David Wiletts and student fees

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Tory David Willetts could raise student fees to £7000. It's not enough.

The Conservative Shadow Minister for universities, David Wiletts, said that he would consider demands to raise the annual fees charged by universities fo £7,000, roughly twice the current levels. That's a step in the right direction. People complain about students leaving university with debts of £20,000 and suchlike – but the fact is that a university education can raise their future earning potential by much more than that, so it's still a really great deal.

If the universities had to balance their own books and pay for themselves instead of taxpayers handing them cash, their fees would have to be a lot higher than that, though. ASI Fellow Terence Kealey, himself the head of Buckingham University, reckons that £15,000-£20,000 would be nearer the mark – comparable to the fees in top US universities.

The public interest argument is that we don't want bright but poor students to be discouraged from going into higher education. Quite right. But the US universities solve that by accepting students only on the basis of merit, then having endowment funds to pay the fees for those who can't afford them. It's a very sensible sort of arrangement, and we should strive to have it in the UK. But I'm skeptical of the argument that the taxpayer should subsidize the universities because the country needs lots of graduates. The main benefit of a university education goes to the students themselves, and not to the general public. So the students should pay most of the cost – the real cost. A loan system is a good way to make that manageable for them. But it is right that people should look at the costs and benefits of higher education and decide on the basis of the realities – not on the basis of subsidized prices. That would be a more rational allocation of taxpayer funds, and better for the students themselves.

Dr Butler's book The Rotten State of Britain is now in paperback.

Home education vs. the bully-boy state

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The presumption of guilt is eating it`s way into our lives: Home Education is the latest victim.

As a parent you are a suspect in the crusade against child abuse. That is the message to Home Education from this government.Through a staged Review and now onto a Select Committee, the drive has been to find ways to justify an assault on Home Ed., taking away parental rights, enforcing child interviews alone and invading the family in a way that singles out Home Ed. as a "prime suspect".

Yet the very idea that Home Education could be harbouring child abuse is one manipulated from Local Authorities because the Government wanted to hear something that would enable it to invade Home Ed. Certainly, cases like Baby P. have made the system determined to seek out and stamp-out child abuse whatever the cost, but such cases have not been anything to do with Home Ed., so why single out one group for inspection?

The drive to stamp out child abuse should not cause abuse of children, or their parents, yet this is what compulsory interviewing of childen will achieve. Home Ed. is a sanctuary of love and good education, it nurtures children and allows them to learn and develop at their own speed. Many children are bullied in school and parents deregister their kids to protect them from further harm. We can only imagine what harm will be done to these kids when they are forced into interview alone, not to mention the damage if the National Curriculum is imposed along with government educational standards.

Currently, Local Authorities are widely acting ultra vires in regard to Home Ed. They are lying to parents, purporting to have powers under the law that they do not have, trying to bully children into returning to school. This really is a bully-boy State.

The value of innovation

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Innovation is of course a good thing: so too is the science that leads to lovely new things to innovate with. We're all also well aware of the public goods arguments about science: because it's very difficult to profit from it directly we'll not have enough of it. Thus we need taxpayer support for science, so that we've got lots of lovely new things to innovate with and thus we all get richer. An example of the argument from Colin Blakemore:

PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that every pound spent on research by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council sees a rapid return of £10, and £15 to 20 in longer-term benefits........But it’s not just a love of intellectual pursuits that justifies the nearly £3 billion per annum the Government spends through the research councils and the additional £2 billion that is dispensed through the higher education funding councils. It’s the expectation that it will deliver benefits for UK plc — “outcomes" in Treasury-speak.

However, we do also have to add what we know from what I think is one of the great research papers of all time: Schumpeterian profits in the American Economy.

We conclude that only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances over the 1948-2001 period was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers.

In more detail, only 3% or so of the value created by new technologies goes to the entrepreneurs, 97% goes to the rest of us lucky people who get to use the new technology. In one way this bolsters the argument that science should be heavily funded: look what we all get from it!

