the hod carrier and the mortar board #3
Have I got PPI? As a purveyor of too much daytime TV I now have a bit of an ‘ear-worm’ where PPI is concerned and am replaying it in my mind to the tune of some shockingly bad UK Gold advert. Due to these oft-repeated ads, sensationalist news coverage and unwanted cold-calling, we’re all now more than aware of the ails of mis-selling financial products. If student loans were such a product I am confident that, on the basis that they’re overpriced, badly administered and unfit for purpose, they’d fall into the ‘avoid like the proverbial plague’ category. The best example of this is the Bureau for International Financial Statistics calculating that students will have accrued, on average, £5,800 in interest charges before they’ve even graduated!
Partly due to a demographic fall in the number of students taking A-levels, the dip in this year’s university attendance, can more likely be accounted for by the changing attitudes to the value & worth of higher education. An increasing number are considering the alternatives to university and the associated average debt of £50,000. Studies show that for entire universities, as well as specific degree subjects, average graduate earnings are no higher than those of non-graduates, and in many cases they’re actually lower. In these situations, the inherent promise of greater lifetime earnings sound increasingly hollow and amount to nothing more than blatant mis-selling.
Tuition fees have, in many instances, become an unsustainable quasi-Ponzi scheme and rather than being the default setting for our younger generations, we need to develop more vocational and technical training.
