Student sums don’t add up

One spent three years studying literature and emerged with an average degree; the other studied politics, left with a first-class degree, studied for many more years and became a professor.

One of these brothers now earns quite a lot of money; the other does not.

This personal parable is only an illustration, and no doubt my brother the professor would mark me down for wobbly logic.

But the point remains: going to university was never in itself a guarantee of earning more. Yet the introduction of student loans was based on this optimistic assumption.

These loans are just another example of the ways in which we have made life harder for young people.

Worse still, as has been pointed out before, the politicians who imposed this burden on today’s students attended university for free.

Back in the dim and distant, after three years of study and other optional extras – and sometimes the pleasurable distractions could overshadow the studying – you stepped into the world free of debt.

Now students in England leave with a weighty debt to be paid off once they are earning £21,000.

At the time of the last General Election, Nick Clegg and his band of unexpectedly relevant Liberal Democrats went into a Government job-share with the Tories.

Part of the cost of this arrangement was that Mr Clegg had to abandon a pre-election pledge not to raise annual tuition fees.

These fees were then ramped up from £3,000 to £9,000.

Now it emerges that this contentious measure might have been for nothing, following reports that the Government “got its maths wrong” over tuition fees – to the extent that the way we pay for universities could be at threat.

A former political adviser to the Tory universities minister, David Willetts, is calling for a rethink on the fees.

Nick Hillman, who worked for Mr Willetts when the policy was introduced, now says the Government overestimated the amount of debt that would be repaid.

The basic problem is that graduates are earning less than expected. The first response to that is surely: expected by whom?

It should always have been obvious that this arrangement was based on a too convenient calculation. You can’t send more and more young people to university and assume they all will prosper.

What we have done is decree that as many young people as possible should attend university, and then charged them handsomely for the privilege, while also creaming money from them in expensive accommodation costs and so forth.

And at the end of three years, we have sent them off to work – in a recession and fighting with fellow freshly-indebted graduates for jobs that are often low paid. And if they don’t hit that magic figure of £21,000, they don’t start to repay the loan.

When the higher loans were introduced, Ministers calculated that 28 per cent of student loans would never be repaid.

That figure is now reported to have reached 45 per cent – and could be heading for 48 per cent, at which point the whole edifice begins to crumble and the so-called benefits of the system are cancelled out.

So all that pain and worry for young people could in effect have been for nothing because the present rate of payback won’t support the university system, which should, anyway, be considered as a fundamental social good.

Strange, isn’t it, the way in which the cast-iron certainties of politics often end up being in direct opposition to what actually happens?

And is it just me or doesn’t this also show that market forces cannot be the answer to everything?

• ON Saturday, I will be taking part in a York Literature Festival event at the Quaker Meeting House, in Friargate, appearing alongside fellow crime writer Helen Cadbury and the York poet John Gilham.

The event was originally advertised to start at 11.30am but will now begin at noon.

We’ll all be there are the original time, just in case.

Tickets cost £5, with £2 going towards the Quaker roof building fund.

They are available from the York Theatre Royal box office.