Yes.

On average, students graduate with £20,000 of debt. This is repaid when your earnings reach £15,000. Effectively, as a graduate you pay a 9% graduate tax on all earnings over £15,000 until your student debt is cleared. So, let’s say you’re earning £22,000 a year in your graduate job, you will be paying back £630 a year. In fact, until you’re earning £43,000, the ‘graduate premium’ will outweigh any student debt repayments.

‘Aha!’, the critics may snarl. ‘So the current system penalises successful graduates?’ Well, no. It’s difficult to earn £40,000 a year without degree. Try becoming a doctor, lawyer or engineer without a degree. Their graduate premiums are of course higher. Plus, they pay back their student debt quicker.

The fact is some degrees are worth more than others. Putting an exact figure on how a much a ‘degree’ earns you is pointless. Engineers and medics, for example, will nearly always earn more than history graduates. My degree has less of a premium as it gives me fewer valuable skills. I can’t build bridges or perform surgery; I can sift through lots of data and read quickly.

How fees are paid for should reflect this. Expensive degrees, with lots of teaching like engineering and medicine, should have higher fees paid for by a graduate tax on high earning graduates. It’s unfair that arts student have to pay the same as science students for considerably less teaching and resources. Students with these more expensive, skills based degrees tend to earn more as a result. They should thus pay enough fees to cover the actual costs of their degree, if they can afford to. Should doctors and engineers earning large salaries not chip in a little extra for their education? If not why not?

Related posts:

1. More student debt hyperbole
2. Student Debt: The Facts You Need To Know
3. Fees to rise to £7,000 after next election

How much would you have to be paid to teach these oiks?

Michael Gove, Shadow Schools Secretary, has announced a quite simple new policy to entice more science graduates into teaching science – graduates get their student loan paid off, if they go into teaching.

It’s a good policy insofar that it gets lots and lots and lots of headlines. The downside is, it won’t make much difference. Gove claims that the scheme could potentially save graduates ‘£40,000 over a lifetime’.

‘Over a lifetime’, that is not a lot of money. A grand a year over a forty year career? Will that replace the hole in a science graduate’s earnings caused by turning down Glaxo for a teaching job? I doubt it. In real terms, Gove is offering a 3% pay increase to science graduates – up until their student loan is paid off. When that debt has gone, there is no incentive.

It’s better than nothing, but why would high-achieving graduates want to embark on a really stressful career for the sake of a barely improved salary?

Gove claims that the scheme will help create “generation of teachers who have made a commitment to the long-term, and thus we will diminish the churn that characterises our system now.”

How is a short term pay increase going to ‘diminish the churn’? To be a good teacher, you have to love your job. And I mean really love it. Extra pay might cushion job dissatisfaction, but not forever – and certainly not if the extra pay dries up in a few years.

Teaching is difficult and not particularly well paid. Why would someone with a first in Chemistry go and teach at a crappy comp if Deloitte have offered them a £25,000 starting salary for a piss easy consulting job?

Gove has got the right idea: you want better teachers, give them a better pay deal. But he needs to go much further.

Related posts:

1. Why shouldn’t medics and engineers pay higher fees?
2. Cut, cut, cut! Teaching jobs go at Sheffield University

Exams bug me for a few reasons, and the main one is pretty selfish: I’m crap at them. I never do as well as I should, partly because I never prepare for them properly, but mainly because they’re designed to show you at your worst.

Rather than allowing you to take time to ponder and develop an argument, you have to simply vomit something out as quickly as you can. Despite the fact that you type every other single piece of work for university, you’re expected to write them by hand. And what do they prove? That within a short period of time, you can regurgitate some memorised facts and arguments – Well Done.

Exams bug me for a few reasons, and the main one is pretty selfish: I’m crap at them.

Exams do not encourage individual, original thought. They do not encourage learning for the sake of it. All they do is encourage you to rape your subject, reduce it to a few memorable, pithy arguments and facts and then reproduce them in a semi-legible form, surrounded by 400 people doing the same.

Admittedly, this criticism applies largely to essay based subjects – particularly the poncier ones, like history, philosophy, English and politics (hobby degrees, I like to call them) – and not so much to science degrees, or engineering. There’s a certain element of hoop jumping in the latter subjects – i.e. wrong answers actually exist; you can’t just make up some bollocks and scrape a third like in Arts subjects – which make exams seem a reasonable means of assessment, but for essay subjects, this doesn’t hold.

It’s peculiar that in an age where nearly every fact or detail is accessible in seconds via the Internet, syllabuses still obsess over the regurgitation of a tiny number of memorised pieces of information in frankly odd circumstances. Exams are bad for the pupil, as they encourage a crammed, shallow education. Exams are bad for teachers and professors, who have to wade through hundreds of often illegible scripts. So what are they good for? Absolutely nothing.*

*Say it again…

Related posts:

1. Why shouldn’t medics and engineers pay higher fees?
2. On revision and procrastination (P.S. I wrote this piece to avoid more revision…)
3. Are universities open to all?