Students

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Australia: Student debt: how the government’s Hecs changes will affect you

Noticias

Oceania/Autrialia/02.07.18/Source: www.theguardian.com.

On 1 July the threshold falls by more than $10,000, so if you earn at least $45,000 you’ll start repaying your loan

From Sunday, thousands of students and graduates across the country will have to start paying off their debts earlier than expected.

In the coming financial year, which starts on 1 July, anybody earning $52,000 or more a year will have to start paying off their student debts, which for most domestic and undergraduate students is known as the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (Hecs).

And that’s just the first stage of changes because the government announced plans to lower the repayment threshold further to $44,999 in the budget. The bill locking in that change was expected to pass the Senate this week but has now been delayed until parliament resumes in August.

Given the bill has not passed before the start of the 2018-19 financial year, the full reduction in the threshold will likely not apply until 1 July 2019.

When do I have to pay it back?

Under changes made in 2016, from 1 July 2018 people earning more than $51,956 will have to start paying back student debts.

If and when the Coalition bill passes, you will have to start paying your debt once you earn $45,000 or more a year, with a likely start date of 1 July 2019.

For the 2017-18 tax return, you will only pay your debt if you have a taxable income of more than $55,874.

Importantly, it’s not just graduates who are affected – you have to start paying your student debt as soon as you hit the income threshold, even if you are still studying.

You also still have to pay your debt if you’ve moved overseas. This used to be a loophole – worth $20m-$30m a year in lost revenue – but it was closed in 2016.

How much do I have to pay? 

The amount you pay rises as you make more money.

Under the new rules, those on the lowest bracket (more than $44,999 but less than $51,957) will have to pay 1% of their total income. For someone earning $45,000 before tax – or $865 a week – it would be $8.60 a week.

Those earning between $51,957 and $58,379 will have to pay 2%, and so on, rising to a maximum of 10% for those over $131,989.

It’s important to note that you pay a percentage of your total income – not a percentage of your debt.

The move will generate $345.7m in savings until 2020-21. Previously, any extra contributions you made offered you an extra discount on your debt, but this policy has been repealed.

Your total debt should be included on your tax return, and can be viewed on the MyGov website. You can also contact the ATO to ask for updates.

As well as Hecs, it includes other related debts like Fee-Help (for full-fee paying students), Vet Fee-Help (for vocational colleges), OS-Help (for when you study overseas or are on exchange) and SA-Help (when you take a loan to pay your $149 student services amenity fee).

How long do I have?

A Hecs debt is effectively an interest-free loan. Rather than charging you money, the government indexes your debt to the consumer price index – the amount goes up every financial year, but by not more than the rate of inflation, so the effective change is zero.

This means it shouldn’t cost you more to pay off your Hecs over a long time, and there is no time limit to pay it off.

The yearly indexation only applies to debts older than 11 months, and it happens every 1 June.

However, the government’s changes have also created a new a lifetime cap on all Hecs loans of $104,440 – starting on 1 January 2019. Previously there was only a cap on postgraduate, full-fee and vocational loans. The cap is higher for those studying medicine, dentistry or veterinary science ($150,000)

Only loans taken out after 1 January 2019 will count towards the cap – so existing debts do not.

Can I reduce or cancel my debt?

If you are a nurse, midwife or teacher, or a maths, statistics or science graduate, you may be eligible for the Hecs-Help benefit, which will reduce your Hecs debt.

The scheme was cancelled by the government on 1 July 2017. However, because you have two years to lodge a tax return, if you were eligible in the 2016-17 financial year, you can still claim it until 30 June 2019.

If you were eligible in the 2015-16 financial year, you have until Sunday to claim it.

Eligibility criteria are quite complex, so check with the Study Assist websiteand the Australian Taxation Office.

In special circumstances, you can also have some of your Hecs debt cancelled.

If you failed a subject, or had to withdraw from a subject due to illness or other circumstances, you can apply to your university or education provider to have the debt for that subject cancelled.

If you withdrew after the census date without a special circumstance, you still have to pay the Hecs debt for that subject. You also can’t cancel the debt for a subject if you successfully completed it.

After revelations that many private colleges were exploiting the Vet-Fee loan system, the government also introduced debt cancellations if your vocational provider committed “unacceptable conduct” – for example, if you were pressured into signing up for a course, were offered money or goods to sign up, or were lied to about how much the course cost.

