Higher education and anti-social mobility; a 2024 rant
As an update to a post I made a while ago, I'm bloody annoyed with people shilling for current systems who either don't realize (because they haven't done an iota of researcch) or because they actually dont believe, that better systems could exist or have ever existed.
The context for this one; current university students in the UK insisting point blank that there are NO issues whatsoever with the current funding system whereby:
Any student (unless they are from a wealthy family) has to, in order to study any degree course, take out a loan of a minimum of £30,000, (for a three year degree) which, I may add, is over the national annual salary for the UK, and this loan has compound interest which starts accumulating from day 1 of the course date, not even after graduation, and that the value of this loan plus interest must then be paid back by the student, at a value of 10% after a certain boundary of their annual salary for the next 40 years of their life and can't be wiped by any means including bankruptcy.
"Oh, but the loan allows the people to go to university at all! Really, it's just a graduate tax!"
It's not 'just' anything!
In practice, what this says out of a group of 10 medical students, 2 of whom are from a wealthy family that can easily afford to give the student 10k a year to pay the annual fee upfront, is -
"You can all become doctors, the system will let you do that. But 8 out of the 10 of you will, once you graduate, only earn 90ish% of a doctor's salary for the next 40 years of your working life. The 2 of you who are already from wealthy families though, you can earn a full 100% of a doctor's salary. Yes, despite the fact that you will all be doing the exact same job."
How did the system work before, then?
Well, whoever wanted to go to university firstly didn't have to take out a loan at all. The government paid students to go to university, because it wanted to incentivise people to get qualifications in order to upskill the country and create better systems to keep the population more advanced; as well as benefit from the higher taxes that the higher earners would then pay back into the system.
Nowadays, it's just greed all the way down.
The government still benefits from the higher salary each doctor gets coming back as tax. Then they get their compound interest from each doctor not from a wealthy family, coming back in as extra income. The doctors already from wealthy families, well, they just get to keep the rest of their full salary and put it towards whatever they like, thus guaranteeing that generational wealth continues and there's very little capacity for the children of this generation of doctors to be able to break the cycle.
And yet instead of being up in arms about this and DEMANDING better, because they are already preparing to serve their country by becoming higher earners and paying more in taxes, for some reason, a significant chunk of students seem to just accept this system.
