I think you hit the nail on the head in your last paragraph. HE funding is not a particularly good way to increase social mobility, mainly because by the time a child goes to university the barriers to moving out of the circumstances of one's birth are already so entrenched.

That's why you have to start earlier. If you create a state education system in which the grades achieved at GCSE and A-level does not correlate to the income of the child's household then frankly the way higher education is funded is almost an irrelevance.

That is where the state's efforts should be focussed.

Excellent and Jamie_Griff, agreed.

I think there is a readiness to accept the presentation of education as a market and fall into discussion of such details and in such terms. Thus the confusion between expenditure and investment continues.

Consider the points made by HAL Fisher.

... which is why, of course, David, the coalition government's top education priority has been the pupil premium. I'm also from a working class council estate background and managed to make it to Oxbridge; I want others to have that opportunity and the key age to make that difference to aspiration and attainment is the early years.

The image to imagine is a bright kid, about 12, just started secondary school from a poor family. A family where someone, due to freely available credit managed to run up a credit card bill of a few thousand pounds. Perhaps it escalated due to missed payments and ended up being consolidated into a long term loan, that is a constant drain on already tight finances. £3000 debt can do this easily to a low-income household. There are thousands of people in exactly this scenario in council estates all over the UK.

Someone explain to me why anyone in that household would think that £40,000 is a good gamble for the chance to earn a few grand more each year.

These kids are already on a different path - even though they wouldn't start uni for another 6 years, now they won't, ever.

This is not a mad hypothetical extreme circumstance, it's the reality of growing up in a low-income household.

This policy removes all upfront fees for going to uni, so surely it is actually encouraging for the poor? And lets not pretend student debt is real debt, Iv got 20 grand of it and am not worried, as repayments are linked to earnings, are not onerous, can not just be demanded as a lump sum, can be written off in certain circumstances etc etc

It won't matter. You, and the Libdem apologists really are missing that point. All anyone hears is "£40,000 debt".

This policy can never surmount that, and if you don't understand why that is, then you are not in a position to comment or conceive of policies which have this sort of effect.

I also claim my working class council house roots, albeit half a generation older and grammar school (of a sort) educated. I come from what was then a predominately working class town (Slough) - even more than now. Whilst I didn't get (or aspire to) the heights of Oxford, I managed to get to Imperial College (the first ever from my school), something that I'm pretty sure I couldn't do now, fees or no fees. It's much more to do with competition and a school system environment in which I'd not thrive. I should say that I work in IT, which unlike law, is not dominated by the privately educated and has employed many like me.

There is no doubt that the 50s & 60s were a boom time for the upwardly mobile working classes. It's many of those that make up much of the current middle classes, with frustrated aspirations for their own children. That generation of working class kids, plucked out of their council estates, is never going to happen again, and that very elitist approach in the public sector as a matter of policy, rather than parental push, has gone. In may days, there was only one class that surrounded me - and that was one where parents knew little of education and the system took over. Now we have some kids with the advantage of savvy relatively newly middle-class parents, and some without.

So in a very real way, the disadvantage that matters is not this issue of fees. That's totemic of course, but everybody knows that the disadvantages start early. They start in the first few years of life, and no amount of reducing university fees is going to make much difference if kids are intent on leaving at 16.

There several things wrong. Firstly, school targets have been aimed at improving the figures. However, at the very time where we've done this, our position in international comparison tables has plummeted.

The scond problem is we've created an environment where a degree is now, apparently, a requirement for some relatively ordinary jobs. we have ratcheted up this bar so that if you want to join Majestic Warehouse you now effetively need a degree (as their MD was boasting). This means that those failing to get to university are in the same position as those that didn't get to grammar school. We've just postponed it 7 years. I see no difference. In fact it's worse - this extra 3-4 years is an immensely expensive investment in people's time and the cost to all concerned. The economy simply can't absorb that number of graduates in appropriate jobs. You just get "qualification creep".

We need a properly grown-up debate on what we need out of an education system. The German one is, to my mind, much more rational and serves the needs of its people rather better.

I read far too much from political and social theorists about the totemic issues of class, identity, representation, power structures, class enemies, opressors and the like. Speaking to parents, what people want is some hope, and a decent hope of a career. The politically active journalists who tend to blog on this site are not representative of the vast majority - they are often the would-be career politicians that have landed us in this mess.

Fear of debt and prospects of higher education.

In a similar way to you, I went from a comprehensive school to Oxbridge. Then on to a legal career. I funded my way through Cambridge by working off my debts at McDonald's, for around £2.30 per hour. I now charge fees, am owed money and owe money myself. My student debts are as nothing in comparison to my mortgage. I have two children, who I hope will go to university.

