Rah Rah Rah, We're Going To Smash The Oiks!

Last week the delightful Aditya Chakrabortty of The Guardian reviewed the government's plans for funding Higher Education. I won't bore you with the technical details, but essentially they were going to fund expansion (largely through private providers of the kind currently suspended for immigration fraud and low standards) by selling off future student loan payments to banks.

The only problems were that 1) so many students weren't paying back their loans that the whole loans-for-fees system isn't saving the government any money and b) even with a massive discount, banks weren't biting. The whole idea is ridiculous: flogging off a major income stream for a pittance, even on their own terms. I wrote to my MP Paul Uppal, the HE minister's private parliamentary secretary, asking him if he could explain how it would all work. He replied with a very courteous letter essentially saying 'er…no, but I'll write again if we think of anything or if the sale doesn't go ahead.

The sale isn't going ahead. Vince Cable, who as Secretary of State for Business obviously oversees HE funding and policy, has declared that the sale is off, leaving a £12bn hole in the projected budget. My hunch is that they'll close it by ending the expansion of student numbers.

So this is the background to Chakrabortty's declaration that the sector is itself in disarray, with market-friendly managers and senior academics wrecking proud institutions like King's College London.

pushed into a marketplace, the managers of higher education don't really know how to act. So they ape each other, pass off what they are doing to what's left of the staff as the new wisdom – and pay themselves vast sums for wrecking one of the few sectors in which Britain leads the world. The result in all its strategic confusion and grasping anxiety is the university version of The Thick of It: from bean to cup, those HE bosses fuck up.

Not that I have a single critical word to say about the enlightened leaders of my own dear Hegemon. I don't want to end up like Thomas Docherty, suspended by the University of Warwick for 'sighing' and  'irony'. Apparently academic bitchy resting face is now a disciplinary issue.

But fear not. The true madness has just descended on us. The deposed minister for HE, David Willetts, has been privately advocating a work of staggering genius. Discovered by Newsnight's Christopher Cook and presumably a government attempt to float the idea, Willetts wants to dump student debt on individual universities.

The idea's simple. You borrow from the government. That debt is then sold to the student's university on graduation. That's the debt that they couldn't sell to the banks, you remember. Then the student owes her debt to her alma mater.

A few problems arise. Firstly, are either the government or university finance offices capable of even managing the process? I can't even get my finance department to pay a visiting speaker £30 in travel expenses, so I have my doubts that it will successfully negotiate the (enforced?) purchase of discounted financial instruments.

Secondly, loading universities with their students debts is guaranteed to lead to fewer courses populated by richer students. Imagine the recruitment department looking at a forty-year old single mother from a minority community applying to study social work or education. Women earn less. They have career breaks, often to have children. School teachers, nurses, social workers and other useful people earn very little compared to the bankers who even steal from the government which bailed them out. The average company CEO, it turns out, is still male, 54 and an Oxbridge graduate (and therefore very likely to be white, too).

Any sane university trapped in the logic of depending on student loan repayments would turn away the poor, the old, the ethnic, the female and the altruistic. It would shut down the courses which lead to socially useful jobs, because they pay less. It would also shut down the expensive courses, like the sciences.

And then we turn to geography. Imagine being a university serving a community of poor, often BME people. The local employers pay the minimum wage or are public sector employees. Unemployment is high. Would you provide courses enabling the poor locals to better themselves? Of course not: because we all know that unemployment and low pay aren't a function of individual fecklessness or bad luck. They're a deliberate strategy designed to provide a pool of desperate workers (keeping wage inflation down) and to increase shareholder and executive pay at the expense of the workforce.

Willetts claims that loading universities with their students' debts will make the institution work harder to make those graduates more employable. This is economic illiteracy or – worse – deliberately deceptive. It implies that employability is solely a matter of personal qualities and education is a private good, when it remains inescapably true that there are (and have been since 2008) more unemployed people than there are jobs, and until the financial recovery becomes an economic recovery, this will continue to be the case. So it doesn't matter if you have 'appropriate' qualifications bursting from every orifice, or your university has showered you with skills, courses and internships, many graduates won't get a job.

Cook points out that six 'top' universities are keen on the whole idea. Of course they are. Getting a degree from the Russell Group, particularly Oxbridge, Imperial, UCL and a couple of others, is like winning a Golden Ticket (though Willy Wonka's distribution of tickets is much, much fairer than elite university entrance, which is largely predicated on parental wealth and private education: as an aside, Piketty's Capital points out that the average parental income for Harvard undergraduates is $450,000 p.a. – feel the egalité). So these 'top' universities, drawing their intake from the global elite, can be pretty sure that most of their students (of course some will dedicate their lives to low-paying, altruistic work) will be earning massive salaries simply because of the name on their degree certification, let alone the social capital acquired along the way. They won't even have to shut down the Medieval Icelandic courses, because institutional prestige will smooth those graduates' paths.