Source of the notice: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jun/28/student-debt-how-the-governments-hecs-changes-will-affect-you

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The Two Biggest Problems With College

David Leonhardt

By Davi Leonhardt 

American higher-education policy has two overarching problems. We don’t spend enough money on college education for middle-class and poor students. And we don’t demand enough accountability from colleges.

The two problems feed off each other, leading to miserably low graduation rates — often below 50 percent — at many colleges. The colleges that have figured out how to do better aren’t rewarded with more resources. The colleges with weak results face few consequences. All the while, lower-income students suffer.

Fortunately, the problem of college performance is starting to get more attention — from colleges themselves, state officials and others. But there is still a huge missing piece: the federal government. Washington has the potential to influence higher education, via both money and oversight, more powerfully than any state or college consortium.

I don’t see much reason to hope that the Trump administration will play this role. Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, seems more focused on using federal dollars to lift the profits of private education companies, regardless of how well or ill they serve students.

Outside the administration, though, some policy experts are starting to have intriguing conversations about the future of federal higher-education policy. The latest example comes from the Center for American Progress, the liberal research and advocacy group, which on Wednesday is set to release a new higher-education proposal. It focuses on those two big problems: lack of resources and lack of accountability.

The proposal calls for roughly doubling federal financial aid, an increase of $60 billion a year. (That’s less than one-fourth of the annual cost of the Trump tax cut, as Ben Miller, a former Education Department official who helped write the proposal, told me.) The bulk of that money would increase financial aid by up to $10,000 a year for a low- or middle-income student.

This money would effectively help cover student living costs, which often run close to $15,000 a year. Those costs — mostly room and board — are a major burden even for students who receive enough financial aid to cover much of their tuition bill. In fact some higher-education experts believe the recent attention on “free college” has been problematic, because it has obscured the fact that tuition isn’t the main issue for many lower-income families.

The second part of the new proposal would require colleges to meet performance benchmarks in exchange for the infusion of new federal spending. These benchmarks would include graduation rates and post-college employment and would vary based on “degree of difficulty.” A college that enrolled mostly low-income students wouldn’t be expected to have the same results as an elite college. Over the long term, colleges that failed to meet the benchmarks could lose funding, as is already the case in some states, including Florida and Indiana.

I don’t agree with every part of the proposal. I think it focuses too much on equity among demographic groups within colleges, for example — whether white and non-white students, or high- and low-income students at a given college fare similarly. These gaps exist, but they are usually modest. The much bigger problem is that students from different groups tend to attend different colleges. But I also think the plan is an excellent way to start the discussion.

A college degree remains the most reliable path to a good job and a healthy, satisfying life. That path should be open to a much larger segment of Americans than it is now.

On the news. President Trump’s use of the word “infest” yesterday continues his ugly pattern of describing illegal immigrants as subhuman. And “infest” is particularly stark, because it suggests that immigrants are akin to insects or rats — an analogy that Nazis frequently used to describe Jews, as Aviya Kushner notes in The Forward.

On the same subject, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie predicts that Trump’s

dehumanizing language “will only get worse as November approaches.” Bouie adds: “To energize its voters, the White House plans a campaign of vicious demagoguery.”

I’m not suggesting that Donald Trump is a Nazi. He is not. Yet it would be wishfully naïve to explain away his racism and his hate at this point. In both word and deed, he has shown himself to be quite comfortable with many of the ideas of white supremacy.

Source of the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/opinion/college-middle-class-poor-students.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FEducation

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Pakistan: Education and sanity

Noticias

Asia/Pakistan/26.06.18/Source: nation.com.pk.

Education is prioritized on such a huge level that important tools needed to survive in the society are often ignored

We have been raised in an environment where we are made to believe that education is essential and the path to a successful life. We have heard Urdu sentences like “Parhoge likhoge banoge nawab, kheloge kudo ge banoge kharab”, “Parho takay baray aadmi ban sako” with regards to study all our lives and children often think of it as boring as it may seem education is indeed important. Children and adults alike believe that education is so important to the point that nothing else is supposed to come in between and in some cases not even your own life.

