No-one denies the problems surrounding higher education in the U.K. Rachel Johnson and Toby Young discuss some of these in a recent episode of Spectator TV. Problems are as apparent to students as they are to those of us who observe from a distance. Many students feel that universities are shortchanging them with low teacher contact time in some subjects. They see ‘rip-off’ courses with many of the contact hours being virtual, a never-ending student debt to repay and often come in time to realise the irrelevance of their higher education, having chosen subjects before they know what they want to do with their lives.
Grave though this is from the students’ perspective, there is another aspect of higher education that one never hears spoken – the cost of diverting and frittering away the productive working time of the young, an invisible drain on our society far larger than the apparent costs of higher education.
On the face of it, the costs of higher education seem modest. In round figures, the 2022-23 budget for tertiary education from central Government was £5 billion. On top of that, students paid fees of £9,000 each, a further £20 billion. Two thirds of the students were in accommodation away from homes which, at around £5,000 per student, adds another cost of £7 billion to the bill, making a total of £32 billion. This is comparable with the cost of pre- and primary education and much less than the £54 billion of secondary education. What’s more, most of this expenditure comes from the willing future pockets of the students who happily agree to pay 9% of their future income in excess of the repayment threshold. (I admit some irony here.)
But what this doesn’t take into account is the opportunity cost of years spent at university.
The opportunity cost of any activity is the loss incurred as a result of choosing that activity instead of doing some alternative. Students are becoming increasingly aware of the opportunity costs to them of higher education. With fees and accommodation, they know that, fees and accommodation together, a three-year course will run up a loan of £50,000. On top of that, they look at their contemporaries who choose to work instead of studying for a degree. While they are at uni for three years, their working friends earn around £20,000 a year, a total of £60,000. So the total cost to a student of a degree is the £50,000 of education costs plus the £60,000 of lost income. A degree, therefore, costs well over £100,000 – more than twice the cost of what ends up on their student loan.
In the same way that students are subject to opportunity costs as a result of higher education, society as a whole is also subject to opportunity costs. Let’s see how they arise.
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a country is the total value of all the goods and services produced within a country. For the U.K. in 2022 it was £2,230 billion.
Who produces all this value? Why the workers in the country of course – about 30 million people working in 2022. With simple division we see that the GDP per working person is £74,000. That means that, on average, every working person in 2022 generated goods and value worth £74,000.
Again in 2022, the average wage was about £24,000. I find it helps to think of these two figures, average wage and average value of goods and services produced, in terms of running something like a bus company or a house building company.
In this analogy, the average bus driver paid £24,000 is expected to earn about £74,000 in ticket sales on his bus. In the same way an average bricklayer, paid £24,000, is expected to build walls worth £74,000. The difference between the wage and the value of services or goods produced goes principally to two things: the cost of the things needed to do the job (premises, buses, bricks etc.) and taxation to pay for things like education, health, defence etc.
What happens if, instead of plying the worthwhile trades of bus driving or bricklaying, these two individuals choose to go to university for three years? The answer is simple. The economy contracts by, on average, £74,000 per student, while they sit in a lecture theatre, watch a lecture online or lie in bed. Instead of producing £74,000 worth of goods and services, they do nothing productive. The opportunity cost to society for every student is £74,000. Sure, education is a good thing. We get greater productivity later. But do we? And how much?
The increase in the proportion of the population going into higher education from 5% in 1960 to 37.5% in 2022 corresponds to an extra 1.8 million students in higher education in 2022. What is the total opportunity cost of all these students going to university? Or, let me put it in another way: how much better off would our economy be if all of those students were working instead of studying? The answer is simple: 1.8 million students multiplied by £74,000 per student – a total of £133 billion per year.
The total cost of higher education per year is the sum of the actual costs of £32 billion plus the opportunity costs of £133 billion. That is a total of £165 billion, nearly enough to cover the whole cost of the NHS, or 25% more than the current budget deficit.
In 1972 the school leaving age was raised to 16. In 2013, the Gove-Cameron partnership raised to 18 the age for leaving education. Now we understand the opportunity costs of chaining our young people to education, we can see how frighteningly expensive are the real costs of imposing extra education on large segments of the population.
Each year cohort – 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds etc. – comprises about a million young people. Raising the educational leaving age for half a cohort takes half a million out of the workforce – an opportunity cost of nearly £40 billion.
Imagine if the focus of education were to shift just a little to reduce the numbers under its sway by a million. What benefits would we see?
We’d see an increase of GDP of over 3% caused by a million more people working. The need for immigration would reduce by the same number. Since we would not be taking in a million from overseas, it would reduce housing demand by 250,000. And, if half a million of those moved into work were students currently studying away from home, that would free up 125,000 houses. This provides a total improvement in the housing shortage of 375,000 houses. This is worth comparing with 192,000 houses that were actually built in 2022.