Those VCs are rubbing their hands together with glee, because there's another little bonus coming their way. They can point to their students' economic successes as proof that they have little risk attached to income, and raise their fees massively, thus excluding more of the Great Unwashed. If you're going to become a derivatives broker, £50,000 debt is chicken-feed, a quarter of the price of your latest Lamborghini. So is £100,000. So let's party!

Meanwhile, in the rust-belt, poor old Poly will have progressively shut down sculpture, art, and music, then media and film, then languages (if any still existed), then English. Before long, history, politics and sociology will go. Pretty soon only nursing, law and business will exist outside the sciences. At some point the finance director will point out that sciences are expensive and the students aren't getting well-paying jobs. Then the league tables will point out that legal and business jobs depend on contacts and prestige degrees, while the nurses have stopped paying back their loans. Before long the whole place will quietly shut down with barely a whimper of regret from anyone in authority. A (perhaps the) major source of pride, regeneration, cash and enlightenment in the region will be gone and nothing will bring it back.

This will not be an accident. This is the plan. As I've said over and over again since I started this blog many years ago, successive government long-ago decided that they work for the financial elite. Rather than looking at the industrial situation in 1960 or whenever and work out how 60 million people will earn a living, they decided to concentrate on shareholder profits. This meant crushing wages, reducing labour protection, reducing social security and engineering an economy based on low-paid, low-employment, low-skilled services. This necessarily requires a smaller, meaner state because while most of us can't and wouldn't avoid our taxes, corporations can and do. The grotesque sight of Russian oligarchs paying the Tories £160,000 for a game of tennis with Boris Johnson illustrates this strategy perfectly. Why pay millions in taxes, governments say to these people, when you can pay the Party a few hundred thousand?

Higher and Further education are key to this strategy. They don't want, or at the very least don't care about widening participation. They don't think the poor deserve or are capable of succeeding at HE, and they define success solely as personal financial gain (except for their own kids, who will be privately funded to study wonderful courses I'd love to take such as Medieval Icelandic, safe in the knowledge that they'll never be exposed to the cold winds of the job centre). My students, and their kids, can sod off to an Amazon warehouse and be grateful.

Other, better analyses of this crackpot scheme are here, here and probably all over the net.

Which takes me to the title of this post, derived from the chant of Footlights College when they meet Scumbag College in University Challenge.



It was funny then. Now it's policy.

Lucky there's an election in 10 months eh readers?

From Pizza to Pedagogy

Yesterday my MP, the elusive millionaire Paul Uppal made a daring foray into social media. He'd spotted the most outrageous waste and corruption in the city council's accounts!

Mr Uppal, Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West, claimed in a live radio interview that the council spent £70,000 at the Westin Pune Koregaon Park in October last year. The council says this was 70,000 rupees and that the cost at the time came to £723.80.

And it wasn't just hotel costs!

Mr Uppal said the council spent £1,428 in a Pizza Hut in India. The council confirmed this was also in rupees and the bill was around £14. 

This is of course purest opportunism. It really shouldn't take a genius to work out that a £1428 bill for pizzas is unlikely, to put it mildly. No, I don't believe this was an act of good faith on the MP's part. It was a cynical sleight of hand to distract citizens from the truth: that Mr Uppal voted in Parliament to impose massive funding cuts on councils, impacting disproportionately on Northern, poor and Labour-run councils. He voted through the cuts and is now campaigning with breathtaking cynicism against them in the local press. 

However, I agree with Mr Uppal when he says that 

(Actually, it's taught us two things: the other is 'never trust a Tory campaign'). It's also an interesting position to take from a keen supporter of the city's only 'free school', which was given £220,000 of taxpayers' money for 20 pupils, with a promise of £1.6m more while the rest of the city's schools rot away or get spatchcocked into defensive alliances simply to limp on. 

I took Paul at his word, because I've been trying to work out just what the hell the government is up to in regard to Higher Education finance and student funding. Higher Education is (depressingly) in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Its Secretary of State is David Willetts and his Parliamentary Private Secretary is one Mr Paul Uppal. 

So I sent him a letter:

Dear Mr Uppal,
as you’re Mr Willett’s PPS, could you clear something up for me in regard to ongoing HE expenditure?
 As far as I can gather, the Autumn Statement says that funding for lifting the university numbers cap is guaranteed for 2015-16. Section 1.203 makes it clear that the outlay on loans will be covered by proceeds from the sale of the student loan book. However, this outlay is less than the projected expenditure, and neither the Autumn Statement nor Mr Willetts’ discussion with the BIS Select Committee mentioned the years subsequent to 2016, during which the cost of the extra places is calculated in the BIS to reach £720m.
 I can see that selling the loan book will bring in over £2bn in the short term, but results in a net loss when the reduced repayments are calculated. While I understand the theoretical possibility of selling new loans ad infinitum, I gather that Rothschild’s advice to BIS is that there is only limited appetite in the city for student finance.
 Could you further establish why projections stop with 2015-16 rather than – as is usual – taking a view for several more years?