While many people might be of the view that education does indeed come first above everything else and every other aspect even if it is important or a favorite pastime is something secondary which can only come after education or be successfully achieved after it, but I tend to disagree, education has often been confused with gaining knowledge or perhaps even gaining some degree. For me education is not important as people think it is, gaining knowledge on the other hand is.

The importance of education has been pressurised upon people through different institutions of society like educational institutions and even parents. This mindset can be traced to even the smallest of things for example most people might remember that back in school, it was a common practice among teachers to take games, P.E. or a free period in order to complete their syllabus. While teachers might have been of the view that it was for the benefit of the students, the truth is it was done in order to just wrap up things quickly. If schools were really concerned about the benefit of the students, they would have made it against the rules to do such a thing because it doesn’t give students the time to relax but instead most schools are now just a money-making business that puts up information in brains of students for which they don’t even get enough time to process.

Another issue is that of tuition centers. It’s one thing if a child doesn’t go to school and is attending a tuition centre but what is the point of wasting your money on a school if you’re going to send your child to a tuition centre anyway? Even the excuse that your child is weak in a certain subject is not a valid one because isn’t it the incompetence of the school and teachers or their parents in the first place if the child is weak in a certain subject?

Not only that but while most parents, teachers and schools emphasise on studies, they either very rarely or never take into consideration things like sports or arts. Their misconception is that those are things that are simply useless and can be done at a later time or is something extra that does not need any time at all. The person’s time is fully prioritised on studying that they do not have the time to do anything else.

Education is prioritized on such a huge level that important tools needed to survive in the society are often ignored such as how to pay your bills, how to cook, how to buy a house or how to drive. A disagreement to this might be that without education you might not able to even know this but the thing is a formula in physics is not going to help you solve these problems; someone has to educate you on this stuff. Not everyone is going to learn from YouTube tutorials.

Then there comes another problem; the question what are you studying? If you’re not doing medical or engineering, your education is invalid. It is true that people have become more acceptable towards other disciplines today but the mindset which disregards other disciplines still exists today and is unfortunately pretty common. People need to realise that every person is different and they all have their qualities and flaws, but the society unfortunately tends to focus on the latter as if their flaws are the only things they see in a person.

Formal education and gaining knowledge is necessary. It is not something that should be done to impress the society but to have a successful path for one’s self. Pressurising people on studying in order to become a better person in a society on the other hand is wrong and should be discouraged. There should be a certain time for studying with breaks in between. This is something that should be realised by parents, teachers and schools. Having four periods with one break followed by another four periods is unhealthy and helping none. There needs to be a more open and liberal approach to education with a focus on other important things as well. Only then will the person and the society in general be on the path to successful road.

Source of the notice: https://nation.com.pk/24-Jun-2018/education-and-sanity

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‘The importance of great teaching on children’s success’

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Europe/United Kingdom/By Peter Tait/ 25.06.18/Source: www.telegraph.co.uk.

As a society, we spend an inordinate amount of time, resources and money looking at how to improve the quality of education in our schools.

The questions we ask ourselves are always the same. How do we improve the quality of teaching and learning? (and its corollary, our examination results?) How do we make our children more motivated and competitive? And how do we get children to value and ‘own’ their education?

And yet, after all the talk of new methodologies and curricula; after new and different methods of teaching and models of assessment; after all the time and money spent on technology; after the personalisation of education and differentiated teaching; after learning styles and habits of mind; after mindfulness and Every Child Matters; after the debates about continuous and formative assessment; and after all the constant tinkering, bureaucratic and legislative, with their greater focus on data and compliance, we seem to be no closer to establishing what are the most important factors that make children succeed.

The only consistent factor we can identify is the role of the teacher, whose abilities and skillset, knowledge and enthusiasm are crucial in determining the success or otherwise, of the children they teach.

Teaching, after all, is about engagement, about getting children to listen and switch on. The best investment any government can make is to get the most effective, the most talented, the best teachers they can in front of the children.

By best, I don’t mean those who are the best qualified, but those teachers who know how to enthuse and connect with children regardless of their own levels of education. I mean those teachers who can properly engage with children and teach them by inspiring and challenging them.

Sometimes the pathway dictates that the process comes down to hard work rather than inspiration, but teaching is all about the relationship between teacher and pupil more than anything else.

