Or: or why the drains are blocked:

Context: “Cookie licking is the act of claiming something as something only you can do, but without actually doing it. (Note: This is considered a bad thing.)“

Sometimes public authorities lack the resources to deliver their proper functions (austerity) but cannot admit to this (legal obligation) and so persist in holding responsibility for a task they will never deliver (regulatory inspections once every 200 years). This means that alternative delivery by community groups and individuals is also prevented as the public authority has ‘licked the cookie’ of the task.

This is worse than straightforward responsiblisation where a public authority makes individuals or groups responsible for something the authority should be doing, as in this ‘licked responsiblisation’ those responsiblised are denied even the acknowledgement of their unsought responsibility. Hence, they are stuck waiting for help that will never come, unable to make alternative plans. This is why the drains in Glasgow are blocked and the streets unswept.

I can see two ‘solutions’ to this: The first is to adequately resource public authorities to deliver their statutory functions (unlikely in the UK with the government of the week). The second is for public authorities to admit failure (embarrassing) and enable individuals community groups to take full responsibility for parts of problems (to give them the cookie). For example, in Paris residents can formally take on responsibility for gardening small sections of public green space and do something more interesting with it than the local council could.

The ideal is probably to do both, to resource public authorities to fulfil their function, and for those authorities to have the flexibility to hand over responsibility for small bits of their work to community groups and individuals that demonstrate the ability to deliver something better than the public authority is required to.

I am currently considering this question as the Peterhouse JCR is in the process of running a referendum and this is the first and most important question on that referendum the purpose of which is to determine how Peterhouse should vote at the next CUSU Council meeting.
The possible options are:

1. Raised tuition fees
2. A graduate tax
3. Offer fewer university places / close down less well performing Universities
4. Higher universal taxation
5. Cuts to other public services instead
6. Other / Abstain

However there are more fundamental underlying questions which need to be considered:
What are the purposes of University?
Why are those good purposes?
How well does University achieve those purposes?
What value to we place on outcomes beyond the simple increase in potential earnings such as on producing better adjusted individuals with improved support networks who are better able to play their part in society?
Should ‘Universities’ which are ‘rubbish’ and don’t actually provide ‘proper’ degrees be called Universities? (No clearly not: they should be called polytechnics or similar and not offer degrees but rather more flexible qualifications which actually fit the useful things they are there to teach)
Should these polytechnics exist? Should they receive government funding in the way that Universities do?
Is University the best way of teaching people the skills they need for work in areas such as Engineering and Computer Science? Does that matter?

Clearly a graduate tax is a stupid idea because it would mean that anyone we educated and who then left the country to work abroad would not pay for the cost of their education – and that many people would do this, particularly among the highest earners. It also does not provide the money directly to the universities which educated them and would instead go to some general pot and so not reward universities for how good they were at educating their students (from the point of view of earning potential).

Offering fewer university places / close down less well performing Universities… well to Cambridge students that seems like a rather appealing option (and it is the favourite to win the JCR vote). However it is important to ensure that we are not thinking that this is a good plan simply because it means that University funding becomes an issue affecting other people at other Universities rather than us which is easy to do on a subconscious level and to then justify on a concious one. One justification is that we know that our friends and fellow pupils at school did not always work as hard as we did in order to get where we have got and so why should they be supported at our expense? Clearly we put more work in than they did. However the question of what the value of University is to both society and individuals even if the University doesn’t manage to teach the individual anything is one for which I don’t have an answer. Putting concrete values on externalities is not something which we are particularly good at as a society. I should probably study some more economics in order to get better at doing so.
The problem with this point then is that while it seems appealing on a superficial level I worry that in the grander scheme of things it might not be such a good idea. For example how would reducing the number of university places be managed? Remove the same proportion from all universities? Clearly that would be a stupid idea as it places no value on the relative quality of teaching at different universities. We don’t want those who should go to University missing out due to lack of places in good universities while those who probably shouldn’t get in to the lower quality ones. How about making the number of places available on a course be dependent on how many people applied for it? So that for example if 200 people apply then a maximum of 100 places can be funded. However there might be problems with that if there are good courses which only appeal/accept candidates from a small pool of potential applicants and so most of those who apply should get a place as they are sufficiently brilliant.

Higher universal taxation? Well here we have to consider whether the benefit of university is for society as a whole than to the individuals directly as otherwise it is perhaps not fair to make everyone pay more. Here again I think we struggle to be able to make good decisions on what proportion of university funding for teaching should come from the students and what proportion from general taxation due to the lack of a function for determining the value of university and apportioning that to individuals and society as a whole.

Raised tuition fees? Clearly this is controversial for students as it affects us most directly and does cause real problems for students. It is thus perfectly understandable that many students and their representatives vehemently oppose tuition fees in general and their increase in particular. As per one of the CUSU motions “Education is a public good” which is true but to be able to weigh its value against that of other government expenditure we need some way of measuring relative worth of different public goods which I don’t think we have. At least not in a clear manner which allows decisions to be reached which don’t appear to be simply arbitrary. Instead long discussions are had and long articles written which skirt around the edges of issues and are dissatisfying in not being able to deal with these issues directly.[0]
However here it is perhaps useful to consider that compared with private secondary education University is still cheap even with increased tuition fees to £7,000. A private day secondary school could easily be charging in excess of £9,000 a year and at least in comparison to Cambridge not be providing nearly as high a quality of education. A private boarding school could easily be charging £26,000 a year per student. The cost my going to University per year is ~£10,000 including tuition fees, rent etc. this is significantly less than what my parents were paying for my sixth form education even with the 20% scholarship. My parents could still pay for the full costs of my university education if it was ~£14,000 instead and then I walk out with a degree and no debt… This only applies to a small minority of students though and somewhere around University children need to become adults and stop relying on parents for all supplies of funding. I suppose the point I am trying to make here is that there are students who have parents who could easily pay the higher fees (or even higher still fees) and not really be affected by doing so, however it is unfortunately probably not feasible to identify who these students are. Higher levels of debt are likely to put off students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds from applying which is a serious concern as it is very important to find those people from disadvantaged backgrounds who have the ability to perform and give them a helping hand to make sure that they can perform to the best of that ability.

Of the CUSU motions a and c seem reasonable, b is poorly worded and says things which are blatantly wrong and d makes some good points but also some silly ones and some of its action points seem unrelated to solving the issues identified. E which the JCR as a whole is not voting on also appears to be reasonable.

Peterhouse JCR people: Vote. Everyone else: vote early, vote often.

Apologies for the unsystematic and poorly written brain dump, really I should go back through this and rewrite it…

[0]: Here I am thinking back to discussions I had last night relating to the difficulty of expressing and discussing truly important things compared to the ease and simplicity of discussing trivialities.