On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Aidan Stanger wrote:

Tom Anderson wrote:
On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Neil Williams wrote:
wrote:

Indeed! The graduate tax is so obviously the right way to do it
that i'm utterly baffled by the lack of support for it amongst
politicians. Well, okay, i'm not, since, as you say, it wouldn't be
popular. It would also be a bit dodgy making it retrospective, and
if it wasn't, we'd have to wait quite a while before it started to
pay out.

Probably for the same reason that they're so averse to raising the top
rate of income tax - they want people to stay in Britain and make more
money.

Hmmph. Would that really happen? I can't see professionals emigrating in
their tens of thousands to avoid a bit of tax ...

Agreed - to an extent. Remember that if a graduate becomes a high
earner, they're paying more income tax anyway!

Absolutely, and there is an argument that if the government is correct
in saying that graduates earn more, then they'll also pay more tax,
and so fund their own education through general taxation without any
mucking about with fees etc. Of course, this is [...] (c) not true
anyway, since demand for graduates isn't elastic enough to absorb
millions more of them

That's true in the short term, but probably not in the long term.

Possibly true, definitely irrelevant - the policy we're talking about is
about a short-term increase in student numbers.

(even if they were of the same quality as current ones, which they
wouldn't be).

Doesn't that depend on the universities rather than the number of
students?

I don't think so. I tend to think that growth in student numbers means a
reduction in the standard of entry; i think most of the people who are
really up to university-level academic study already go to university
(along with a lot of people who aren't), so any further growth is going to
be from less academically capable students, who can't end up as highly
educated as the more capable students.

Christ, i sound like a right Daily Mail reader, don't i?

YMTTICPC!

WTFDTM?

The general taxation approach is also a little unfair on people who don't
go to university but still become high earners.

Only if you believe that capitalism is fair. Those who recognise its
unfairness have no problem with providing assistance to those who need
it.

I have no illusions about capitalism (well, maybe some), and no problem
with redistribution, but i do think it could be unfair: if two people
achieve the same level of income, but one's benefited from extensive
assistance from the state (in the shape of education) and the other
hasn't, surely it's not fair to take the same amount of tax from both?
That just seems like common sense (still in Daily Mail mode here!).

Applying it retrospectively would be *seriously* dodgy, mind, not so
much for those like myself who paid no fees and received a grant,
but more for those who have paid the current levels of fees. To
apply a graduate tax fairly if retrospectively would mean you'd have
to level the playing field for everyone it applied to before doing
so, meaning that you'd have to refund a lot of tuition fees, and pay
out "grants" (or take them back from people who got them).

What about people with degrees from overseas universities?

Internment camps.

Regarding the 50% target, I believe this is absolutely wrong.

Yes, of course - as does anyone with more than two brain cells to rub
together.

How many are the Taiwanese rubbing together? UIVMM the figure there is
well above 50%.

Really? I evidently need to go and read up on the Taiwanese education
system.

- and like in Germany this should not be looked down on in any way.

Ditto.

All of which requires a huge change in attitudes, sadly - as was mentioned
earlier, employers need to learn that a degree doesn't really mean
anything,

That depends on what kind of degree it is. An engineering degree means a
great deal.

An engineering degree certainly means more to an engineering company than
an english degree does to a management consultancy, granted. However, i'm
not convinced that it means as much as you might think; in the sciences,
at least, an undergraduate degree *does not* teach you to be a scientist,
it just lays a lot of groundwork (more than necessary, really) for the
next step, the PhD, which is where you really learn your trade. I would
guess it's the same for engineering - you don't walk out of your
graduation ceremony an engineer, you're just now qualified to start
learning to be an engineer. This is certainly true in software
engineering, but that might be a bit of a special case, since academic
departments typically teach theoretically-oriented 'computer science',
which is rather far removed from practice.

and the populace need to stop seeing university as some sort of
essential badge of middleclasshood. A gigantic renaissance of
apprenticeships and the like would be a start.

Indeed it would, but I don't think the decline in the number of
apprenticeships has much to do with the rise in the number of university
places. AIUI a lot of it's due to downsizing - employees are now too
busy to train apprentices.

Good point. Did the government subsidise apprenticeships? If they paid the
same amount as they do to educate university students, would they be
economical for companies?

It's ironic that the highest qualifications we have, doctorates, are
essentially apprenticeships:

That depends where you do them.

How so?

i've apprenticed myself to my supervisor to learn to be a scientist,
and will spend three years basically being a pair of hands for her
(albeit an increasingly autonomous pair of hands) and learning the
trade. The clinical part of a medical degree and legal pupillages are
very much the same.

And that's very good when student numbers are high, as the lecturers can
put the postgrad students in charge of some of the tutorials.

They'd better bloody not, i tell you!

tom

--
It's worth remembering that if you chain a thousand monkeys to a thousand typewriters, they will all eventually die of starvation. -- themanwhofellasleep