I'm not going to trawl through the entire Browne report, or even the Coalition's proposals for funding higher education. Apart from anything else, given the state of the higher education sector as it is and the increasingly causalized part of its labour force I am in, I haven't got time. What I will say is that Stefan Collini appears to be talking shit in the LRB of the 4th of November. Collini attacks the Browne proposals as a marketization of higher education which, by encouraging students to pick degrees on economic grounds, will destroy higher education as a public good. Public goods are goods whose benefits are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, that is, goods where if one person has them, everyone has them, and where there is no dimunition in benefit from extra people possessing them. Such goods are notoriously under-provided by the market.
One of the reasons this happens is because people are unwilling to pay the cost of something they know other people are also going to benefit from - or at least they are when they think about it in homo economicus terms. Public subsidy avoids this problem by spreading the cost more evenly across the population who benefit rather than expecting some sucker to pay for everyone. So Collini would then be on strong grounds if he could show that the Browne report proposed reducing public subsidy to higher education to the extent that students started making choices about whether to go to university and what to study that where not conducive towards the production of a population with optimally high levels of higher education. This would at a minimum, presumably require investigation into current patterns of students' choices about higher education so as to form hypotheses about what differences the different structure of public subsidy that Browne proposes will result in. Collini says nothing about what motivates students and how sensitive that is to the subsequent costs of their degree. Unless Collini can show that the Browne proposals would substantially change the behaviour of students, then his argument is basically empty bleating - especially since students already bear substantial economic costs of their studies and this doen't seem to have made any difference to their participation rates or choices about what to do.
None of that is to say that the Browne proposals aren't terrible, indeed, aren't terrible in exactly the way that Collini claims they'll be. It's to say that if you're going to make that claim, you could at least adduce some relevant evidence. A lot of the commentary on the Browne report and the government's proposals has been of this kind of standard so far as I can see. What exactly the effects on student participation is an empirical question. If you want to argue that students are in general going to behave differently if they have to pay back another £18,000 over the course of their working lives on top of the £9,000 or so they now have to pay back, then you need to show that there's reason to think that they will. Making them pay £9,000, initially up front, doesn't seem to have made much difference. Is £18,000 going to push them over a threshold? I don't know, but neither, so far as I can see, does Stefan Collini.
5 comments:
Rob, isn't it £27,000? And they'll be told ad nauseam that they should see the degree purely as a self-funded career investment. And that the more they earn, the less they'll pay in interest. And that if they don't earn enough quickly enough they'll be financially crippled by debt for decades. And so on.
Of course Collini is only making a prediction and you're right that he doesn't adduce a lot of evidence for it. The American example would seem to show that people are still inclined to do expensive liberal arts degrees; but there are so many different variables at play there (and I have to give a 9am lecture), so I'm not hopeful at all.
Enzo: I think Rob means that students currently pay about £9k so £27k is £18k more than they do now.
I agree that there's not a lot of empirical support for the claim that raising degree prices will diminish demand. But surely Collini has a point that completely abolishing any subsidy for arts and humanities degrees is, in effect, to deny their public good status (or at least that they're a public good the government ought to subsidize).
And minor quibble with your definition of a public good. You say if one person has it, everyone has it. I agree that's sufficient, but isn't the necessary condition merely that everyone has access to it? I suppose you could call that having it in some sense (I have access to the British Museum, even if I never go), but I think it makes clear that not everyone need actually benefit.
Enzo,
I very much doubt that students are going to be told that they'll be financially crippled if they don't pay it off, not least because I suspect that that would be politically disastrous. And anyway I think that what students think about doing degrees is likely to be influenced by more than what the government says - in particular, what teachers and their families say I think probably has a lot more weight which I'm not sure is going to be so straightforwardly affected by the Browne report.
Ben,
it's just not true there would be no public subsidy for non-STEM teaching under the Browne proposals. Universities will not be given money directly to pay for it, this is true, but since students will be provided with goverment loans at (typically) lower than market rates of interest, which they will only have to start paying back if they start earning over a certain level and which will be written off after (I think) 30 years, this is not the only issue. Giving someone else money - which is effectively what students loans on these terms are - only to buy a good from some producer is a subsidy to that producer. And the issue with your definition of a public good is that it's not clear how it's a good to everyone unless if one person has it, everyone has it.
@Ben:
Yes, you're obviously right about the figure. Shouldn't be commenting on blogs whilst half asleep and rushing out of the house. Which is what I'm about to do again now, after two days away.
@Rob:
I agree that the students won't be told by the government that they'll be financially crippled; but their families will put a lot of pressure on them.
I agree that the Browne proposal is still a form of subsidy of HE, and in fact even the current grant system is tied to student preferences (albeit much more loosely), in so far as the value of the grant is a multiple of student numbers (of course with certain constraints etc.). But is something a genuine public good if it is left to the users to decide whether they want it? It seems to me that public good status should not be conditional. To put it another way: HE remains a public good of sorts under Browne, but no subject except STEM is a genuine public good any more. Humanities and social sciences will only be conditional public goods.
Enzo,
on the first thing, I tend to think they just won't go at all if they're worried about the debt - as a survey in today's Guardian apparently indicates. But I'm open to evidence. On the second, I'm not sure I get this idea of a conditional public good. Students already choose whether they use the good in question by deciding whether to go to university. And anyway, isn't a good a public good iff it's non-rivalrous and non-excludable, which conditionality makes no difference to?
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