Keir Starmer has now abandoned his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to remove all university fees, opening up a debate about how exactly Labour would fund universities. The end of the old pledge recognises the reality that graduate repayment is the best way to finance higher education. Public spending on higher education for over a million English students is not a political priority – not even within the education budget, where the conventional wisdom, rightly or wrongly, attaches much more weight to the first three years of schooling than three years at university.
But fortunately there is another way of financing higher education. Graduates do on average earn significantly more than non-graduates so it is reasonable to expect them to pay back for their education if and when they can afford to. In fact, that model is indeed more progressive than taxpayer funding.
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