students was placed online.
US public universities ‘more efficient on teaching’
Times Higher Education, 20/05/2018, Simon Baker
Public universities in the US are the most efficient at educating the general population but the large multi-campus nature of many institutions can hinder research efficiency, a study has suggested.
The paper, by two academics based in France, also found that being located in a major city can significantly boost research efficiency for US universities.
Academia is built on exploitation. We must break this vicious circle
The Guardian, 18/05/2018, Anonymous
Anonymous blog about the working environment for academics and students at British universities. Recent research has found that over 30% of PhD students develop a psychiatric condition. This is a higher rate than for people working in defence and emergency services, which is about 22%.
I’ll have a first, please: 30% of students to get top grade
The Times, 16/05/2018, Rosemary Bennett
Almost a third of students taking their finals this summer are on course for a first, according to a report that says rampant grade inflation means a new top category will have to be introduced.
It added that 30 per cent of students predicted that they would get a first and 54 per cent were expecting a 2:1. No one thought they would fail. Students are able to give a fairly accurate prediction of their final grade, with the majority completing modules as they go along that contribute to their final mark.
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Professor Judith Marquand has just published Democrats, Authoritarians and the Bologna Process: Universities in Germany, Russia, England and Wales. Here she explains what the Bologna Process has meant in different countries
When I told the principal of an Oxford college that I was writing a book about the Bologna Process, she asked, “What is that?”
Only in England would such a response have been possible. Elsewhere, in the past two decades the Bologna Process has given rise to unprecedented changes in the structures and methods of higher education. It extends across the whole Council of Europe area, from Nuuk in Greenland to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East. It was signed in 1999, yet no book about it has appeared since 2006. The process renamed itself as the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in 2010. It now has 47 member states. Beyond this, there is active participation in its triennial Policy Forum by countries from every continent.
Its main provisions have been to introduce, throughout the 47 members a system of three- or four- year first degrees, followed by one- or two-year masters degrees, with comparability of outcomes and diplomas for each student which can be understood throughout the EHEA. Underpinning such a system has required the development of national qualifications structures based on “learning outcomes and competences” so that ways of representing the outcomes of what students have learnt should be comparable. Guidelines for quality assurance spell out what is implied by this and emphasise the need to include all stakeholders in the assessment process.
The Bologna Process is essentially democratic between members in the conduct of its decision-taking. It is steered centrally by ministerial conferences, now held triennially. The secretariat moves with the conferences; it is located in the country where the next conference is to be held. Before each conference, each member state produces a report on developments in its higher education system. Discussions are held and decisions are taken, but there are no sanctions. Peer pressure and example are the only mechanisms for obtaining compliance. The European Commission funds the secretariat and the conferences and other supporting mechanisms, but the European Union as such is not represented and takes no part in the decisions.
More fundamentally still, the student-centred learning which lies at the core of the methods of the Process is essentially a democratic concept. The idea of capable, active citizens is crucial to the concept of an effective democracy and active, student-centred learning methods are key to forming capable, active citizens. For some countries, especially the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” countries ¬– the UK and North America – and for others in North-Western Europe, there is nothing new about using active learning methods. For many other countries, they are much more difficult. Together with implementation of new degree structures, they pose a major challenge.
So the only way to begin to understand what the Bologna Process has meant on the ground is to look at individual countries and higher education institutions within them.
I selected what I thought were three widely differing countries. The United Kingdom (England and Wales), as the gold standard at the outset of the Process, was an obvious choice. Russia, where I had been working for many years, was another. But it had only joined in 2003. It seemed desirable to include another of the initial signatories. Germany was extremely slow to implement some of the major provisions. What was happening there?
Within each country, I could only interview a limited number of institutions. Obviously the peak organisations had to be included. Additionally, all the countries had “classical” universities and various types of newer institutions, usually with a background in technical or professional training. So I made sure that the handful of institutions I visited in each country included representatives of both traditions.
What I found did not correspond to my initial expectations.
In Germany, the reason for slow progress was not unwillingness. Higher education is primarily the responsibility of 16 Land governments. All these governments and the federal government believe in governing through consensus, not through unilateral edict. The Bologna objectives required a huge change, moving from 5 years or longer for a first degree to four years, with defined learning objectives, not curricula, for each course. To change by informed consent to such a system required an immense effort in each institution. Individual institutions enjoy considerable autonomy; the way in which each introduces and assures change is not prescribed. So change at first was slow and gradual. It was only in 2010 that legislation was introduced which required it over the next couple of years. Germany is no longer a laggard.
By contrast, the Russian ministry moves in an authoritarian manner, issuing edicts to which all institutions are supposed to conform. But the central Russian institutions are incompetent authoritarians. They provide almost no guidance on how their edicts are to be implemented and still less, any support in implementing them. So universities are able to go their own way. I visited four of them: two welcomed Bologna, as an opportunity to reform their teaching methods and extend their foreign links, so as to learn from best practice elsewhere. But the other two institutions had simply crammed their five-year syllabuses into four years and had not attempted to reform their teaching methods. “Learning objectives” were simply interpreted as “covering the prescribed syllabus”.
The United Kingdom had signed the Bologna Declaration because the minister for higher education had believed that it would require no significant changes in higher education. At that stage, she was right. But since then, the English system has changed dramatically, in ways which certainly do not respect the democratic methods of the Bologna Process. The environment in which universities operate has become increasingly authoritarian, imposing market-oriented approaches upon them, with the compulsory use of so-called ‘objective’ indicators. Anything which cannot be measured is treated as though it has no value. The key difference between the English and the Russians is simply that the English are COMPETENT authoritarians.
My fourth country is Wales. It turned out that it could not be bracketed with England – since 1999 it has struggled, against the financial odds, to differentiate itself from English policies. The Welsh government view is that the Westminster government pursues policies of “choice, customers and competition”, whilst it believes in “voice, citizens, collaboration”. Not only does it pay all fees above £4,000 per year for Welsh students and provide means-tested maintenance grants, but part-time education is included. More radically still, the Welsh government has accepted and is now consulting on the detailed implementation of the Hazelkorn Report. This provides for a single new Tertiary Education Authority to regulate, oversee and co-ordinate the whole post-compulsory education system. Wales does its best to operate within the spirit of the Bologna Process methods of consultation and agreement.
So the main divide between countries which subscribe to the Bologna Process is that between democratic and authoritarian ones. Why do the authoritarian countries want to participate in what is an essentially democratic Process? I suspect, especially on the basis of my Russian experience, that there is a simple factor explaining the interest of authoritarian governments in the Bologna Process. They see it as a route to help their scientific and technological progress, by enabling them to share in the European and indeed in the “Anglo-Saxon” excellence in these fields. But this misunderstands the role of democratic learning methods in producing such excellence.
What of the future? The triennial Ministerial Conference and Policy Forums take place in Paris on May 24-25. We shall have to see what happens there.
Click here to buy Democrats, Authoritarians and the Bologna Process: Universities in Germany, Russia, England and Wales.
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