“Free Education for All!” cry the would-be students. Where do they want the money to come from? From the working class masses who will never get a university education? From our disappearing taxpayers, who are emigrating in droves, partly because of high tax-rates?
In fact, there is an obvious way to finance university education for all, rich and poor. It is fair, simple and affordable. I shall explain it below. First, I’d like to consider the worth of a university degree.
There are two main reasons for wanting a university education: to get a better job, and to get higher social status. The wish to gain knowledge comes a poor third. University degrees reinforce the class system by separating higher economic classes (those with a degree) from lower classes (those without one). Class is decided by other factors too, such as birth, inheritance, accent and location, but universities are increasingly important for class distinction.
Small companies employ people by assessing their merit and experience. Big companies cannot do this and employ people based on economic class. A big industrial corporation wanting a senior operational manager will seek someone with a degree over someone without one, even if the latter might be better for the job. I’ve had personal experience of this. Because of my degrees in science and engineering, I’ve been appointed to positions in factories in England and South Africa over foremen and skilled workers who would have been better than me. (In Lancashire, the fact that I didn’t have a local accent also indicated my higher class and therefore my suitability for promotion.)
Some university degrees, such as in accountancy, medicine, mathematics, computing, science and engineering, do give useful technical qualifications. Most do not. It is often said that a degree in the humanities “helps you to think”. Today these degrees usually “help you to stop thinking”. They oppose critical thought. (Critical thought gets “cancelled”.) They encourage blind acceptance in whatever is the latest woke fashion.
If you’ve got a Marxist lecturer in economic history, you will fail the exam unless you repeat all the Marxist slogans he chants at you. If you’re doing a degree in “Environmental Studies”, you will fail if you give a rigorous scientific explanation why climate alarm is nonsense. If you’re taking English Literature, you will fail if you pay attention to the beauty and insight of Shakespeare and Milton, or the haunting, surprising prose of Joseph Conrad. Instead, you must reduce all Western literature (in fact all Western art) to crude Post Modernist condemnation, and Conrad to an attack on European colonialism.
Social class is further divided among universities. Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale bestow higher class distinction than lesser universities in both countries. This is why social climbers are so desperate to get their children into them. Critics say that the top universities provide many “useless qualifications”. This is only true in the sense that they impart no useful skills or knowledge. But it is not true that they don’t make you more employable. A major USA corporation would far prefer to employ a Harvard graduate with a degree in Lesbian Dance Theory than someone with a diploma in mathematics and physics from a technical college.
Here’s the solution for university funding. It is in addition to cases where students (or rather their parents) pay cash for the fees, or students receive private loans (from banks for example), or students receive bursaries (from Eskom, Sasol and other companies). In my solution, every academically eligible student who applied would be guaranteed a government loan for the full costs of their education. To repay the loan, the student would be required to pay X% extra income tax for N years after leaving university. The X% would be proportional to the size of the loan. If the student got a high paying job (if she were an actuary, for example), she’d have to pay a lot of extra tax. If she got a low paying job, she’d pay little extra tax. If she couldn’t get a job at all, she’d pay nothing. Whatever happened, she’d have no student debt at all after N years. (The treasury would adjust X and N to cover costs.)
This solution was proposed by Milton Friedman, the US economist, over 40 years ago. He pointed out that the existing system, where the taxpayer was forced to pay for the education of students, was innately unjust. Everyone, rich or poor, pays taxes (income tax, VAT, tax on fuel etc). So everyone pays for universities. But only the elite get university education, which gives them bigger salaries. The poor are required to subsidise the rich. Is this what our protesting students want? It seems so. It seems they want poor South Africans to give them money for their education so that they can become rich.
I agree with Milton Friedman. Let students finance their education with loans from their future riches.
[Photo: Bloomberg]
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