The new fees aren’t half bad

Some might find this surprising, but I’d much rather be going to university under the new tuition fee system than the old one.

You see, under the current system, when we graduate we’ll start paying back our fees as soon as we earn over £15,000. Students going in under the new system won’t pay anything back until they’re earning over £21,000 and they’ll pay £540 a year less than they would currently.

Meanwhile there will be more bursaries for students from poorer backgrounds, no one will have to pay fees upfront (unlike part-time students under the current system), all unpaid debt is written off after 30 years and the percentage of your income you pay won’t change whether your uni charges £6,000 a year or £9,000 a year. In short, it works exactly like a graduate tax.

In the last edition of The Stag, Dan Stevens wrote an article support Labour’s new policy of capping fees at £6,000. Incidentally, Dan Stevens is a Labour Councillor, something he didn’t mention – hardly surprising he’s supporting the party line.

Now, hands up, I’m a Lib Dem so I can’t claim that I’m not biased either. I think Nick Clegg was wrong to break his promise on fees, but I don’t want students to be misled by Labour either.

What Dan failed to mention it was Labour who introduced fees after promising not to, who tripled fees after promising not to, who commissioned the fees review which the government implemented, who then did a U-turn to oppose the findings of review they’d started and Labour who now, just six months after calling for a graduate tax, have broken yet another policy and are saying that fees should only be doubled rather than tripled.