British government suffers huge losses due to... tuition fee increases

(Baonghean) - Warnings have been issued continuously since the British government implemented educational reforms, increasing tuition fees at universities in this country by 3 times. Starting from September 2012, 124 British universities were allowed to increase tuition fees and two-thirds of them increased tuition fees to the maximum allowed ceiling, which is 9,000 pounds/year. The previous ceiling given by the government was 3,000 pounds.

Along with the tuition fee hike, the government has also cut university grants by 40%, and promised students loans at concessional interest rates for up to 30 years, guaranteed by the state. Under the policy, graduates will not have to repay a single pound as long as their income is under £21,000 a year. Over this limit, monthly repayments will not exceed 9% of their income; but if they earn more than £41,000 a year, the interest rate will be the rate of inflation, up by 3 points.

A lesson for students at Writhlington School in Somerset, southwest England.

With tens of billions of pounds being lent out each year, total student debt reached £46 billion in 2013 and 3 million students secured repayments. Student loans have been in place since 1998. According to a report by the Public Accounts Committee on 14 February 2014, at this rate, the debt will reach £200 billion by 2042 with 6.5 million borrowers. However, recently the default rate has reached 45%, instead of the predicted 28 to 30% when the reform was introduced in 2010, reported by The Guardian on 21 March 2014. This result far exceeds even the most pessimistic forecasts and will easily exceed the “death” figure of 48.6%, the threshold at which the state would suffer more losses than under the old policy that was replaced.

The Public Accounts Committee report also found that the government’s debt recovery policy is rudimentary and ineffective. It costs no less than £27 million a year and generates £1.4 billion, and is powerless to monitor student borrowers, especially those who go abroad. Even the resale scheme for low-cost loans is losing money: in November 2013, the government sold off a batch of £890 million in loans for £160 million!

Another consequence of the education reform was a significant decline in the number of students in the 2012-2013 academic year: a decrease of 5.5% or 27,000 students compared to the 2011-2012 academic year. In 2013, the number of candidates (not the number of successful students) continued to decrease by 3.5%. Rachel Wenston, Vice President of the National Union of Students (NUS), condemned the education reform on 18 March 2013 as "an unrealistic idealistic reform", stating that "the current system is much more expensive than the old system it replaces" and calling for "an urgent review of the whole system". It is known that the "full cost" policy (full cost) is tested on a large scale in the UK to make students pay the real cost of the education system they receive with the help of the state through state-guaranteed loans. At the time it was introduced, it caused heated debates not only domestically but also attracted the attention of many countries in the region and around the world, which is completely understandable when the British education system is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the world.

It has always been a truism that, unlike many countries such as France, university tuition is not free in the UK. This is also what makes the UK one of the most expensive study abroad destinations, often referred to as a "paradise" that only welcomes people from the upper class of society. Either you have to have a lot of money or you have to be extremely excellent if you want to step into the gates of British universities. Thus, it is easy to see that the path that the UK follows is selective, with something close to class division with the level of progression gradually increasing according to the level of education.

While the advantages of this policy are ensuring a certain quality of education, as well as creating pressure, binding responsibilities, and encouraging students to strive, the disadvantages are not small. Firstly, it creates conditions for class discrimination and prejudice in society, even though the gap and division between rich and poor is one of the characteristics of capitalist society (especially in a conservative society like the UK). British society itself has inherent problems between ethnic groups, because unlike the US, a country known as a "cultural melting pot" thanks to the blending of immigrant communities, communities in the UK are still quite isolated. That is also the reason for the start of another heated debate in the UK about changing the nationality law for foreign immigrants, which I will not discuss further here.

Thus, it can be seen that even developed countries with a solid foundation in education are constantly searching and innovating with the aim of further improving the quality of education, not only to train the young generation in the country but also to attract intellectual resources from abroad. However, not all changes bring good results, or at least better than the old ones. This is also a lesson that we should refer to, in the context of Vietnam's education facing many changes.

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