Children will work harder for a teacher they respect, even if they demand more and insist on discipline and high standards. One can only speculate what would have been the impact if all the money spent on technology had gone instead into lowering the teacher-pupil ratio and improving the identification, selection and training of the most effective and passionate teachers. Where would we be now? In a somewhat better place, I would suggest.

I look back at outstanding teachers from my own teaching career and remember, in particular, one woman, whose ability with children was legendary. She was strict, uncompromising, but children wanted her approbation.

One particular year she took on a particularly difficult class of Year 4 children, two of whom had considerable physical and intellectual difficulties and could not even print their names and yet finished the year with impressive cursive writing – achieved through repetition, practice, discipline and unwavering high expectations.

She made such a difference to their young lives and all who were fortunate enough to have her as a teacher.

Good teachers don’t need the security of extra resources and technology that, evidence suggests, can detract rather than add to the learning process.

While they may use resources to embellish their lessons, they will not allow the resources to become the lesson. The best teachers are always wanting to do and find out more about their own craft, pushing out the boundaries of their learning and teaching, which is why many exceptional teaches re-work or even discard their teaching notes on a regular basis and look for new topics, and ways, to teach.

This lesson came home to me when I was asked to introduce art history into the sixth form in a New Zealand school and finding – after the subject had been offered, and places filled – that my knowledge of the period (Italian Art, 1300 – 1650) was almost as deficient as were my resources.

That year, with a few old text books and slides, I learnt alongside the students and at the year’s end, we were the top performing department in the school with one student in the top 10 in national scholarships.

The next year, I went to Italy and soon had the best resourced art history department anywhere with videos and CD Roms, slides, a library of outstanding books of reproductions, computer programmes on every aspect of the course, but my students never did quite so well ever again.

I think they learned better, as I did, by having to think more, by having to eke out what they could from the meagre resources, by having to think and having a teacher learning alongside them. There was no hiding place for any of us.

Teachers need to keep learning and growing – it is not a profession for the cynical or indifferent. The best can be identified by their enthusiasm and interest in pedagogy. They are not characterised by their own high academic performance, but by a thirst for passing on the benefits of education.

They may be unorthodox, idiosyncratic, employing a variety of approaches to get children to want to learn and to question what they are being taught. They are typified by their passion, their non-negotiable standards, breadth of interests, high expectations, understanding of how children learn, empathy, an insistence on greater self-discipline and by their relationship with their pupils.

Interestingly, children know who the best teachers are, even if they try and avoid them in favour of the more popular variety who may make their lives easy. They often criticise them to their parents for being too demanding and only realise later the opportunity they have squandered.

These are the teachers who entered the profession in order to make a difference. And they do.

Source of the notice: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/12201014/The-importance-of-great-teaching-on-childrens-success.html

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India’s failing education system: It is our children’s future, not our ancestor’s pride, that deserves our outrage first

Anustup Nayak

Por Anustup Nayak 

Here is a sample of what has outraged Indians over the last year: a violent mob attacked a bus full of schoolchildren to protect the honour of a mythical queen. Riots erupted between caste groups over a battle fought two hundred years ago. Young people were killed for falling in love outside their faith and for eating the meat of their choice.

We are willing to die and kill for dead queens, sacred animals, and caste history, all symbols of our past. But why is our response so muted when it comes to our children and youth, who symbolize our future?

Angry high-school students are out protesting on Delhi streets over the leaked Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) grade 10th and 12th question papers. Data analysis conducted by Geeta Kingdon shows that between 2004 and 2016, the median percentage score in CBSE’s school leaving examinations have been systematically inflated by 8%. Only 40% of our 14-18-year-olds can calculate the price of a shirt sold at a 10% discount and less than 60% could read the time from an analog clock, according to the findings of the Annual Status of Education (ASER) report. And, less than 17% of India’s graduates are employable.

None of these revelations are new. We have known for years that our education system is failing. Children are going to school but not learning much beyond “floor level tasks.” Yet, there has been no big bang policy shift, very little sustained media scrutiny and indeed no parent uprising.

Why does the bleak future of our young people not stoke our collective outrage?

Students, parents and employers all benefit from good education. But they lack the voice to press for change. Politicians, bureaucrats, and media can influence education from the outside, but they find it of no use to advance their agendas.