In another, the picture is not so clear. For the science is a public good, as we've agreed, which is why it needs funding in the first place. But as the science is a public good (non-rivalrous and non-excludable) we don't actually care where it is done nor who funds it: only that someone does. Further, if all but some tiny amount of the value of the technologies created by the science comes from the use, not the making or manufacturing of them, then we don't really care where that making or manufacturing is done either. All we care about, rationally, is that we get to use the new gear. And the end result of that chain of reasoning is that there's no real reason why we should be insistent upon funding "British" science, or "British innovation" nor even "British manufacturing". As long as someone funds it, somewhere, why should we care?

If the Americans decide to tax themselves to fund such activities, why shouldn't we just be free riders on their efforts?

The priorities

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Tony Blair listed his three priorities as "education, education, education," and achieved none of them. There will be a great deal of pressure on the incoming Cameron government and many claims on its urgent attention. Given the limits of parliamentary time and attention, the four which should count are "education, liberty, education, liberty" (in no particular order). If they do nothing else, they should reverse the erosion of our liberties by setting up a one-year judicial commission to review the state of our liberties and make recommendations accordingly. I set out in the Telegraphhow this can be done.

No less important is the permanent change that can be made to our schooling by empowering parents with a choice of school backed by the funding their taxes have paid for. Provided this is backed by measures which enable a proliferation of new schools, public and private, there is no single measure which can alter the political landscape so much, or with such lasting effect.

No doubt we will be told that times are hard, money is tight, and time is short. Maybe this will be true to some extent. We do not expect miracles. But we do expect the tide which has flowed against our liberties to be turned back, and lost ground regained. And we do expect that education will finally be reformed so that every child, regardless of their background, will gain the chance to succeed.

This is not an ambition or a distant hope, it is a minimum. Without these two, any new government will go down as a failure which turned its back on the untrodden heights and lost the goodwill that might have sustained it.

Check out Dr Madsen Pirie's new book, "101 Great Philosophers."

Profit is good

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Anton Howes is spot on. The next government must not only implement a Swedish-style school reform in Britain, it must retain its essential features. In addition to allowing parents and children to choose a school (even outside their area), it must facilitate the establishment of new schools, including ones set up for profit.

One reason why the Swedish scheme has attracted massive parental support is that nearly all applicants gain their choice of school. That has meant a huge programme of school-building, spearheaded by private firms seeking profits. Without investment and energy from that source, a British reform would be vapid and half-hearted, and would fail to attract the support needed to make it irreversible.

There is still in Britain a resentment of profit, probably surviving from wartime and postwar collectivism. There is a still-widespread view that public services should rely on a dedication to public service rather than the pursuit of more personal motives. This is misconceived. It is the profit motive that spurs people to supply goods and services that people want and need. Services that depend on motives which lack the incentive to satisfy customers are prone to producer capture, and end up with unions and administrators doing a self-serving pas-de-deux which excludes the recipients of the service.

The supply of food, no less important than education, is provided for profit. It would be very different if its supply were decided by civil servants, funded out of taxation, and available only from approved outlets. The 1980s saw many goods and services moved into the private, profit-making sector, and improve immeasurably in consequence. Now is the time to extend the same advantages and improvements to some of the areas which still lack their benign effects. Schooling will be the first and most important, but others must follow.

Dr Pirie's latest work, 101 Great Philosophers, is available to buy here.

A flawed revolution

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Anders Hutin, one of the chief architects of the much vaunted Swedish schools reforms claims that the Conservatives are missing a crucial ingredient in their proposed attempts to recreate the Scandinavian policy phenomenon. Profit. In an article for the Telegraph, he explains that about 75% of the new 'free schools' created after the reform are profit-driven. By leaving the 'revolution' to non-profits and parents, Hutin points out that the emphasis will be on increasing waiting lists, as they mark out the desirability of a school. For-profit schools on the other hand are more likely to see every pupil as a potential new source of income, and will expand their capacity in order to accommodate them.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Minister, despite recognising the desperate need for liberation of the state-funded schools sector, seems afraid to be seen to be privatizing state-run education, even though it is a continuation of Lord Adonis' Academies scheme. If these reforms are so central to the Conservative agenda, as Cameron keeps claiming, it is only right that the full extent of their intentions are made clear. Hopefully, the rapidly approaching conference will shed some light on whether or not Gove will make the right call on for-profit 'free schools'.

