First of all, the Tories only increased Tuition Fees by £250 a year, just a few months ago. Moreover, the offer of a freeze is hardly much of an offer compared to Labour's offer to scrap them altogether. Secondly, the proposal to raise the repayment threshold to £25,000 a year exposes the fallacy that underlies the argument that has been put forward for introducing Tuition Fees in the first place. That argument is that a university education enables people to get much better jobs, and thereby to earn more money than other workers, and so asking graduates to pay for the ability to obtain those higher earnings is only reasonable.
But, for many years now it has been the case that having a university degree was no guarantee even of getting a job, let alone a much better paid job than any other worker. Even back in the 1980's a friend of mine who had a degree in electronic engineering, and had trained to be a maths teacher found it impossible to get a job, and like me ended up working for himself. Back in the 1990's, at the Council where I worked, there were lots of young people who had been to University and obtained degrees, but who came to work at the Council in low paid clerical jobs. They would have been much better off doing what others had done, and starting work at 16 or 18, for the Council, and then doing relevant education, paid for by the Council, whilst all the time earning wages. One of my son's friends who left school at 16, and became a joiner, was able to earn wages during all the subsequent years, and was able, thereby to save enough money to buy his own house, by the time he was in his early twenties, rather than being lumbered with tens of thousands of pounds of debt.
The proposal to raise the earnings threshold to £25,000 simply highlights that fact. According to government data, average earnings in Britain are £25,000 p.a., so how come then graduates were expected to be repaying if their earnings were above only £21,000 a year. And, if having a degree really does guarantee that you earn much more than someone without a degree, should you not then expect to be earning more than just the average wage, which by definition should be the amount that the average person earns and not the supposedly higher earning graduate workers? If the argument for tuition fees and loans is that graduates earn much more than the average worker, then shouldn't the earnings limit be set at a figure much higher than the average wage, say at the level of the higher tax band of £40,000 p.a.?
Having said all that, I am still not persuaded by the argument that university tuition fees should simply be paid for out of taxation. Rather, I agree with the position that Marx and the First International put forward, and which I suggested above. The Tories argument is that graduates themselves benefit from having a degree. Whether they benefit by having higher wages or not is debatable, but who definitely does benefit from them having that education is their employer. Even where such a worker is employed in a job that might not superficially require degree level education, the fact that the worker has it, inevitably acts to benefit the employer in the performance of that worker. The cost of providing education and training should be born by employers, because it is they that benefit from the enhanced education and skills of the worker.
The way I would deal with that would be as the First International proposed, to combine and employment with education and training. The individual worker benefits from earning wages, during such time, as well as benefiting from being involved in the wider labour process, and labour movement. It simply requires that a statutory right be given to all workers to lifelong education and training paid for by their employer. If individuals wanted to engage in a university education without being employed at the same time, that would be their prerogative, but they would have to finance it themselves.
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