Till recently, the software outsourcing industry boomed. Companies flocked to hire at campuses of even second rate engineering colleges. Most of these graduates are ill equipped to do entry level jobs. Corporations spend months to reskill them rather than getting entangled in lobbying government to fix college teaching.

Politicians do not win elections, or bureaucrats get promotions on an education platform. It takes years for good education policies to show results and even for bad ones to fail. Few in public office have that kind of patience to sow and wait. Fewer have the gumption to take on the entrenched unions, cartels, and ideologues who block meaningful change in schools and colleges.

Children are the most important beneficiaries of a good education yet the ones with least power to shape it. When children are in school, they are either unaware of how little they are learning or afraid to speak up. College students sometimes raise their voices in protest, but mostly on issues tangential to their learning.

Parents choose to exit the school system rather than pressuring it to change. Millions of parents pull their children out of broken government schools and enroll them in low-fee private schools. Then they find out that even private schools do not deliver much better results. The better-off among them find refuge in tuition centres. The rest make do with what they get.

However, this pattern of exiting without a voice need not be fait accompli for Indian education. “The time for the richer Indian to secede has come to an end,” notes philanthropist Rohini Nilekani in her article for this column “The end of secession” (13 November 2017).  “The foul air in Delhi is a perfect example of a great leveller. Rich and poor alike must breathe in its health hazards,” Nilekani argues.

The leak of CBSE question papers may be the fateful “foul air moment” for Indian education. Fates of children living in Gurgaon skyscrapers hangs in uncertain balance alongside their mofussil peers.  Consider this. There will soon be 100 million under-skilled and under-employed young people on our streets. Many will be desperate, leading them to harass, loot, and molest, or to harm themselves if not others. A student commits suicide every hour in India, unable to fulfill aspirations, cope with failure, or find emotional support, according to IndiaSpend reports.

Would we keep quiet if these were your children or mine? Will they find a college of their choice? Will they qualify for a job when they graduate? How will we grow our businesses when there are so few skilled people to hire? What India story will we sell to attract foreign investors? What myth will politicians spin to get the disillusioned to vote this time?

Now is the time to cry out for an excellent education for every child.

Parents, students, and employers must demand that our institutions deliver real capability and not empty certificates. Let us stamp our vote to those leaders who can make this happen. Let us not keep quiet till we get what we deserve. But with the right to raise our voices comes the responsibility to stay invested. Media must capture this moment and ensure that those in power heed this call. It must hold them accountable for action.

It is our children’s future, not our ancestor’s pride, that deserves our outrage first. Only then can we begin to unleash the potential of our 100 million young minds.

Source of the article: https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/indias-failing-education-system-it-is-our-childrens-future-not-our-ancestors-pride-that-deserves-our-outrage-first/

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Race- Based Suspensions Undermine Undermine Education of Black Youth

Marian Wright

BY MARIAN WRIGH

A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last month, “K-12 Education: Discipline Disparities for Black Students, Boys, and Students with Disabilities,” reminds us once again that suspensions and expulsions continue at high rates and offer grave risks to students.

The report by this federal monitoring agency reviews data from the Education Department’s Civil Rights Data Collection on school discipline trends across the country, provides a more in-depth look at discipline approaches and challenges faced in five states, and reviews past efforts by the Departments of Education and Justice to identify and address disparities and discrimination.

The GAO reminds us all of the profound ways school discipline affects students and can impair both their childhood and adulthood. For example, “research has shown that students who are suspended from school lose important instructional time, are less likely to graduate on time, are more likely to repeat a grade, drop out of school, and become involved in the juvenile justice system.”

It also notes children experiencing school discipline often have behavioral issues affected by challenges outside the classroom, which are often more acute for poor children – especially children of color, who are more likely to be poor.

The report makes a strong case that there is still much work to be done and we must insist that this administration keep moving forward with solutions – building on what we know is working. We must resist current attempts to move us backwards and instead protect students from discriminatory practices. There are good superintendent-led examples out there to build on.

The GAO’s analysis examines six categories of discipline: out-of-school suspensions, in-school suspensions, referrals to law enforcement, expulsions, corporal punishment, and school-related arrests. It examines the data by race/ethnicity, sex, disability, and poverty level, and included studies of illustrative school districts in California, Georgia, Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Texas.

