Should Theresa May resign?

Same old story, those-who-will-never-vote-tory describe latest Tory party leader as -the-absolute-worst-ever

Order order covered the recent YouGov poll – Boris clear favourite for leader should May be replaced. Rudd and Hammond far behind

Hammond and Rudd Bomb in Tory Focus Group, Boris Still Membership’s Favourite

While demand is all but unlimited and marginal costs are zero it’s hardly a shock that unis are all charging as much as they can and taking all the students they can get their hands on. I’ve been hearing stories of lecturers having to give the same lecture twice because the lecture room isn’t physically large enough to house this year’s intake.

Many Unis are simply taking the piss

The beauty of fees is this in now becoming more transparent. But they are good lobbyists

Yes those degrees that have all that content in them and are valued across the world, many of which need to be accredited. Wind it back though, straight economics – add a fee, charge 6% on the loan and then structure it so that most will never pay it off. How is that different to the government paying a substantial amount more in fees. On top of that how does it stimulate the economy when grads are chucking a sizeable amount into a debt they will never pay off, given the cost of things like food and houses perhaps it would be good if that cash could go into giving them a start post uni.

Still we may be heading back to the days of everyone funding the middle classes to further themselves

Or we could move to a structure that helps and enables the brightest to go, improve educational outcomes for low income households by stopping rich parents moving for schools etc. but that ain’t the tory way is it…

Remind me again how is the UK going to attract nurses?
http://www.kingston.ac.uk/undergraduate-course/adult-nursing/fees-and-funding.html

2017/18 fees for this course

Fee category Amount
Home (UK and EU students) £9,250*
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/02/nursing-degree-applications-slump-after-nhs-bursaries-abolished

Applications by students in England to nursing and midwifery courses at British universities have fallen by 23% after the government abolished NHS bursaries, figures show.

How is that expanding social mobility?

Same old story, those-who-will-never-vote-tory describe latest Tory party leader as -the-absolute-worst-ever

Order order covered the recent YouGov poll – Boris clear favourite for leader should May be replaced. Rudd and Hammond far behind
As useful as somebody asking a bunch of people who won’t back the next party into power which dick they want in charge?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election

Fascinating Frank Luntz focus group on the Sunday Politics asking Tory voters their thoughts on potential leadership contenders. Terrible viewing for Hammond (“so boring, so dull, bland”), and bad too for the great Remain hope Amber Rudd (“not leadership material, she’s backroom staff”). Better for Boris (“underneath it he’s very, very intelligent”), though it was the Mogg and David Davis who were most popular. Nobody in the room wanted May to fight the next election…

and seriously who puts that website together? Is it meant to look like a scrap book?

If I were a right wing nut job, I think I’d be unhappy with a leader who duped me into thinking there’s be a 150 seat majority and left me with such a flaccid feeling on election night.

Who is/was the worst ever Tory PM in your opinion?

Over here it’s led us into Brexshit instead!!!

Hang on, I thought you’d come over all “respecting the will of the people” on that topic of late.

As for tuition fees, I’m almost convinced it’s just a stealth tax by design. Most students will never pay them off at current rates. So, shifting higher ed funding from direct treasury money to via students themselves, some of which will be paid back is still better than none of it being paid back by grants. Just a pity no one in the government has the foresight to realise the total clusterfudge it’s left younger generations when coupled with the price of housing and crap job security. That, and the fact that on average, a university educated worker would pay a lot more in tax over their lifetime anyway.

Better for Boris (“underneath it he’s very, very intelligent”)

I’m guessing none of them have ever asked Ian Hislop about Boris.

Boris clear favourite for leader should May be replaced.

Shame that’s best they can come up with. Shows what a shower the rest are.

Oh and I see May is still bleating on about “A country that works for everyone”. I will never accept the Tories have that as a priority.

mikewsmith – Member

Fee repayment thresholds will also rise, so graduates will start paying back loans once they earn £25,000, rather than £21,000, the PM said.

Which is awesome, because already the increase from £3290 to £9000 per year has been forecast to be roughly cost-neutral, because of the massive decrease in repayments that came with it- we loaned more but recovered about the same while pretending the loan book is worth several times more than it is- subprime for students.

This change will without a doubt mean that it ends up cost-negative and kids are saddled with these debts for literally no reason other than to fiddle the books and pretend a chunk of national debt doesn’t exist.

THE are working on a more detailed breakdown (since the government’s response to falling repayment rates and the financial illiteracy of the £9000 fee structure has been to simply stop publishing their forecasts, mysteriously at the exact point we predicted that it would prove to have increased costs). However there’s very little doubt that the current tuition fee of £9250 is, over the life of the loan, going to be more expensive to the public purse than just leaving fees at £3290.

Hang on, I thought you’d come over all “respecting the will of the people” on that topic of late

Of late??

I don’t like Brexshit for sure. But I’m in a minority, so yes I do respect – or at least accept – the will of the people. The people get what they deserve.