As far as I can see, there's no budget for increased student places other than a vague plan to flog off the student loan debts to the private sector. The problem there is that the debts will be bought for much less than their face value, so the taxpayer will be making a loss and funding the university while the student will still be paying the costs of their education – but the money will be going to some shiny-suited charlatans. Bad for the state, bad for the students. And incredibly short-term…as though they reckon they won't have to worry about anything scheduled for after the 2015 election. 

So that's me, asking Mr Uppal to 'scrutinise public spending and justify every pound'. Along comes his reply:

Unfortunately this is an issue which at the moment I am unable to address fully. However, I am writing to inform you that I have raised your concerns with David Willets MP, and will contact you again when I have received a response, please be aware that this could take up to six weeks.

Which translates, I think, as 'er…no idea mate' though of course I await a detailed explanation with bated breath. Willetts has appeared before Select Committees recently and completely failed to explain where the money is coming from. Or as his opposite number put it:

But that of course might be ascribed simply to political jockeying. So I asked Andrew McGettigan, scrutineer of Higher Education funding and policy and author of the shocking, excellent The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education whether he understood just where the hell the money's coming from:

I understand that this has been deliberately left vague by the Treasury as an incentive to get value from a sale.…The other impediment is the level of financial engineering required to effect a sale of the new loans.

Oh great. So the future of UK HE depends on the Treasury, Willetts and Uppal trying to flog off student loans by pulling the wool over the eyes of City sharks, to mix species and metaphors. What could possibly go wrong? The only certainties are that the taxpayer will lose out, university funding will fall and students will suffer. 

Perhaps Paul should leave the pizzas alone and spend a little more time with a calculator in his own office rather than staging cynical opportunistic stunts like Pizzagate. 

The Tory Barrel, Scraped.

Despite my two fundamental disagreements with the Conservative Party (everything it says, and everything it does), I've always had a lingering respect for it as a machine. It is ruthless, sinister, single-minded and vicious. As parties go, it's the Tasmanian Devil.

Until now. Despite having a wider pool of MPs from which to choose, it has awarded PAUL UPPAL a government post. Not only that, but one as Parliamentary Private Secretary to David Willetts, the Minister of State for Universities and Science.

I am baffled. Firstly, Paul Uppal is a serial loyalist. He literally has never disagreed with the party line on anything, in the two years he's been an MP. One might think he has no invididual consciousness. A cynic might say that his loyalty was a job-seeking strategy. But from the government's point of view, one would have thought that so slavish a toady does not require a PPS job: they're unpaid and often used to force rebels to behave. Many spiky Labour MPs were bought off by such a post: you have to resign if you want to vote against your government's line. There was no danger of Uppal rebelling, so there was no need to buy him off. He retails planted questions, I suspect he invents agreeable constituents who adopt perfectly nuanced Parliamentary discourse to elucidate his personal opinions and as I've documented in the past, is not above telling untruths to Parliament.

Is Uppal qualified to be an education expert? He won't tell anyone what degree classification he achieved (Warwick, Politics) and he's never worked in education or evinced any interest in higher education policy, based on his speeches. He's a property speculator, plain and simple.

What other explanations are there? There is a university in Uppal's constituency, but he seems to basically oppose it: he enthusiastically voted for fees and has not concerned himself with our well-being. The constituency is an ultra-marginal one though: he has a majority of 691. The Tory vote hardly increased: Labour voters stayed at home. So giving him a cheap job might be an attempt to bolster Uppal's profile in the hope that it might save him.

I'm determined to make sure it's exactly the opposite. Government policy is to beggar and humble less prestigious universities such as The Hegemon. It wants to concentrate research and high-achieving A-level students in Russell Group universities, and farm out the rest to dodgy corporate faux-universities. It has loaded students with debts of £60,000 each, which will wreck entry to socially-useful low-paid jobs (teaching, nursing, social work, research) and further study, especially amongst the working classes. I am going to make damn sure that every single student associates Uppal with the government's actions: 2015 is the date of the next election and sees the first £9000 fees students graduate - the perfect storm.

So I don't think that it's a particularly clever marginal constituency gambit. Which leaves one horrible, horrible reason:

The Conservative Party actually thinks that Paul Uppal is the best of the remaining unemployed Tory MPs. 

Even I find this hard to swallow. For all their blind ideological idiocy, there are highly-qualified, articulate and intelligent MPs on the government benches. And yet… this is the decision they've reached.

David Willetts' nickname is 'Two Brains'. I hope it's true because frankly, he'll have to lend one of them to his new PPS.