Overall, the GAO found that Black students, boys, and students with disabilities were all disproportionately disciplined in the 2013-2014 school year (the latest available data) and that disproportionality is widespread and persistent despite the level of school poverty, type of disciplinary action, or type of public school attended (e.g., traditional, magnet, charter, alternative, or special education).
A closer look at some of the sobering findings:

Race not poverty explains the disparities in discipline. This report is the first time discipline rates were analyzed by poverty level, and results show that race is a more important factor in discipline decisions than poverty. Even in the most affluent school districts, 7.5% of Black boys had been given an out-of-school suspension compared to 1.8% of White boys.

On the other hand, disproportionality “was particularly acute for Black students in high-poverty schools, where they were overrepresented by nearly 25 percentage points in suspensions from school.”

Black students represented 39% of students suspended from school even though they accounted for 15.5% of all public school students. These disparities can be seen as early as preschool where Black children accounted for 47% of students suspended from preschool even though they were only 19% of all public preschool students. Black boys have the highest rate of out-of-school suspension overall and Black girls have the highest rate of all girls.

Boys were two-thirds of those disciplined, though they accounted for just 50 percent of all public school students. Even as early as preschool boys accounted for 78% of children suspended from preschool but were only 54% of all public preschool students.
Students with disabilities represented 25% of students who have been referred to law enforcement, arrested for a school-related offense, or suspended from school but accounted for just 12% of all public school students.

School districts included trauma, mental health issues, social media (including bullying and other conflicts), immigration status, gang involvement, drug use by students or parents, lack of parental guidance and support, and situational barriers like transportation, jobs, and responsibilities at home among the many challenges that affect student behavior or attendance and can lead to discipline issues. There is a clear recognition in finding after finding in the report that more attention and resources are needed to help schools reduce disparities in discipline, not less.

That overall finding is critically important now as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos seems intent on the Department doing less rather than more to protect children from discrimination in suspensions and expulsions and other areas and reversing what progress has been made.

In 2014 the Department of Education and Department of Justice jointly released an extremely helpful school discipline guidance package to address these kinds of inequities in school discipline and reinforce the meaning of the non-discrimination requirements under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Yet the Education Department under Secretary DeVos now threatens to withdraw that guidance. The Children’s Defense Fund strongly supports the 2014 guidance package and the GAO report’s findings help reconfirm why it must remain in place for our nation’s children.

The guidance reaffirms the obligation school districts and those directly serving students have to ensure discrimination does not interfere with a student’s right to learn and succeed. It makes clear to all superintendents and other administrators, teachers, aides, parents, and students that students have legal rights to be free of discipline policies that push students out of school and can promote serious inequities in their educational opportunities.

The law in this area is clear and has been for more than 50 years; the guidance brings legal protections together with practical steps districts can put in place through their school discipline policies and practices to comply with these nondiscrimination requirements. It has helped communities recognize and praise good policies and challenge the bad. Positive discipline practices are key to ensuring all children are treated fairly and all students can feel respected and supported in safe schools where they have equal educational opportunities.

The Children’s Defense Fund has been highlighting the disparate impact of school discipline policies on children of color and poor children since the publication of our 1975 report, School Suspensions: Are They Helping Children?

Too much of what we learned then remains true today. It is critically important that the 2014 Title VI Guidance be maintained and that it not be made easier for schools to push children of color, boys, and children with disabilities out of school with impunity in a disgraceful race to the bottom. We must not in any way weaken our efforts to move forward to create a level education playing field for all children.

Source:

http://www.blackstarnews.com/education/education/race-based-suspensions-undermine-education-of-black-youth.html

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England: Student loans ‘heading for trillion pounds’

Noticias

Europe/England/20.06.18/y Sean Coughlan/Source: www.bbc.com.

The tuition fee system for England’s universities is ripping off students and giving taxpayers poor value for money, says a parliamentary committee.

The House of Lords economic affairs committee revealed evidence the student loan book would grow to over £1 trillion over the next 25 years.

The committee attacked a «deeply unfair» system of fees and loans.

But the Department for Education said its review of fees would «make sure students are getting value for money».

This hard-hitting report accuses the government of using «accounting tricks» to conceal the real cost of higher education and to pile up huge debts for future generations.