Nellie Foster started school at the age of five. In 1939, at the age of 14, she left her secondary modern school and started working in a cake shop, developing a skill in tying brown paper packages that always amazed. A few years later she recognised her interest in teaching and, after being a childminder, moved to a nursery, which enabled her to take her NNEB (National Nursery Examination Board) diploma. At that time the NNEB was a qualification obtained part-time, alongside working.
In September 1949, at the age of 24, Nellie Foster completed a one-year “course of training for the teaching profession… with special reference to the requirements of children aged five to nine years”. And from then on she was a qualified teacher. I worked with many such emergency-trained teachers at the start of my teaching career. Despite their education having lasted a mere 10 years, compared with the 20 years for most teachers nowadays, they were indistinguishable in their knowledge and teaching ability, if very much less woke.
Without knocking our current education system, it is worth thinking about the fearful costs involved and gently pointing to the potential benefits that would result if we could achieve similar standards in just a little less teaching time.
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Stop The War On Cash
latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
What’s really happening?
‘Russian reporter Vladislav Ugolny says Russian soldiers are stuck on the islands of the Dnipro river delta as the water froze, and travelling by boats became nearly impossible.
To quote my friend…….’there is no option other than to wait…….there’s no food…..everyone there will have to be sent immediately to the hospital for treatment.’
So there it is….’
Also:
‘On Sunday night, Ukrainian air defences shot down one of the Russian air force’s very rare, and very valuable, A-50 radar early-warning planes, likely killing all 15 people aboard—potentially including high-ranking officers. A Russian Ilyushin Il-22 command plane was damaged in the same attack.
Down one A-50, the Russian air force may have just two of the jets left; the other six A-50s reportedly are in need of upgrade and overhaul. Unless the air force is willing to risk the last two flyable A-50s, it must make peace with its new inability to provide radar coverage over all of Crimea.’
Still bleating your pro Ukraine b0££0ck$. It’s not our war. Leave it to terminally corrupt Biden and War mongering NATO.
It is not our war…..yet……
Belarus is already part of the new ‘Union State’, Ukraine next, then Moldova.
That gives the ‘Union State’ a frontier from Kaliningrad to the Black Sea, encircling the Baltic States.
Then it becomes our war….
Maybe better to do something now?
Who to believe, every Western government with a Russian border or some random punter on the interweb……
Tricky……or not really.
Not our war ever but we are paying for it anyway. Who to believe, concerned UK taxpayer or war mongering Zelensky fan boy. No, not tricky at all
The lack of a definite or indefinite article, as usual, gives the game away.
‘1. The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE [Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe] Final Act, to respect the Independence and Sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine……..
4. The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression…..’
It has been our war since 2014. You just didn’t notice.
What game, it’s not a game and you are delusional. It’s not our war, never was our war and never will be our war. It is however disgraced ex prime minister Boris Johnson’s vanity war, he needed one to bolster his Churchill credentials and which he deliberately prolonged and which for some reason current prime minister without mandate Sunak wishes to continue. If you want war go ahead, fill your boots, but not with my taxes.
English is clearly not your first language.
I very much doubt that you pay any tax in Britain, if any at all anywhere.
You don’t sound as though you are old enough.
You’re an idiot, you can’t respond to my comment so you resort to accusing me of being a Russian troll. I was teaching English when the best part of you was trickling down your mommy’s thigh.
Having your mum help you with your comments is not really working for you, is it? Presumably your dad was also Salvador Dali.
Intemperate language invariably indicates a fool and a poseur who has lost the argument and, indeed, the plot.
Not working for me? I’ll be the judge of that. As for your bizarre non-sequitur, is that all you’ve got? As I said, fan boy, you go ahead and start all the wars you like, just not with my money.
Yes European countries have been having a fertility crisis for years now, with native births falling below replacement level, so the Leftards’ answer to this is to make up the numbers ( thereby replacing us natives slowly but surely ) using limitless immigration instead. Because actually finding out the reasons why young people aren’t having babies, or are stopping at just one kid, and then doing something about it, is just way too reasonable and too much like hard work. If you voice concerns about the continuing demographic changes though, you will be the target of the predictable ”Nazi”, ”racist” and ”xenophobe” slurs, just as this Belgian MEP has found out;
”Once conservative MEP Tom Vandendriessche exposed the globalist migration scheme, threats of a parliamentary investigation were launched, accompanied by smears and false accusations, including likening his words to Nazi terminology, as globalists sought to silence any opposition to their agenda.
The European Parliament, dominated by radical left-wing politicians, has initiated an investigation targeting Tom Vandendriessche, a member of the Flemish conservative Vlaams Belang party. Vandendriessche has fearlessly exposed the European Union’s calculated agenda of ‘organized replacement’ through its migration policies.
