Is there anything nice to say about the Browne Review? It has some pretty graphs, and the font is quite nice. Everything else is a digrace. It places unfair expectations on those from richer backgrounds, proposes a system which will damage access for those from poorer backgrounds, and recommends a system which could easily put people off middle-income jobs for life.
First, those from well-off families will suffer. Under Lord Browne’s proposals, students will receive a non-means-tested maintenance loan of £3,750 per year, and there will be up to £3,250 available in additional support for those from households with a total income of less than £60,000. The grants are a good thing, but the £60,000 threshold signals the clear assumption that those whose parents earn more than that will receive money from them for their living costs – why else would a student’s loan be affected by their parents’ income? £3,750 is barely enough to cover a year’s rent at Oxford, let alone food. Is Browne saying that those with well-off parents should have to get holiday jobs, while those with poorer parents don’t need to? Of course not – instead he is relying on the assumption that anyone with wealthy parents will be able to rely on the Bank of Mum and Dad.
For a start, this isn’t true. There are plenty of students who don’t receive any money from their parents, whether their parents could afford to give it or not. Secondly, and more importantly, the assumption that well-off students will not need a grant makes a mockery of Browne’s own claim, early in the report, that “students will not have to rely on banks or families to meet the costs of living and learning”. His later statement that parents will have to make an “affordable contribution to the cost of living” proves the earlier to have been entirely deceptive and untrue.
So he lied at the start. What else? Well, he suggests (in a rather scary communist-style turn of phrase) that there should be a minimum entry standard “based on aptitude” to qualify for any loans, to make sure that only those “who are qualified to benefit from higher eduction” will receive it. “Qualified to benefit”? Even if you accept the idea that only clever people should get to go to university, Browne’s proposal for how to measure who is “qualified” is ludicrous.
He explains that an aptitude test would be difficult to implement, and instead advises that to “qualify to benefit from higher education” applicants will have to have a certain number of UCAS points. Remember those? They are what you get for GCSEs and A levels. And also music exams, drama courses, the Duke of Edinburgh Award, extra language and IT qualifications and so on – in short, all the kinds of things which you have to pay to do, and which you are far, far more likely to do if you go to a private school or have wealthy parents. Browne claims that his system will leave “no barriers to access”, but when even getting a loan relies on a system of points which can be bought, this is clearly another fallacy.
So the poor and the rich have been disadvantaged, but there is bad news for the middle too. If you go on to earn less than £21,000 a year, you won’t have to pay back anything at all. If you become an investment banker or a lawyer, your debts will be paid off before too long. But if you earn something in the region of, say, £35,000, you will be handing over almost 10 percent of your income for what could amount to decades, as the interest stacks up. Browne has recommended that debts be written off after 30 years – so if you choose to be a teacher instead of a hedge-fund manager, you could hit 50 before you’re debt-free. Browne has been reported as saying “there is a lot of evidence that students don’t just look at debt”, but with debts like these, it will be very hard not to look.
My final big problem is with the statement “investment will be targeted on the teaching of priority subjects” – those like medicine and engineering, where graduates are clearly helpful to the government. The ‘priority subjects’ will probably now cost more. For subjects like mine (Classics), which struggles to recruit applicants from poorer backgrounds and where the number of qualified teachers is decreasing by several dozen a year, losing funding because it’s not high enough ‘priority’ will be disastrous. There is no subject taught at Oxford which does not deserve to be a priority, and if some of them suffer more than others through lack of funding, that will be a very great loss indeed.
