Some lessons from the US university system
BEWARE, those who follow our lead. Those who defend the UK’s university fee hikes say that there’s no need to worry, because the educational loan system ensures that students still are able to pay for an education.
Well, let me tell you about loan systems. We have a loan system in the US, where I’m from. Every student — at least the ones who don’t come from money — gets sucked into it.
Let’s take my case. I finished graduate school in the US 15 years ago. Today, those loans, combined with my undergraduate loans, monthly cost me more than three times what I pay in Westminster Council taxes.
I have a friend — granted, a physician who went to medical school, but still, let’s put the example out there — who finished Columbia almost $250,000 (£158,000) in debt.
I’m not suggesting that such a state of affairs is imminent within the UK. What I am saying is watch your footing when it comes to “loan systems”, education’s most slippery slope.
Following the fees hike, applications to university from within the UK dropped 8.7 per cent, according to data published at the end of January by admissions organisation UCAS. Fees currently stand at as much as £9,000.
Applications from the EU fell by 11.2 per cent. Meanwhile, applications from outside Europe, especially from south-east Asia, continued to climb higher, to almost 14 per cent.
Officials from Universities UK, among others, played down the recent slide in applications from within the country, saying it’s only temporary.
They say we’ll see those numbers pop back up soon enough, and point out, rightly, that there are still more students applying for university than there are slots available. The main concern, they say, is to ensure that students from certain backgrounds aren’t falling out of the application mix more than others.
That’s certainly a worthy concern. But in an era of increasingly cut throat global economic competition, overall national interest should be the primary thing on Britons’ minds. And so far, the numbers indicate that one of the groups of students who risk becoming under represented in the UK’s university system is Britons.
Of course, there’s always a chance that the loan model will work, even if not perfectly. In the US, after all, we don’t have a system that denies potential students the chance to get a higher education. Loans are at the ready. Our system does, however, have one major pitfall for the students: it puts a lot of them in a financial hole from which they’ll spend decades escaping.
Ted Kemp is senior news editor for CNBC.com in EMEA.