by Josh Patel

And I am a weapon of massive consumption,
And it’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to function.

When I was asked to speak about my experiences of graduate indebtedness at the recent SRHE event in June, I was initially enthusiastic. I was a member of the first cohort of school-leavers expected to take out the government loans to pay the then new £9000 university fees in 2012-13. I took a gap year, completed an undergraduate degree, and subsequently received funding for a Master’s and a PhD. I believe I am one of the first of this new generation of highly indebted graduates to have been afforded the time and space to develop expertise around and reflect on the HE system I was a part of. Few graduate voices on their indebtedness are heard in research or policy discourse. 

However, figuring out my contribution became frustrating. Firstly, any perspective I would bring would be unrepresentative. I am a mixed-race male from the home counties. I attended a Russell Group university, and had far too much fun in the sandbox of further academic study, sheltered from having to think seriously about entering the external labour market. Secondly, I had conducted no research myself on graduate experiences. I am also not an economist. I would be exposing my feelings about the current student finance regime (albeit informed by my related research) to the potentially sharp questioning of experts. This felt epistemically precarious. 

Graduate indebtedness

My frustrations around the legitimacy of my voice and my disenfranchisement from the conversation around indebtedness are part of a broader series of doubts and tensions. It’s hard to avoid a sense of resentment every time I check (mainly to satisfy a grim curiosity) my rapidly ballooning student debt total on the Student Loans Company website. I will likely be making payments that have a negligible impact on that total until 2047. It is Sisyphean. At the same time, I had heard for many years hear policymakers and academics like Nick Barr talk about the inherent fairness of income-contingent loans. Given that individuals receive a substantial return from their investment in higher education (HE), it is right that the balance of costs should be shared between students and the state. 

In Claire Callender and Steve Jones’ work on student experiences of indebtedness, the complaints of students and graduates are primarily centred around the slight delays of a few years to the privileges of an expected middle-class lifestyle, like buying a first house or having a family. Are these frustrations really valid, or are they just the mewlings of the demanding children of the late welfare state, now that democratic due diligence has found the public investment in our education was not providing an effective social return?

Thinking through these doubts was hard. Like the students in Claire’s and Steve’s research, I had internalised a certain logic. My failure to shed the shameful label of indebtedness lay in my regrettable choice to pursue history, my (apparently?) poor work ethic, and my subconscious suspicion of Big Four consultancy grad schemes. But I came to think about my frustrations with indebtedness through the work I’d done during my PhD. My frustration with the current loans regime is a frustration with ‘the whole way in which a society selects its priorities and orders itself’, to redeploy EP Thompson’s phrase from 1970. Our current politics has de-prioritised investments in the future, which undermines the realisation of a good society. Indebtedness serves as a sharp and recurring reminder of all of this.

The balance of freedoms

The axiom that those that benefit most from HE should bear proportionately more of the cost derives somewhat surprisingly from the 1960s. The story of post-war massification in the UK is a familiar one; participation in HE grew from less than 5% prior to 1939 to approaching 50% today. In 1962 a mandatory grant was introduced to pay for the education of ‘all those qualified by ability and attainment and who wished to do so’, in the words of the Robbins Report (1963). While this public-mindedness feels inevitable in the spirit of post-war optimism, at the time it was not uncontested. As one economist put it, in a system of grants, resources of the ‘poor and stupid’ in the general population who would not benefit from HE are used to fund the privileged lifestyles of the few ‘rich and intelligent’ who attended universities. While the Robbins Report advocated expansion based on grants, the chairman of the Robbins Report, Lionel Robbins (himself a neoliberal economist, as I have explored) thought the argument for loans and grants was delicately balanced.

Robbins considered the problem one of what he called the ‘balance of freedoms’. There was an important balance to strike between preserving freedoms in the present, and enabling future freedoms in the pursuit of social prosperity. For Robbins, prosperity was a consequence of the inherent tendency of individuals to pursue their own self-betterment in conditions of freedom. This included generating individual returns on the labour market and broader social returns. University education would increase young people’s productivity and ingenuity, while enhancing their understanding of their responsibilities to society.

Taxation (a substantial transgression of personal freedoms by the state) was only justified when it could be shown to enhance future freedoms. In the context of proportionately low attendance of HE in the UK in the post-war period, grants were a state investment in removing structural and psychosocial barriers to self-betterment in the population, particularly for women and others from underprivileged backgrounds. When a greater proportion of the population were empowered to pursue those opportunities, both individual and social prosperity would follow. 

As a greater proportion of the population attended HE habitually, the justification for increased taxation would fall. It would no longer be justified to take poor people’s money to pay for the continued elevation of the gifted. When this happened, it would be more just for the burden of HE cost to fall back to young people so they could make an informed decision about the relative costs and returns of them attending HE. 

