Securitising Britain’s Future: A free market solution to university funding

  When the Coalition Government increased tuition fees from £3,300 to £9,000 a year, it had done so to provide a sustainable alternative that would boost university’s incomes and cut government spending. But there are reasons to believe this has failed. The Guardian reported that the new funding system is likely to cost the government not less, but more money than the system it replaced. It is time to reevaluate university funding, and I propose the following alternative: a system under which students would agree to ‘sell’ a percentage of their future income to their university in exchange for an education.

Under the current system moral hazard occurs since the universities need not worry about its students’ ability to repay their loans. Instead, the government will bear the costs if students default. This is a problem in desperate need of addressing especially considering that an estimated 73% of graduates will not be able to fully repay their loans.

Under the proposed system in which universities own the income rights to students’ future earnings, the incentive structure would be changed as to align the interests of students, universities and society alike. Universities will factor in how much their education will benefit their students in terms of their future earnings. This allows relative prices to convey how much certain professions are, in fact, valued by society. The university would encourage more students to take up careers that are more valued and it could charge less (in terms of percentage points) for the degrees with better prospects than those with worse.

By contrast, universities today charge uniform rates and have an incentive to provide the most appealing courses - which often mean courses that are enjoyable or easy - rather than being actually useful or valuable. The graduates may therefore lack the skills to be productive members of the workforce, despite accumulating large debts. Universities even have an incentive to admit students it knows will not benefit from the course since it will nonetheless receive government funding.

In turn, universities could sell its future income rights through a process of ‘securitisation’, per course or as a diversified portfolio. This free-market solution provides an equitable opportunity to all, since students’ ability to attend university is not depended upon current wealth but future earnings; thus depended upon skill and merit, not money. This system would streamline all stakeholders’ interests and ‘securitise’ Britain’s free and prosperous future.

Tamay is the runner-up in the 18-21 category of the ASI's 'Young Writer on Liberty' competition. 

Economic Nonsense: 47. The state should pay for university education because it benefits society

University education benefits society in several ways.  A skilled, university-educated workforce can boost economic growth and make society richer than it would have been without them.  Less well-off and less well-educated people benefit from this, just as a rising tide lifts all boats.

The experience of going through university generally produces people who are not only educated in their chosen subjects, but who have been exposed to more cultural influences in the process.  Many people would think a society to be a better one if it contained significant numbers of educated and cultured people.  It provides more opportunities for intellectual stimulation and self-development.

All of this is true to some degree, and benefits society as a whole, but there is little doubt that by far the greatest value of a university education accrues to the person who undertakes it.  There is firstly the personal fulfilment that comes from attaining more of one's potential, but there are more material rewards as well.

Possession of a university degree in the UK increases one's employability.  For those in the workforce, aged 18-65, employment among graduates is 87%, as opposed to 70% for non-graduates.  Median salary is higher, too, with graduates on average earning £9,000 more per year than their non-graduate counterparts.  Over a working life this could top £400,000 of extra salary attributable to the degree.  

This constitutes an overwhelming advantage accruing to the individual who undertakes a university degree.  While there are undoubted benefits to society, those gained by the individual are high and measurable.  They make the loans undertaken to finance university, perhaps £36,000 for a 3-year degree, a very good investment indeed.

When people suggest the state should pay for this, they mean taxpayers should.  It seems strange that a person not equipped to benefit from university, someone who leaves school at 16 to become a bricklayer, for example, should be called upon to pay higher taxes so that someone else, already endowed with more academic and intellectual ability, should benefit from what amounts to a ticket to a higher salary for life.  

Some would call this unfair, and suggest that those who gain the most from university education should finance most of its costs.

Government loans for master's students is a risky business

The chancellor announced a student loan system for postgraduate master's degrees in the Autumn Statement. Although many have praised the move, it risks doing more harm than good. There are the obvious unintended consequence of encouraging students to undertake courses that aren't in their (or taxpayers') best interest, but here I'll focus on risks to the nascent funding market for postgraduate loans.

