The UK goes to the polls on Thursday.  There are one or two things of higher importance at stake than higher education (mainly: which party gets to drive the entire country off a cliff and at what speed), but it’s still worth looking at what ideas are bouncing around over on the other side of the pond. 

Fees and funding are essentially the same issue in the UK, because so much of universities’ income is tied up in domestic student fees that are supported through loans, a majority of which are eventually expected to be forgiven by the government (basically: if you do well after graduation you will probably pay most of the loans back, and if not, then you won’t).  The government set up a review of post-18 education and funding under Sir Philip Augar, which made a variety of recommendations when it reported six month ago.  The report made two big sets of recommendations, one of which involved giving much greater prominence to what the British call “further education” (and which we would call “college education”) and the other involved reducing tuition fees a bit while fully compensating institutions for the loss of income.  At the time, many looked askance at the second recommendation because it was widely believed that while the then-still-economy-minded Tories might drop fees, the likelihood that they would compensate the institutions was pretty remote.

The Labour Party platform basically ignores Augar as far as fees go.  For them, it’s full elimination of tuition fees at the undergraduate level and below, with compensation to the institutions (a massive 10bn undertaking, but not as massive as it sounds because, as noted above, government is on the hook for a lot of these fees in the long run anyway), and the restoration of – say it softly – needs-tested maintenance grants (i.e. non-repayable student aid for the cost of living).  One gathers from this that those who are ineligible for maintenance grants will still be able to borrow money for the cost of living, so we aren’t talking about the end of loans.  Nor do we seem to be talking about the end of fees for graduate school.

UK parties aren’t big on costing promises, but most observers say the tuition end of these promises are about ₤7 billion (C$12.25 billion) annually, and that doesn’t include the re-introduction of maintenance grants (which, when they were scrapped in 2015, cost about ₤1.5bn.  Nor is there any details or costing of labour promises to “widen access” (the above cost estimates are steady state; if they lead to higher enrolments – and Labour have not indicated they ill re-introduce central control of student numbers – then the numbers will be much higher), “ending the casualization of staff”, or “ensuring all public HE institutions have adequate funding for teaching and research.  This last one is important in two ways: first, if you abolish tuition you need an actual funding formula to distribute the money and there’s no guarantee at all that this will go back to the status quo ante of 2011; second, Britain is about to lose access to a lot of European research funds post-Brexit (call it another ₤1.6bn per year or so, though Labour claim somehow the UK will still be in European research programmes under their form of negotiated Brexit) and it simply isn’t clear from the Labour manifesto how this will happen.  Labour has a promise to raise R&D spending to 3 per cent of GDP (that’s total spending, not government spending), but make absolutely no effort to explain how this will come about other than some vague guff about “crowding in” private investment and establishing a “Foundation Industries Sector Council” which sounds more like massive government aid to cleantech industries than anything involving higher education.

The Liberal Democrats try to avoid talking about tuition fees, because after riding a free-fees pledge to their best-ever result in 2010, the party promptly abandoned it and backed 9000 fees as part of the coalition deal with David Cameron’s Tories and its standing has never recovered.  Indeed, the total trust deficit this U-turn created is the main reason Jeremy Corbyn’s shambolic personality cult is still the leading alternative to the Tories.  So there’s nothing in their manifesto about fees in there, for the simple reason that on this issue above all else, no one believes a word of what the Lib Dems have to say.

But that doesn’t mean that a party full of young(ish), with-it (ish) types has nothing to say on higher education.  Oh, no.  An extra billion pounds for further (ie. college) education, re-establishing maintenance grants (presumably something close to what Labour are proposing, though the details are sketchy, requiring all institutions to “widen participation” (this is a dig at Oxford in particular), “raise standards” for universities (whatever that means), introduce a “student mental health charter” which will force universities to spend more in this area and – wait for it – “establish a review of higher education finance”.  From this last bit we can assume the Lib Dems don’t like the Augar Review (that is, the last review, which reported all of six months ago), but we don’t really have a sense of where they would prefer to go instead.  

The one significant new idea from the Lib Dems is what they call a “skills wallet”, which is like a bigger, chunkier version of Canada’s newly-announced Canada Training Benefit.  The idea here is to create a ₤10,000 entitlement for every English citizen (education being a devolved responsibility, this would not apply in Scotland, Wales or NI), to be delivered in installments: ₤4,000 at age 25, another ₤3,000 at age 40 and a final ₤3,000 aged 55.   It does not compare to massive promises about free education, of course, but It’s an interesting approach to funding lifelong learning, and one that might appeal in other countries as well.

The Conservatives, of course, back Brexit, which is basically a declaration of war by old people and their weird Dunkirk fantasies upon young people who not unreasonably see it as a curtailment of their freedoms.  So it shouldn’t entirely be a surprise to learn that the Conservative platform is not entirely friendly to young people.  On fees, the Tories say they will “carefully consider” implementing the Augar report, which means precisely nothing.  Their promise is for more apprenticeships, more nurses (context: nursing enrolments plummeted after the Conservatives axed a nursing bursary a few years ago).  On research and development, it’s a bit more positive because Brexit ideology involves the UK “realizing its potential” by becoming some sort of damp, temperate Singapore, and that requires at least some genuflection towards science and high-tech industry.  This includes a promise to raise R&D spending to 2.4% of GDP (less than Labour’s promise, but still substantially higher than the current 1.7%) through means unspecified, but there are tantalizing hints of a weird DARPA-like agency, mainly because Johnson’s chief advisor, Dominic Cummings, has a predictably depressing tech-bro view of the world.

Now, keep in mind the only party in anything like a position to form a majority government is the Conservatives.  It’s possible that the other parties (Labour, Lib Dems, the Scottish Nationalists and a bunch of others tiny groupings) might scrape 325 seats together, but any government that emerges that isn’t going to agree on much other than holding a second Brexit referendum.  And you’d be mad to trust any promise the Tories make because Johnson is a man whose commitment to the truth is about as firm as Don Cherry’s grip on sartorial elegance.  A walking Nigerian 419 scam, if you will.

Don’t make plans to take up a position at a UK university, is what I am saying.  Very little good can come of any of this.