Department of Bad Ideas

I wish we did in fact have such a department for bad ideas like this one:
Former students should pay a "graduate tax" for decades after leaving university, according to a former Labour education minister.

The charge should be levied on all graduates to enable more schoolchildren to stay in education beyond the age of 18, it was claimed.

Baroness Blackstone, an education minister between 1997 and 2001, admitted such a move would prove hugely unpopular.

But she insisted that she would be willing to pay such a charge - 40 years after graduating from the London School of Economics.

The thinking behind this idea is that as it's the graduates who benefit from their education, through their higher earning power over the decades, it should be said graduates who pay for the education system.

There are however two chinks in the logic of this argument. The first is that if it is indeed only the graduates who benefit then we don't in fact need to fund it through the tax system. The reason we do so fund it is because we accept (well, most do) that such education is a public good, that there are spin off benefits to having a well educated populace which do not in fact flow solely to the graduates. If we're now denying the existence of that public good then the rationale for higher education being anything to do with the government disappears.

The second is that while it certainly used to be true that there was a graduate earnings premium (and still is in some subjects) this isn't necessarily true now. Indeed, I've seen figures that an arts degree for a male now reduces, not increases, lifetime earnings.

Now in that situation a graduate tax really would be a hard sell. We'd like you to pay extra tax because of the way we funded your decrease in earnings?