It's certainly a popular policy. As the FT reports: "Universities, unions and business groups have reached rare agreement in welcoming new £10,000 loans intended to ‘revolutionise’ the support available for students taking postgraduate degrees." But the devil will be in the detail. Just consider the Student Loans Company, which MPs recently requested face an inquiry following the ‘persistent miscalculation’ of money paid out in loans that will not be repaid. But more important than the wasted money, the government’s intervention in the postgraduate student loan market risks crowding out private sector solutions.

The failure of the Professional and Career Development Loans (PCDL), which are already subsidised by the government through the Skills Funding Agency, is principally due to banks being ill-suited to lending to students (and one the main reasons for this is because of excessive banking regulation). The analogy with SME business lending is the right one – students, like SMEs, are risky and banks are no longer best placed to lend to them.

Smaller and leaner companies can fill the gap where banks fear to tread. As we have seen with Santander’s partnership with Funding Circle in SME finance, the banks know that nimble companies have the skills to plug gaps in the market. In fact, entrepreneurial companies like Future Finance, StudentFunder and Prodigy Finance are already responding to the demand for loans for postgraduate studies.

Whether the bulk of the money comes from peer-to-peer (P2P) investors, alumni or universities themselves, the plurality of the private sector would trump the one-size-fits all approach that the government could take. We are on the verge of the equivalent of the funding revolution we are seeing in SME finance but this intervention risks stymieing it.

All is not lost. The government will consult on how to put the policy into practice and here they have the opportunity to do less harm than copying the PCDL model. As with SME finance, the government could funnel the loans through providers already in the marketplace. And, most importantly, government needs an exit strategy so that we don’t see mission creep and the destruction of a private sector solution.

Philip Salter is director of The Entrepreneurs Network.

We would rather expect the children with degrees of people with degrees to earn more than the children with degrees of people without degrees

A finding that people who have degrees, and who are the children of people who had degrees, earn more than people with degrees but who are the children of people without degrees, seems to be worrying some people. We rather think that it's a likely, obvious even, outcome of how the country has developed over the decades.

British men earn more if they have a parent who went to university, a study has found.

In contrast, men born to lowly educated parents earn 20 per cent less that those with the same qualifications but from a better background.

Researchers at the Institute of Education, part of the University of London, said it proved the wage inequality could be transmitted from one generation to the next.

They studied the salaries and backgrounds of 40,000 men between 25 and 59 across 24 countries, including Britain.

Think through what happened to higher education in the past. From 1950 to 1980 or so it really was only the bright (some 10% of the age cohort) and the rich who went to university. The poor and bright could indeed get there through the grammar school system. After that the floodgates were opened and we now have some 50% of the age cohort going into higher education. We might not immediately think that that should imply a wage premium to those in the current workforce as a result of their parents having a university education but look again. We do know that inheritance is inheritable (it couldn't have risen up out of the primordial slime it it were not) and it's really not a surprise to anyone at all that in the UK wealth and social status are in part also inheritable.

So what we're seeing is that the children of the rich and or bright have higher incomes than the children of the not rich and not bright. And put that way it's not really all that surprising, is it? Whether we want it to be this way is entirely another matter, but it's not actually surprising.

Think Piece: Good and bad arguments against positive discrimination

The US Supreme Court has just left one Texan affirmative action scheme in place, but it has recently busted schemes elsewhere. I discuss what libertarians should think about positive discrimination and affirmative action.

Many of the arguments libertarians make against affirmative action/positive discrimination do not hold. For example, it neither needs to interfere with equality before the law, nor does it need to imposed by state coercion. And in its favour, affirmative action may be one way to overcome some of unjust forms on inequality in our society. On the other hand, it is clearly not even close to the best way of dealing with unjust inequality. And some evidence suggests that these schemes actually hurt those they are designed to help. But without sufficient evidence perhaps the best short-term approach is to allow universities to experiment with their admissions process, so they can among them discover the best approach.

Read the whole thing.