This change will without a doubt mean that it ends up cost-negative and kids are saddled with these debts for literally no reason other than to fiddle the books and pretend a chunk of national debt doesn’t exist.

Better that users have to deal with the debt than non-users who can’t afford it anyway. Perhaps the users could demand sensible changes and more flexible forms of tertiary education instead many stale offerings

Ask why state pensions are treated in current manner and re-ask fiddling the books !!

Order order covered the recent YouGov poll – Boris clear favourite for leader should May be replaced. Rudd and Hammond far behind

Of the 4, May is/was by far the most electable. Boris would never make it to a GE- far too gaff-prone.

Have we mentioned that Labour are ahead by 4 points in the latest YouGov?

Fee repayment thresholds will also rise, so graduates will start paying back loans once they earn £25,000, rather than £21,000, the PM said.

I imagine all this fees and repayments stuff is to capture the student vote. I can’t imagine why else they would do it. Must be another GE on the way.

I agree but if she thinks this will win her the youth vote she is even less capable than I thought.

I agree but if she thinks this will win her the youth vote she is even less capable than I thought.

😀

“Hey kids, come vote for us! We promise we won’t charge you any more than 9 grand a year to go to uni and you won’t have to pay back your loans until you’re earning just below the national average wage”.

teamhurtmore – Member

Better that users have to deal with the debt than non-users who can’t afford it anyway.

I’m sorry, did you not understand that I’m talking about the cost to the public purse? I thought I’d explained that pretty clearly but sometimes it’s hard to get that quite right when you’re a subject expert explaining something unintuitive to people who aren’t.

Yes. Do you not understand who funds the public purse?.

You made it loud and clear thanks

As an aside, imagine a Uni outside, lets say the top 25 in the UK, what are they/should they be doing to compete with better Unis?

Or what young people would feel like if they voted for a party who pretended that they would cancel fees and outstanding debt and the went, oops, sorry?

teamhurtmore – Member

Yes. Do you not understand who funds the public purse?.

Is it a) “users have to deal with the debt” as you said, or is it b) general taxation including non-users?

Or what young people would feel like if they voted for a party who pretended that they would cancel fees and outstanding debt and the went, oops, sorry?

You argue much better when you aren’t conflating/confusing an idea in a single interview with a pop magazine with ‘policy’ or manifesto. Unless you are suggesting that university students are too poorly educated to tell the difference? Cos obviously you can, why else would you make such a remark?

Is Theresa May still PM?

You are the expert here NW, you tell me..

Unless you are suggesting that university students are too poorly educated to tell the difference

Not me. But some are clearly saying that, indeed relying on it. And there’s precedent too – July 2017 or last week with the PFI catastrophe

Ok, so TMs major policy announcement is anything but at least there is a slight chance of it becoming policy. Unlike..,,,

Is Theresa May still PM?

I don’t think so. I was told last week that labour won the last election

But some are clearly saying that, indeed relying on it

Er, who?

Students are smart enough to know Julian – hence “reading” for a degree

They are also smart enough to realise a finger of fudge is not just enough

No really thm. Who is ‘saying that and relying on it’?
Traditionally in online debate, this is the point where you post a link to explain the assertion.

sorry-double post

Not sure she still is PM been invisible since the election, her big speech to an empty venue in Florence, went well.

Let’s see what Times HES said last week

But perhaps the biggest single difference between this year and last is that more people are turning up to ask about the details. Everyone in the sector would like more detail – from the NUS and the UCU to university groups and learned societies – and they naturally have suggestions for what that detail might be. However, not only is that absent, it remains a long, long way below the headline promises that the Labour faithful love to hear and that are continuing to driving both Labour and Conservative politics.

No matter then that some of the claims about level and overall volume of debt and the subsequent impact on working-class applicants, students and graduates have been questioned by, among others, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and BBC Radio 4’s More or Less.

Even John McDonnell’s big speech yesterday fluffed some of the detailed numbers, according to a fact check by Channel 4. But no one really cared very much. Even the cost of scrapping debt – he put it at £10 billion each year – didn’t seem that big, given he’d just promised to end PFI; nationalise railways, water, electricity and Royal Mail; build HS2 to Scotland, Crossrail for the North; and electrification for every train line everywhere else.

Ice and a slice with your snake oil?

Very good thm. Now please think back to your post at the end of the last page and explain where one interview with nme gets confused with policy/manifesto and who confused it.

It is right and proper that people including students who voted labour should be questioning the detail. Snake oil indeed. Sounds like politics continues as usual.

However you do this argument no favours at all when you can post unsubstantiated comments like your original one. No one thought it was policy at the time, and there will no doubt be plenty of other actual real policy/manifesto u-turns and myths busted open to be disappointed about should we have a labour government in 2 years’ time. …so why not start with the facts in the first place and work from there? You could have saved yourself four posts in here if you’d just made that last point on the last page.