The question of the balance of costs of HE was never as simple as stating that: because attending HE generates both a social return and a large individual return, students should be expected to take on some burden of the cost of their education.

As Robbins understood it, the question is: on the balance of how far future freedoms are enabled by the reduction of freedoms in the present, how far is it right that resources should be redistributed from the general population to fund HE? 

Three frustrations

Revisiting the question of the balance of freedoms in the twenty-first century leads you to a different place than in the twentieth century. The burden of the costs of education is now tipped towards graduates far in excess of a good faith balance of freedoms. It serves a regime which has played politics, fetishised austerity, and sought short-term returns above sustainability and long-term economic prosperity. Reflecting on my indebtedness, I identified three rough frustrations:

Short-termism

Because we live in a democratic society, the assessment of our collective capacity to engender future freedoms is, rightly, subject to accountability through our political system. But the downward pressure this exerts on public expenditure is not inevitable (as it is sometimes presented) but a consequence of political culture. Public and policy discourse seems to have completely lost sight of the capacity of collective action to advance future freedoms. Austerity has led to an underinvestment in social infrastructure, ducked the costs of maintenance, and eviscerated our national capacities. The burden of the costs of repairing this damage has been shifted to our future. There is limited research as to the economic and social consequences of this debt. Both Labour and the Conservatives’ commitments to avoiding raises in tax feels like a failure to have an honest conversation with the electorate about our national priorities in the face of serious national and international challenges. 

Poor redistributive justice

Recent London Economics modelling demonstrated that, for those taking new loans from August 2023, lower income female graduates will subsidise high-earning males’ education. Or, as James Purnell put it recently in publications for HEPI, ‘a nurse must now pay back more than a banker’. This is deeply unjust. It is completely antithetical to the progressive income tax regime we all abide by. It violently severs one route this generation can mutually support one another in our pursuit of human flourishing. And it is pointless. As Barr has argued, ‘The argument that tax cuts lead to growth is mistaken; lower taxes are not always better. Productive private investment needs to be complemented by productive public investment’. Job forecasts from other advanced economies expect more than 80% of the workforce will require some tertiary accreditation by 2050. Skills shortages even today are calculated to cost the UK economy up to £39 billion a year from 2024 through to 2027. Investment in education and training by employers and the state has deteriorated and productivity is stagnant. Redistribution is imperative. 

Deterioration of HE

The deterioration of the unit cost following from the political deadlock around loans makes HE an unappealing place to plan a career. The transition period at the end of the PhD consists of a ridiculous juggling act of multiple contracts for everything from research to teaching to administrative roles. Despite all the hard work, remuneration is comparatively poor. All the delays to adult life that indebtedness inflict are compounded. Even permanent academic roles do not seem particularly secure given the redundancies sweeping over the sector. Add on top of all that the expected workload, bullying managerial cultures, artificial ED&I strategies, it is a wonder HEIs are able to attract qualified and ambitious candidates at all. During my time as a PhD and Fellow, I was paid more per hour as head coach of the university swim team than I was to deliver seminars.[1] Why bother?

The next sixty years

Robbins was arguing for expansion just after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The wars of the first half of the twentieth century were raw, living memories. HE was implicated in this in a complicated way – the powerful knowledge of modern societies taught through HE had the potential to both to raise living standards to unparalleled heights but also enable mass atrocities. A proper education cultivated the wisdom in students to wield modern technologies with responsibility. 

Obviously freedom is diminished after a nuclear holocaust. But the existential crises I fear – everything from crises in teaching and healthcare, gender and social inequality, to the climate change and the resurgence of fascism across the world – if they are not tackled are also equally non-conducive to overall freedom. They require exponentially more of my generation and later generations to be part of the solution. Indebtedness is a constant reminder that our contribution to solving these problems is not worth collective support. 

Josh Patel is a Researcher at the Edge Foundation. There, he has contributed to research on Degree Apprenticeships, New HEIs, and T levels, and is currently leading research on student experiences of tertiary pathways between HE and FE. He was previously a Fellow at the University of Warwick and completed his PhD on the justifications for the massification of higher education in liberal thought. He is writing a monograph on this topic for SRHE’s Research into Higher Education book series with Routledge. Here, Josh writes in a personal capacity. The views contained within do not necessarily reflect the views of the Edge Foundation.

---

[1] I have to qualify this by stressing that participation in student-led communities was central in my and (as I saw as a coach, tutor, and researcher) others’ personal development. My point is that there is a social maldistribution of resources that permits this circumstance.