Skip to main content

Student Finance - the Options

Regardless of reports in the press, I have not yet made up my mind as to which way to vote. I cannot practically do this until the government has produced any proposals. However, in terms of the debate some things are clear:

Ideally tertiary education should be funded directly from general
taxation. That is not an option so there are various options.

1. Up front fees.
2. A graduate tax (an open ended tax)
3. Up front fees with an option of the government providing a loan
4. A scheme which shares the burden between graduates on the basis of
their earnings (not their parents' wealth), but which is not an open ended
"pure" graduate tax.

What would you pick?

I think the fourth option is the fairest (or most socially just) because it shares the cost of tertiary education between graduates on the basis of the income of the graduates.

This does, however, require the option of an up front payment without penalty being removed. It also requires more work on the calculation of the net present value of the graduate's contributions. I have done some initial work and although some graduates would pay nothing, Quite a few would have a net present value of something like 5K. However, there are questions as to what happens as people go up the income scale.

The graduate tax itself causes financial problems as it does not provide the cash today, but a gradual increase and we (the UK) need the cash today.

What option 4 does is package together students for financing purposes where some make greater contributions and some make lesser contributions.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Its the long genes that stop working

People who read my blog will be aware that I have for some time argued that most (if not all) diseases of aging are caused by cells not being able to produce enough of the right proteins. What happens is that certain genes stop functioning because of a metabolic imbalance. I was, however, mystified as to why it was always particular genes that stopped working. Recently, however, there have been three papers produced: Aging is associated with a systemic length-associated transcriptome imbalance Age- or lifestyle-induced accumulation of genotoxicity is associated with a generalized shutdown of long gene transcription and Gene Size Matters: An Analysis of Gene Length in the Human Genome From these it is obvious to see that the genes that stop working are the longer ones. To me it is therefore obvious that if there is a shortage of nuclear Acetyl-CoA then it would mean that the probability of longer Genes being transcribed would be reduced to a greater extent than shorter ones.