That this House considers higher education should be treated as a public good not something to be commodified as a private expense and that universities and graduates play an essential role in society and our economy; believes in scrapping undergraduate tuition fees and restoring maintenance grants; notes the English funding model is an international outlier by relying on high tuition fees and large student loan balances and many OECD countries operate systems that treat higher education primarily as a public investment; further notes the London Economics finding that for every £1 of public money invested in the higher education sector across the UK, £14 goes back into the economy and the total economic impact of the sector is estimated at more than £265 billion; further believes higher education has intrinsic value in and of itself; thinks it is totally unacceptable that students and graduates are being ripped off under outrageous loan terms that no consumer lender would be allowed to get away with; recalls in 2012, the Coalition Government nearly tripled tuition fees from £3,225 to £9,000 a year and introduced the unjust Plan 2 system; also believes that the freezing of the Plan 2 student loan repayment threshold is profoundly wrong; also notes the significant amount of public subsidy our dysfunctional student loan system requires; and calls on the Government to urgently return to a system of free higher education paid for by progressive taxation.
