Sir Philip Augar’s review of post-18 education in England was commissioned by Theresa May in 2018, after the then prime minister was spooked by the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn’s election pledge to abolish student tuition fees. Four years later, the government’s response is finally in. But the reforms it unveiled last week are mainly about saving the Treasury money, rather than students. They are also shamelessly, and calculatedly, regressive.
Although it talks a good game on adult and further education, the government’s policy priority has always been to slash the amount of university graduate debt that is never paid back – and for which the Treasury is on the hook. It has thus extended from 30 to 40 years the period in which loan repayments must be made, and substantially lowered the salary threshold at which money starts to be paid back. The number of graduates required to pay back their loan in full is expected to rise from under a quarter to more than half.
In partial compensation, high interest rates levied on loans will be cut. But this move will overwhelmingly benefit high-earning graduates. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that, overall, the changes will save the Treasury £2.3bn for each university cohort. This is money that will be coming from graduates on extremely modest salaries who already have house prices and meagre pensions to worry about.
The regressive approach is compounded by the government’s apparent aspiration to reintroduce minimum GCSE and A-level entry requirements for university – a move that would further entrench social inequalities in educational attainment. An ominous consultation has also been launched on how to deal with “poor-quality” courses that fail to deliver well-paid graduate jobs. This looks like a backdoor route to reintroducing caps on student numbers in some areas, as well as a licence for philistine judgments on what constitutes the “value” of university learning. The freezing of tuition fees until 2025 will lead to a hefty real-terms cut in universities’ income and hit teaching resources. That will further depress staff morale on campuses, where many lecturers have just completed another round of strike action over pensions and working conditions.
It all amounts to a stealthy and painful Whitehall squeeze on the higher education sector: the net effect of the financial reforms will be to make the prospect of a university education appreciably less attractive to some, and more of a perceived gamble.
This is the intention. The government wants fewer young people to do degrees and more to consider further education colleges, apprenticeships and vocational training as viable alternatives. The Augar review itself called for a rebalancing of this kind. But notwithstanding the welcome proposal of a lifelong loan entitlement for non-graduates from 2025, nothing like enough money is being spent to reverse the impact of a decade of savage cuts to the further education sector. Instead, the government is taking the dismal but cheaper option of upping disincentives to take the academic route. As the financial war of attrition on our universities continues, the only true winner from the government’s response to the Augar review is the Treasury.
