{"id":6630,"date":"2018-06-19T09:07:40","date_gmt":"2018-06-19T09:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/?p=6630"},"modified":"2022-09-11T21:51:33","modified_gmt":"2022-09-11T21:51:33","slug":"peak-inequality-jubilee-2022-the-case-for-the-write-off-of-uk-historic-student-debt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/?p=6630","title":{"rendered":"Peak Inequality &#038; Jubilee 2022: the case for the write-off of UK historic student debt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Labour Party must draw up plans to write off the majority of the debt run up by students who paid fees under England\u2019s post-2012 funding regime.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This issue and much more that arrises when we hit <em>Peak Inequality<\/em> will be being discussed by Danny Dorling and Faiza Shaheen in London at 7pm on Wednesday July 11th 2018 at the London Review of Books Bookshop, details of that event are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk\/events\/2018\/7\/peak-inequality-danny-dorling-and-faiza-shaheen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"background-color: transparent; display: block; padding: 0; max-width: 700px;\" title=\"Audioboom player\" src=\"\/\/embeds.audioboom.com\/posts\/6901941-jubilee-2022-the-case-for-the-write-off-of-uk-historic-student-debt\/embed\/v4?eid=AQAAAAm_KFu1UGkA\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Danny Dorling speaking on Jubilee 2022 &#8211; the case for the write-off of UK historic student debt, Invited Seminar, Centre for Global Higher Education, University College London, June 14th 2018.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>A report of the talk was posted in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.timeshighereducation.com\/news\/labour-needs-plan-write-english-student-debt\">Times Higher Education<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Labour \u2018needs plan\u2019 to write off English student debt<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Danny Dorling suggests limiting debts to pre-2012 levels<\/p>\n<p>June 14, 2018<br \/>\nBy Chris Havergal<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The Labour Party must draw up plans to write off much of the debt run up by students who paid fees under England\u2019s post-2012 funding regime if it is to implement its promise of free tuition, a leading academic has said.<\/p>\n<p>Danny Dorling, Halford Mackinder professor of geography at the University of Oxford, has proposed a model under which graduates who were among the first cohort of students to pay \u00a39,000 a year for their degree would have their tuition debts written off to the extent that they would owe no more than graduates who started their course in 2011-12, and hence were the last to pay \u00a33,000 a year.<\/p>\n<p>Students in the final cohort to pay higher fees \u2013 currently capped at \u00a39,250 \u2013 would have their debts written off to the extent that they would owe little more than the first year group of any future free tuition system, with the debts of graduates in the cohorts in-between being cancelled on a tapering scale.<\/p>\n<p>Professor Dorling, who was set to present his ideas at a seminar hosted by UCL\u2019s Centre for Global Higher Education on 14 June, said that this solution would ensure that no graduate was significantly disadvantaged by changes in student finance policy simply because they had been born a year earlier or later than another graduate.<\/p>\n<p>Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn faced controversy after the 2017 general election when he said that his pledge to \u201cdeal with\u201d historic student debt did not amount to a promise to write off all outstanding loans. It has been estimated that an across-the-board debt moratorium could cost taxpayers about \u00a3100 billion.<\/p>\n<p>But Professor Dorling said that Labour needed to draft a policy on the issue because it would be asked \u201cmore and more\u201d about student debt. He acknowledged that his proposal would cost tens of billions of pounds but argued that it was important to address a \u201cpoint of principle\u201d, and explained that the amounts of money involved were \u201cminuscule\u201d compared with the overall demands on public finances.<\/p>\n<p>Professor Dorling argued that his suggestion had the advantage of falling short of pledging to abolish all debt, hence avoiding the need to reimburse people who paid \u00a33,000 a year, who were more likely to have paid their debts off. The approach was fair, he added, because those who studied under the post-2012 regime and had repaid their loan \u2013 or had never taken one out in the first place \u2013 were likely to be from the most privileged backgrounds.<\/p>\n<p>Starting the conversation now would make companies considering buying part of the student loan book, which the government is trying to sell, aware of the risk that they were taking. The scenario envisaged by Professor Dorling could even occur under a future Conservative government, he argued, given the party\u2019s increasing concern over student finance.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s necessary to put forward a potential policy to deal with outstanding debt, and my main idea is to take the last to come in under the current regime and the first to come in and to try to ensure that their economic futures are as similar as possible to the students one year away from them in time,\u201d Professor Dorling told Times Higher Education.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>We need several of these suggestions, and we need them now \u2013 there could be a snap election, but there will certainly be one by 2022, and this needs to be talked about years before implementation to avoid a cock-up<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Labour Party must draw up plans to write off the majority of the debt run up by students who paid fees under England\u2019s post-2012 funding regime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9120,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6631,"href":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6630\/revisions\/6631"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dannydorling.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}