Through her proposed changes to student loan repayment, Rachel Reeves has hit the nail on the head of exactly how not to legislate the higher education system.
The proposal is that the salary threshold, above which graduates begin repaying student loans, will be frozen at £29,385 until 2030. The freeze means that more and more students will repay their loans in full as wages rise with inflation.
Reeves’ argument is that only those who go to university should have to pay. It implies that, by having part of their loans written off, students are pickpocketing the British taxpayer. However, the pretence that these changes will provide noticeable financial respite for non-graduate taxpayers is baffling – the sums of money involved are simply not that big when shared between the tax-paying population.
What the freeze will do, however, is raise the financial barrier to higher education. It will contribute to discouraging an entire generation of prospective students from pursuing higher education, especially those from working-class families. Prospective students will be forced to make decisions based on a cost-benefit analysis of university. Rather than having the freedom to pursue their interests and passions, they will be forced to evaluate university as a financial investment.
Reeves seems to have misunderstood what education is for. Education at its core is a collaborative, collective and very human endeavour. Through education, people find fulfilment and purpose in contributing to and learning from collective knowledge. Nurturing and sharing this collective knowledge gives us critical thinking skills, teachers, healthcare, art, literature, scientific and historical understanding and a better country in general. Education cannot be reduced to a personal financial investment and should not be treated as such in legislation.
The controversy over the Reeves-freeze lies precisely on the frontier of this debate. According to a report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies, “these latest freezes mean that in the long run, we now expect the taxpayer will pick up almost none of the bill for financing the higher education of [the latest] cohort” of undergraduates. Following this logic, eventually the state will no longer finance any of its citizen’s higher education.
This approach is deeply individualistic. Instead of making university more accessible – so that, while being collectively funded, it is an opportunity open to everyone – Reeves has concluded that the solution is to make university less appealing to those from lower-income backgrounds.
Reeves’ vision of Britain relies on the assumption that the country is a nation of self-interested individuals. She has assumed that those who do not go to university have no interest in contributing to the opportunity for the next generation of young people from their community to do so. Instead, according to the chancellor, they would rather pocket an extra couple of hundred quid over the next decade and see higher education opportunities for working-class people become increasingly thin on the ground. The chancellor vastly underestimates the selflessness of communities across the country and how much they value seeing their young people pursue a university education.
Reeves’ argument is simple: students pay for their own degrees. But it is tired and short-sighted. And I wonder how far the chancellor is willing to extend this logic. Should we start charging those with chronic illnesses more for their greater use of the NHS? Should we start charging for the use of streetlights, public parks, and libraries on a case-by-case basis? So only those who use them have to pay? Or maybe, just maybe, services that are funded by the taxpayer, including higher education, should be accessible to all those who wish to use them. Controversial stuff.
Reevesian Britain is a place where you may suddenly be liable to pay for your benefit from university education as soon as you are treated by a university-educated doctor or read a book by a university-educated novelist. What Reeves fails to understand is that education will never be a personal investment or a private good, simply because you cannot exclude people who have not paid for it from benefiting from it. This happens to be the single best and most beautiful thing about education – that it is shared. It is shared by the community. It is shared constantly all across the country in workplaces, pubs, at dinner tables, online, and on stage; in letters, books, artwork, music and in the way in which we live together. This is precisely because we are not a nation of individuals and actually, on the odd occasion, happen to talk to each other, form communities, families, and networks of care, support, and communication.
If Reeves’ proposal is that cutting back on state funding of university degrees will redirect money to those who need it, then she has based her logic entirely on the fact that poor people should not be in higher education. Let’s be clear, the threshold freeze is not the pragmatic money saving decision that Reeves portrays it as. It is a policy in direct opposition to the collective nature of education and stands to further increase the exclusivity of university in contempt of working class communities.