It calls for «immediate reforms» – such as cutting interest rates on repayments and restoring grants for disadvantaged students.

‘Astonished’

Committee chairman and former Conservative minister, Lord Forsyth, said they had also been «quite astonished by the complete collapse in part-time education».

The report warns of the lack of funding for vocational training – and claims that the apprenticeship system has been damaged by artificial targets invented to sound impressive for a manifesto promise.

The cross-party committee, with two former chancellors and two ex-chief secretaries to the Treasury, says the student loan system seems to have been used for a «fiscal illusion» to make the deficit look smaller.

«The thing that shocked me – and I thought I was pretty unshockable – was that I had not understood that by moving to a system of funding through loans, because of the accounting methods of the Treasury, it was possible for George Osborne [then chancellor] to appear to increase funding for higher education by £3bn but at the same time cut his deficit by £3.8bn,» says Lord Forsyth.

The cost of unpaid loans will not be included until they are officially written off after 30 years.

Lord Forsyth says a parliamentary question revealed how much student borrowing was really piling up for the future.

By 2044, when many of today’s students will still be paying off their loans, the student loan book will have grown to more than £1tn, rising to £1.2tn by 2049.

«The public argument for cutting the deficit was so that debt wasn’t handed on to the next generation.

«But for this generation, being asked to pay these loans, when they’ve eventually paid them off, they’ll suddenly find there’s a bill for £1.2tn.

«I hadn’t realised that was happening.»

‘Devastating consequences’

But Lord Forsyth says this system has had «devastating consequences».

It has produced excessive interest rates, set to rise again to 6.3%, which the committee says should be no higher than the rate at which the government borrows, at present 1.5%.

The conversion of means-tested grants into loans has meant that the poorest students end up graduating with the biggest debts, says Lord Forsyth.

And he warns that the current repayment system was more expensive for people in middle income jobs such as nursing, rather than high-paid lawyers or financiers, who would pay off their debts more quickly.

«The people who get screwed by this are those in the middling jobs,» says Lord Forsyth.

«This was all done on the basis that it would create a market in higher education – and that has failed, there isn’t a market.»

Lord Forsyth says that there is no meaningful consumer choice or competition – and he dismissed the system for rating teaching quality in universities, the teaching excellence framework, as a «bit of a joke».

«Because no-one ever turns up to look at the teaching,» says Lord Forsyth.

‘Quantity rather than quality’

The report says that the student finance system has failed to recognise the need to improve vocational skills and to help those wanting to re-train.

Part-time student numbers have fallen by about 60% over the past decade – with accusations that the funding system is based around school-leavers beginning full-time degree courses.

«There’s been a huge distorting effect. It’s a huge mistake,» says the committee chair.

Lord Forsyth says there have been concerns about the apprenticeship policy – and the committee heard suggestions that the target for three million apprentices was not the result of any strategy, but was chosen as an impressive number for a manifesto promise.

The consequence of such target setting, he says, is to «encourage quantity rather than quality».

It means more attention is paid to the numbers starting than completing and there were signs that some employers were re-badging existing training as «apprenticeships» as a way of getting funding.

«There is clear evidence that what the economy needs is more people with technical and vocational skills. But the way that the funding for fees and maintenance operates makes it pretty well impossible for us to meet that demand,» says Lord Forsyth.

‘Value for money’

Alice Barnard, chief executive of the Edge Foundation, which promotes vocational education, said the report «clearly highlights how the funding bias in our higher education system has favoured universities at the expense of choice and opportunity for young people».

The head of the MillionPlus group of new universities, Greg Walker, said the report had produced «robust evidence» to support the return of maintenance grants and to find ways to make universities more accessible to part-time students.

A Department for Education spokesperson said: «We agree that for too long young people have not had a genuine choice post-16 about where and what they wish to study.

«That is exactly why we have overhauled apprenticeships to focus on quality and why we are fundamentally transforming technical education, investing £500m a year in new T-levels that will provide a high quality, technical alternative to A-levels.

«On top of this, we are undertaking a major review of post-18 education and funding, to make sure students are getting value for money and genuine choice between technical, vocational and academic routes.»

Source of the notice: https://www.bbc.com/news/education-44433569

 

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