Rat Salad Days - Why The Browne Report Is A Load Of Brown Stuff.

As the findings of the Browne Report sink in (in summary, 'Pay Up or Piss Off'), let’s dwell on the real issues at stake here.

Like the hypocrisy. Some pampered had-it-all boomers love to whine that in their day only the top 5% got into university and the rest got jobs. (Ergo, all the young 'uns today should pay through the nose for what their predecessors got for free.) I feel a strange urge to shout back that this is just another spin on the 'Do As I Say, Not As I Do' argument. And then brick their windows.

Plus it sort of misses the fact that in those days there were other options for post-A Level students. Like lots of jobs that didn't need a degree. You'd be surprised at just how many shit-shovelling, low-level, braindead office, reception and call centre jobs require a BA now. Images of some blessed soul in bellbottoms climbing the ladder to paradise and then kicking it away somehow leap to mind. There was a time when you didn't need a degree to be a nurse, for example. Or, for that matter, a businessman or a bank manager. You just needed a brain, and debt was seen - for some reason - as a Very Bad Thing.

Or how about the doublethink? Many a free market maven (or 'dogmatic arsehole' as I like to call them) scream that students gain the most from their degrees so should pay most of the cost. This sounds like a strong argument until you realise, by definition, that the whole point of education is to benefit the recipient. I may well have greater earning power by having a degree, but I also earn more for being able to add up and read too. By such a standard should we also charge for GCSEs, Primary Schools and Infant Schools? Actually, pretend I didn't say that. It might give them ideas.

Then there's the old chestnut - 'why should the dustman who didn't go to university pay for those that do?' Well, Mr. Dustman will no doubt change his tune pretty damn fast when one of the Dustchildren gets into Leeds Met. Secondly, we already pay for things that do not have a direct benefit for us, but are still for the greater good. Like Mr. Dustman's medical care and pension or his children's benefits if they are unemployed, even if it means not a jot for you if they live or die. You see, that's how society works - we help each other out, even if there isn't a direct payback.

But the argument is flawed in another way too. If degrees really do improve the lives of students* then any (economic) gains are threatened by saddling those same students with crushing debts. Therefore, these people are arguing that students should be benefited by education but only in a way that does not benefit them. That makes sense if you are an idiot.

What doesn't make sense, though, are the social costs. There is the knock-on effect of parents having to divert their finances to helping their kids through the BA/BSc grinder. And then there are those graduates who have to put off buying a house or having children because of the debts they are servicing. This does not bode well for healthy, secure societies. But hey! They get a degree!

Ultimately, it is the lack of honesty that is most galling. What most fees advocates really want is all the (economic) windfalls of a well-educated society, but they sure as hell don't actually want to cough up for it. Hence why sane ideas like a graduate tax were dropped by the Coalition. No one wants to spread the cost even though this would be both more just and sensible. And curiously, very few recipients of free university education seem willing to pay for the benefits their degrees have given them over the years and decades. Nor do they seem to feel any shame for betraying the young in that artful way that horrible old bastards tend to do in this country.

Nor does anyone admit that universities are now just another cog in the economy. Joyless and miserablist as this is, it is also very naive. The skills we all thought the country needed in 1970 or 2008 were quite different from the ones that turned out to be useful. And society needs thinkers as well as doers and office fodder. Adam Smith didn't have an MBA, after all. He was a philosopher.

But what does it say about us? We are willing to condemn future generations to £35k debts, if they’re lucky. And yet we still vote for white elephants like the Olympics, Trident and a bloated NHS bureaucracy. It is a hard-faced penny-pinching age we live in, in part through necessity. But the thing to remember about misers is that in the end they are the living embodiments of false economy.

* Considering that Alan Turing's Maths degree and Sylvia Plath's English MA didn't stop them topping themselves, one must presume this is solely an economic argument.