Very good thm.

It’s a pleasure

Now please think back to your post at the end of the last page and explain where one interview with nme gets confused with policy/manifesto and who confused it

Yes re-read it, and…..

Are you confusing the conditional and past tenses?

Or what young people would feel like if they voted for a party who pretended that….

teamhurtmore – Member

You are the expert here NW, you tell me..

I did. And then I corrected you when you got it the wrong way round. You’re welcome.

Not sure why you edited your interesting response, but

If the increased cost of tuition really were to be paid by the student, that would be defensible. Not necessarily the best way- but at least it’d make some sense, it’d be a coherent argument

Which was my point, but accept that….

But the current regime is increasing the cost to the taxpayer for no benefit- the student body is not paying the increased cost, they’re just holding onto it for a while then giving it back to their kids.

Could be the case under the assumption of a mass write off, true

Unless of course you count cooking the books and letting the government pretend they’ve cut the national debt when all they’ve done is defer a chunk of it, as a benefit.

Not a benefit at all. You will be aware of m views on the state ponzi pension scheme. Another con…

Just watching Theresa May interviewed by Marr this morning. Just absolutely bloody awful! She’s ****ing clueless! It’s staggering that someone as utterly inept and totally unsuited for the job has ended up as prime minister. She seems utterly and completely detached from reality

I wouldn’t let her run a bath, never mind the country

What’s staggering is that all the present alternatives are even worse

She’s also doing that Gordon Brown thing where her media trainers have told her to smile, but when she does that awful rictus grin it just looks like a serial killer who’s just buried a body in a shallow grave on the moors

…and our country is the body!

teamhurtmore – Member

Which was my point

And it’s wrong. That’s my point. It’s just an illusion.

I’m not talking about a “mass write off”, I’m talking about the system working as designed. No big event, just the slow, expected life-expiration of the proportion of loans that were never expected to be repaid, year on year

(history suggests that every so often a tranche of good debts will be sold off for less than they’re worth to private investors but that’s another matter)

So it’s exactly the opposite of your point- this change reduces the amount of the cost that’s repaid by students, while increasing the cost paid by the taxpayer. Nobody wins. Except the Tory party, because they can pretend they’re improving the lot of students while preserving almost everything that’s wrong with the system they introduced.

The old system (ie the one replaced in 2010) wasn’t perfect either but it was a lower lending, higher repayment model which put more responsibility on the student. This latest evolution of the current one switches it from dubious, to undeniably fiscally stupid.

Please help me out here. IME the cost of the taxpayers is determined by two things: the level of defaults and the extent of the rate subsidy. This is the basis of the IFS analysis

So what happens today with the silly announcement affects neither if I understand it correctly. It affect the timing of the payments hence the NPV will change but only dependent on other factors. Can you explain where you get your defintitve conclusion from or which bit I am missing. Thx

Context – ifs views on labours proposal to scrap fees

Table 1 summarises our modelling of the impact of the reforms. Replacing fees with teaching grants would increase the up-front government contribution to HE by £1 billion compared to the current system. This is driven by the additional spending on the fees of students who do not take out student loans and paid some or all of their fees up front. Otherwise, the up-front cash outlay – and hence contribution to government debt – is unchanged.
The big difference, however, is in the impact on the measure of the deficit that we typically focus on. This is entirely because of the way these things are accounted for by the government; teaching grants count towards the deficit in the short run, while tuition fee loans do not. Consequently, scrapping fees adds around £11 billion to the deficit. This is £10 billion for current borrowers and an extra £1 billion for the current self-financers.
The long-run impact on government finances is smaller than this, because some – though not all – of the tuition fee loans would have been repaid. We estimate that the present value (to government) of long-run student repayments is £6.5 billion. This reflects the real long-run cost of removing tuition fees and is therefore a better estimate of the true cost of the policy to the government. This is still a substantial amount.

teamhurtmore – Member

So what happens today with the silly announcement affects neither if I understand it correctly.

They’ve increased the repayment threshold from £21000 to £25000, so an increase in the level of nonrepayment (and the mean time to repayment for those loans that are repaid) is unavoidable.

Incidentally, this is semantic but default is a pretty weighted term so it’s probably worth noting that these aren’t defaults. The loans have a built-in expiry date so when the loans are legitimately written off at the end of life the borrower has fulfilled the loan agreement in full.

The IFS report is really valuable, and ironically forecasts the true cost of write-offs as being less than Labour think, never mind the Tories. But it only looks at full write-offs, it’s not a cost/benefit analysis of the 2012 change which is what I’ve been talking about.

Not that I’m arguing for the pre-2012 status quo either, it had most of the same basic flaws, just smaller numbers- basically as bad in theory but less impactful in practice. A bad Labour idea multiplied by the Tories.

I’m being thick here

How does increasing the threshold make higher levels on non repayment unavoidable?

I can see that it affects timing of the cash flows