Graduate tax: UCU is barking (up the wrong tree)

The University and College Union (UCU) have weighed in against a graduate tax today, claiming it will hit low paid public sector workers. Their report cites the additional sums that would be paid by nurses, teachers and doctors if a graduate tax of 5% were applied to all earnings over £15,000 for a fixed period of 25 years. Their ham fisted intervention to the higher education funding debate misses the terms of the debate completely and their sums should make us worry about the quality of the critical thinking taking place within our academy.  

That there is a row lively debate within the Coalition is one of the worst kept secrets of this government. Having announced that he had asked Lord Browne to look closely at a graduate tax, Business Secretary Vince Cable received an embarassing slap down from a ‘senior Conservative source’ that a graduate tax was off the table. Nonetheless, the debate within government continues to rage and today’s Financial Times reports that the Tories’ Universities Minister is coming around to the idea of a progressive graduate contribution. Since it is unlikely that Lord Browne’s review group, carefully stitched up selected by Lord Mandelson with the complicity of David Willetts, will endorse a graduate tax-style approach, genuine progressives should have their eyes of the prize of defeating attempts to further the marketisation of higher education through higher, variable fees.

Instead, UCU’s clumsy intervention will strengthen the arm of the right wing commentariat and Conservative policy wonks in Number 10 who are keen to kill of the momentum behind the concept of a progressive graduate contribution linked to earnings.

Not only are UCU’s tactics short sighted, their analysis is undermined by flaws so basic one might begin to wonder whether the accusations of dumbing down in Britain’s universities aren’t entirely without merit. Their figures for ‘full time average earnings’ are based on those of whole workforce (i.e. average salaries over 43 years) and therefore are pretty useless to UCU’s exercise. Generally, a graduate contribution of the type suggested by the National Union of Students (NUS) and modelled by UCU would typically be collected during the first 25 years of graduates’ careers and will therefore be less than the average modelled by UCU. Lower salaries = lower contributions. It’s hardly rocket science and it beggars belief that such a ropey analysis should have been given any serious attention by the Guardian and ITN. We can forgive Toby Young over on his Telegraph blog for doing the same; he is, after all, using UCU’s flawed research precisely in the way I anticipate most commentators on the right will: to undermine the case for a more progressive system.

If UCU are serious about halting the marketisation of higher education they should weigh in behind the genuinely progressive alternative set out by NUS, which is winning the backing of Labour leadership contenders, Liberal Democrats desperate for an alternative to unite around inside government and, if the FT is to be believed, David Willetts.

If they won’t, they ought to be placed under serious pressure to explain how they expect to be taken seriously when they continue to demand, simultaneously, universal tax payer subsidies for undergraduate education, an expansion of university places, inflation busting pay increases, continuation of a generous final salary pension scheme… Have I missed something? Oh yes, how they intend to achieve all this in the middle of a recession and one of the biggest assaults on public spending Britain has ever seen.  Otherwise, it seems that students are more grown up than their lecturers.

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