The NUS proposals on funding: fairer, more progressive and widening acess to higher education

By Wes Streeting / @wesstreeting

As the Labour Party turns its attention away from introspection over its leadership to debating ideas to secure a fourth term, the National Union of Students today launches a radical alternative to tuition fees – a policy which has caused the Party a serious headache throughout the past twelve years.

The introduction of so-called variable ‘top-up’ fees, capped at just over £3,000, brought the government within just a handful of votes of defeat in 2004 and threatened to bring down the Prime Minister himself. Later this year, the government will establish a review of the existing fees regime and the forthcoming debate is likely to generate as much political heat.

It is crucial that the forthcoming review is not simply a question of how high the current cap on tuition fees can rise. Although a real market is yet to emerge while the cap remains where it is, NUS published a report in September 2008 revealing the serious consequences that would arise if the fee cap were set at £7,000 (a modest target for some university chiefs). In short, the richest institutions would benefit most despite their poor performance in widening access to under-represented groups, and the market itself would reinforce existing social inequality of both opportunity and outcome.

I don’t believe that the miserable vision offered by the proponents of the marketisation of our higher education system is one that is shared by people who vote Labour and spend their time toiling away on #labourdoorstep. Any minister committed to social justice should baulk at the prospect that, further down the line, those universities with the worst widening access records would be able to charge runaway fees, while those institutions with the best record of expanding opportunities would be left to languish at the bottom end of the market.

The Labour Party’s relationship with students has suffered during the past decade. But students will never forgive a Labour government if they establish a review that simply seeks to plunge them into further debt, unleash market forces and indulge those in higher education who are encouraging the privatisation of elite universities.

Instead we need a wide ranging review that is open to alternatives and encourages solutions that meet the political aims and objectives of our Party.

That’s why NUS has made a radical break with our history of simple opposition to any form of graduate contribution. The model we propose today is fairer, more progressive and supports widening access. It prevents variable top-up fees and instead abolishes the notion of ‘fees’ altogether. It delivers more income for our universities and opens the doors to part-time students, currently priced out by unregulated up front tuition fees.

Our model is not a ‘graduate tax’ that would see graduates paying an extra penny in tax for life, only for the Treasury to siphon off funds to other areas. We propose a People’s Trust for Higher Education, to which graduates would make a contribution, linked to how much they earn and how many academic credits they have attained. The actual proportion of earnings donated to the trust would vary on average from 0.3 from the bottom fifth of earners to 2.5% for the top 20% of earners. Contributions would only be collected for a fixed period of 20 years and graduates would not contribute anything while earning less than £15,000.

No system is perfect, and we don’t claim that our proposals can solve every problem. But our radical proposals deserve serious consideration by our Labour government, and students deserve a place at the heart of the forthcoming review.