With an increase in number of students – 52%!! – the prospect of a highly-paid job surely recedes. The (British) Government is either playing a con trick here or hasn’t thought it through. The more graduates there are, the less premium a degree will attract by way of subsequent salary. Poor people will have even less of an incentive to get a degree.

Yes, that was the point I was making. Under my suggested system, these wrongs are undone. If people are made to personally pay for the education they receive, wasters don’t bother, degrees become valuable and the prospect of getting a highly-paid job increases again.

Isn’t education an investment by society in the talents of its young people?

Under the current system, it doesn’t work like that. As I have pointed out, it is a subsidy that lets rich people enjoy themselves for a few years. Society doesn’t need to invest in the talents of its young people. If it will work for society, it will only be if it will work for the individuals in that society. As such, the individual investments would maximise the benefits that accrue to society. Under the current system, society sometimes ‘invests’ in people who will be worse off if they go through university than if they don’t. Therefore society is overall worse off. (This is unless you think there is an innate benefit to society from funding university education per se, but this seems like quite a costly way of getting a warm glow, particularly since it appears to hurt the poor the most.)

If they benefit greatly from this monetarily in later life it ought to be given back (taken back by the state through the tax system?)

Seems like quite a bureaucratic, roundabout way of going about it, particularly since there is only a tenuous link between income and university attendance (in the sense that there are lots of other factors that can affect your income).

Isn’t education an investment by society in the talents of its young people? If they benefit greatly from this monetarily in later life it ought to be given back (taken back by the state through the tax system?) – as should any large monetary benefit that people accrue through making it good in the environment the state has enabled.

(There is also an argument that the state’s investment should be recouped from those who benefited by them remaining in the country for a length of time to contribute to the system via taxation.)

When taking the decision whether or not to study, what matters is the difference between what you expect to earn in your lifetime if you go to university and what you expect to earn in your lifetime if you don’t. But we know that this difference is larger for people who come from poor backgrounds than it is for rich people. So poor people have more to gain from attending university.

Under the current system, a rich person can attend university even if the difference between the two incomes is lower than it would be for the average poor person, lower than the cost of tuition fees or even slightly negative (this negative value would be in effect the price the person is willing to pay to have a laugh for a few years). Poor people cannot afford to behave like this. As such, in effect, universal free university education acts as a cushion for the rich, not as a helping hand for the poor. If those rich people who had a very low or slightly negative difference knew they had to pay for their tuition, they would probably give it a miss, thereby freeing up a position for somebody who would genuinely benefit from university education.

I know that there is uncertainty in such decisions that may deter a poor person from attending university when there are tuition fees. But I think having people pay in line with their ability to pay would give people enough breathing space if things did not go to plan.