In his powerful Parliamentary speech, Vandendriessche emphasized that the EU’s migration pact falsely claims to tackle illegal migration. He stated, ‘With the EU migration pact, they claim to address illegal migration. This is an absolute lie. There is no upper limit on the number of asylum seekers, and there is no mechanism to deport fraudulent asylum seekers. Therefore, the asylum chaos will continue.’
Vandendriessche went on to reveal the underlying purpose of the EU migration pact, citing a statement from controversial European Commissioner Ylva Johansson. She openly admitted, ‘There are too few European births, and she aims to replace them by importing 4.5 million non-Europeans annually. This represents a deliberate and organized replacement strategy.’”
https://rairfoundation.com/great-replacement-belgian-mep-stuns-parliament-exposes-their/
So glad to see that the good old Coudenhove Kalergi plan for a Europe of Mongs is going so well .
And who says a gently declining population is a bad thing? A rapidly rising one has not turned out too well for living statndards, has it.
Mogs the immigrant invasion of Europe has been planned for and current national governments are complicit in enabling this. The aim is the destruction of Europe and Western nations.
Low birth rates are simply a symptom. Why would young people want to bring children into this world while their societies are collapsing on a daily basis?
Deliberate destruction.
Is this the same Mogwai who called me a ‘Nazi’ and ‘Gestapo agent’ last week? Sauce for the goose……….
What’s ”sauce for the goose” got to do with anything? I called you those names because 1) you were sneaking around, covertly tampering with my posts for reasons unknown, not even bothering to leave any explanation, and 2) I was wanting to check you were reading what I posted. Which you were, and obviously still are.
Tell me, is there anyone else on your ”Naughty List” or am I ‘the chosen one’? When does my probation end?? Do you get a ”red alert” notification straight to DS Mod HQ whenever I post anything? Bizarro..
More on this ongoing issue of immigration and the significant impact family reunification has on demographics. And the fact the Leftards continue to dismiss anyone speaking out about this as ”racist” or that the ‘Great Replacement’ is just mere far-right conspiracy theory, when there are many sources of data to back this up, is just farcical;
”1976 is the year of the “family reunion” in France of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the architect of the institutional construction of the European Union. Giscard d’Estaing had recently expressed regret over the reunion. “The idea of bringing in immigrant families seemed natural at the time. With the massive increase in immigration from Muslim countries, it has instead produced deep divisions in French society.”
It starts with the wife and children, then come the wife’s parents, the other children of the wife’s parents and their children. And so on, in a demographic chain that has become repopulation.
A number? Christopher Caldwell provides it in the latest Compact: “By the middle of the century, a fifth of France will be Islamic.”
Caldwell in an essay for the Claremont Review talks about another country that is generous with family reunification, Sweden:
“The Pew Research Center has predicted that, by 2050, if it receives a moderate amount of immigration, Sweden will be 20 percent Muslim. If it receives high immigration, it will be 30 percent Muslim.”
Family reunification of migrants in Germany will reach a new record this year.
The former Belgian senator Alain Destexhe talks about the “avalanche effect of family reunification” in Le Figaro. “In Belgium, 50 percent of immigration is linked to family reunification. This type of immigration is, by definition, exponential and, literally, infinite, through the recognition of refugees, fake or gray marriages, the endogamous character of most Turkish and Moroccan marriages, massive fraud, etc. The almost mechanical consequences of family reunification on demography are never explained.”
37.3 percent of Belgian citizens have an immigrant background. In Brussels this percentage is already 82.5 percent, in Antwerp 62 and in Ghent 41, reveals sociologist Jan Hertogen. “Without immigration, Brussels would only have 250,000 inhabitants, Antwerp half of those it has today.”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/383744
Chain migration, the gift that never stops giving !The problem is in what its called .To a westerner “Family” , is normally Western Nuclear ie mom Dad Children , not extended family including 3rd cousins and uncles etc Any famly reunion should be limited to children only and 2 maximum so we dont get families with 15 kids arriving to suck on the welfare teat for life…
Indeed and now the US and the Western press are giving cover for genocide.
This will be the end of the old global order with the US globally vilified much like the Nazis.
““New WEF participant does the unthinkable at 2024 Davos meeting””. Whereas Javier Milei actually did indirectly in a much longer and more nuanced manner.
https://www.youtube.com/live/Pfcd0gWNIog?feature=shared
“Escort services ‘completely booked’ as WEF begins”
I hope those escort agencies have good ESG ratings and meet the required DEI requirements….
Beware a sudden global emegence of monkeypox !!!
The clientele wouldn’t be seen with a counterfeit Rolex so it seems safe to assume these will be real women.
Yes but they are the ones promoting the Alphabet agenda so I am not so certain lol