The Conservatives should certainly not be so complacent as to hope that their reforms can act as merely the next stage in liberating the state-funded supply of schools. As Sweden showed, it takes time for the grassroots revolution to take root, and if it progresses too slowly, the entire venture could be scrapped or stalled by a future administration. Gove's reforms will need all the boost they can get if they are to be both successful and lasting. Once they are established and recognised as an invaluable policy, the likelihood is that even Labour will cease to oppose the use of profit, much as their Swedish counterparts, the Social Democrats have done. Regardless of the political reality, Hutin explains that Britain is perhaps best-placed to benefit from the reforms that he designed, due to the high demand and extraordinary lengths that parents will go to in order to secure a good place - although this offers hope to reformers, it is a savage indictment of state education in this country.

The customer is king

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We come top of the National Student Survey because we charge full fees. Full fees not only allow us to fund teaching properly but they also ensure that we treat the students – not the Government – as our clients.

– Terence Kealey 'The league table that has big hitters at the bottom' The Independent

A lesson from the US

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Spending more on public schools doesn’t increase students’ academic performance. Fill in the blank.

No competition, no progress

As reported by the BBC, a recent study has found that there was no improvement in maths skills between 14-year- old students today and those studying during the 1970s. Considering all that has changed and definitely been improved upon in the last thirty years, this should be very troubling to all parents in England. Advancements in mathematics, engineering, and other major disciplines have worked to transform our world into a technological marvel compared to a mere thirty years ago. Most of these advancements are due to an increased number of private universities, and more importantly, increased competition between all universities. The competitive marketplace has thrived among universities in America, and has lead to a host of scientific and economic breakthroughs. When the evidence of what free market competition can do on an academic level is increasingly evident, why will government not allow it to enter into the primary and secondary schooling system? Why, after thirty years, can children not perform any better in basic maths skills? Without competition among schools, teachers have no incentives to improve teaching; they have essentially “levelled out" in their field of work. Principals and administrators have nothing personal to gain by putting more pressure on teachers. There is no adequate mechanism to hold administrators accountable for failure. Unless proper competition is injected into the education system we will be stuck in the same place in another thirty years (or worse). the simple truth is that more competition among schools will lead to more accountability placed on administrators and teachers, which will inevitably lead to better educated students.

National literacy day

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To put into context the worthlessness of marking the UN mandated National Literacy Day, the same institution puts Cuba top of the tree in its ranking of world literacy at 98.8%. Having lived in Havana for a number of months, I can categorically deny the validity of this, based upon the simple fact that a worryingly large number of the people I met were unable even to write their own name. Given that this was the major city, I hold little hope for real rates of literacy in the countryside.

Interestingly though, many of the poorest in Havana were able to speak a plethora of different languages, learnt not in the classroom but on the streets: essential in selling all manner of black market product and disreputable service to tourist so they can get hold of those precious greenbacks. The moral of the story? If you really want your children to learn foreign languages, dump them on the streets of Havana. Perhaps not. But it does go to show that human ingenuity adapts even in a heavily distorted market.

Rather than to simply celebrate literacy and condemn illiteracy, the key point to consider is how it is achieved. It certainly helps if economic development is at a point where literacy is itself as essential to being able to function as having German, French and English as second, third and fourth languages is on the streets of Havana. However, we also need a good and competitive education system, especially for the poorest in our country. The former we have, but the latter we don’t; and this accounts for the embarrassingly high levels of illiteracy among UK adults, because of – not in spite of – government interference.

For a proper understanding of literacy and all matters related to education, you could do no better than to peruse the excellent work coming out of the E.G. West Centre based at the University of Newcastle. They also have blog that can be accessed here.