It is a sad fact that the state no longer funds students at university. Those days were disappearing when I was at university. However, doesn't the current situation demand a rethink on the way most people view debt? There is no gain without risk, but going to university seems a fairly good bet- go there, borrow, and only pay back if the gamble pays off. If such loans had been available for my law conversion course and the Bar Vocational Course, it would be have been much easier for me. They weren't. I therefore had only my own determination and faith in myself. By and large, mine was a good gamble.

If a student has a 40k debt and earns 21k, his repayments may be lower than the current payments are but his interest charges will be considerably higher, on current figures £40 a month, as raised in Parliament yesterday - so any grace proffered in repayments by the coalition is wiped out as soon as the 21 thousand threshold is reached. Also, as raised in parliament yesterday, the raising of the payback level by the time implemented in 2016 will be worth no more than the current situation affords.

The situation whereby a graduate who doesn't earn enough never pays his fees back is also currently in operation.

So, basically this coalition government isn't giving the students anything other than a higher charge to go to university to make up for the 80% in cuts for funding. Not any old increase, a tripling in fees which Unis freely admit will be the higher levy to make up for the funding shortfall.

I fail to see why certain people still think that the students are getting a good deal, they aren't. They will get more no benefits than they currently do but with the scrapping of EMA and the trebling of fees, will be considerably worse off.

Why would someone on a potential salary of 21 thousand want to start their working life with a debt of 40 thousand and growing that instead of being repaid over the current average of 11 years, will still be a millstone round their necks 30 years down the line when, as also stated in the House yesterday, they will be in the position of their children being about to go to Uni whilst they are still paying for their own Uni education?

Lorna. So students won't owe £40,000?

I have to disagree completely with what you're getting at here. Yes, there are problems with social mobility, but those problems are entrenched well before the time when a person makes the decision whether or not to carry on with education. Higher tuition fees won't discourage anyone from poorer backgrounds, especially with the bordering-on-ridiculous "progressive" measures that have been included in the package.

What needs to be done is a sweeping improvement of primary and secondary education across the board, that's the main way social mobility will be tackled. To the blame on tuition fees is to ignore the real problem.

Nigella's Cupboard Syndrome strikes again.

I'm a PhD student in astrophysics.

I wrote a computer program which calculated the total repayment for four cases, the "poor", "middle income", "rich", and "superrich" graduates. I made an assumption of starting salaries of £15k, £25k and £50k for the three poor, middle and rich cases, and an annual payrise of 1.4% for the poor and middle income, and 2.8% for the rich, 5.6% for the superrich (same £50k starting salary)

Of course what you get out of such an exercise depends on the detail of the parameters you put in, but it is instructive that the poor and middle income graduates don't actually repay the majority of their debt within the 30 year timespan. So at least for these it behaves more like a graduate tax than a loan. However the "superrich" graduate actually pays less in total than the "rich" one.

Anon and Mike,
The elephant in the room being the fact that a degree is a more desired qualification for employment by employers and a person with any thing less won't get a look in.

That's why degrees are important to social mobility, employers want it and if someone wants a chance to improve their social circumstances through employment and earnings, they are well aware that a degree best affords them that opportunity.

Is it just me or is there a curious disconnect in government championing a policy which demands that students not worry about how much debt they take on while the country, in terms of it's national debt, is supposed to live within its means?

It's not all that simple because the interest rate would be variable depending on income. It would be zero (I assume zero in real terms i.e. RPI) at an income level of £21k, rising to 3%+RPI at £41k.

Spamson, I don't know whether the majority of future graduates would finish paying off their debts within 30 years.
I reran my program for starting salary of £25k increasing by 2.8% a year. In this case 30 years after graduation this hypothetical graduate is now on about £56k a year income, has paid £46943 and has the remaining £43940 written off.

I'm not sure the Liberal Democrats will even exist once the repayments of these planned fees come in.

“Some people will, apparently, be put off applying to our elite institutions by the prospect of taking on a debt of this size. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is all to the good.”

Michael Gove Times Op Ed 2003
http://www.nextleft.org/2010/12/has-michael-gove-revealed-real-thinking....

Those some people being the people from the lowest income households and poorer families not the more affluent higher earning ones. Yet another respresentation of how coalition policies affect disproportionately the less well off.

What was that about social mobility?

swatantra nandanwar wrote:

"There are degrees to working class culture since there are subdivisions ie of upper- middle- and lower- working classes, but the working class as a whole is ever diminishing, whilst the middle class is expanding. So evidence of class mobility is there."

I guess if you put a horse in a sty you can start calling it a pig. I see more working class people who might have fooled themselves into thinking they were middle class finding out the hard way that without that credit card they are worse off than twenty years ago. Wait till the real cuts kick in.