As part of a government review of tuition fees the Secretary of State for Education, Damian Hinds, has implied that arts courses could end up costing less than STEM subject degrees because graduates in those subjects earn less later in life.
Ever since tuition fees were raised to £9,000 a year in 2010, serious question marks have hung over the issue of whether or not students are getting 'value for money' from higher education. Pretty much everyone, including Hinds' predecessor Justine Greening, agrees that something needs to be done to make getting a university degree workout financially in the long term for graduates but not everyone agrees that this is how to do it.
In particular, concerns are being raised about the potential for science subjects to cost more than social sciences or humanities. Speaking to the BBC's Andrew Marr Show on Sunday the Shadow Education Secretary, Angela Rayner, said 'we are told that we need science and maths and therefore to make those degrees more expensive flies in the face of what our economy will need in the future and as part of our industrial strategy we need to make sure we preserve and make sure we get those students on those courses'.
More than this, it has been suggested that increasing the cost of studying STEM subjects at university could have a serious long-term impact on diversity and the gender pay gap in related industries. Since we began measuring the gender pay gap in 1997, it has closed by nearly 10% but progress has more or less flat lined in the last 5 years. Experts have long said that reducing the pay gap once and for all will, in part, be down to getting more women into higher-paid STEM careers.
As things stand, research conducted by WISEhas found that only 23% of workers in STEM industries are women. WISE research has also found that only 9% of young women opt to study maths, physics, computer science or engineering at degree level. That's compared with 29% of young men. There is, as this LSE research compiled by PHD candidate Natasha Codiroli McMaster shows, not only a gender gap in STEM subjects and, therefore, STEM jobs but also a class gap.
She writes that pervasive stereotypes about STEM subjects being 'for boys' or only the 'brainiest students' are off putting for young women or those from lower income backgrounds: 'students from less privileged backgrounds are rated as less able than their peers, even when they have similar levels of attainment, and as noted previously, STEM subjects are often seen as for particularly brainy students. So, disadvantaged students would likely need to have great resilience to deal with these multiple stereotypes'.
Decisions by ministers at the Department for Education to make higher education in STEM subjects more expensive could, then, further reinforce the gender gap in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics jobs long term at a time when the very same government department is asking businesses to publish data which reveals the extent of their internal gender pay gaps in an attempt to leverage transparency and do away with the problem once and for all. Are the two policies working at cross purposes?
Speaking to The Debrief Hellen Wollaston, Chief Executive of WISE, said 'the Government should be looking at waiving tuition fees for women doing engineering and technology degrees in which they are currently under-represented and where demand for graduates far outstrips supply - certainly not imposing new barriers to those considering making the choices we want them to make!'
Similarly, Dr Keith Purves, the Deputy Chair of WISE told The Debrief that he thinks 'the government needs to think through what it is trying to achieve with this suggestion'. He pointed out that maintaining higher tuition fees for STEM subjects simply because those graduates 'stand a chance of being able to earn enough to pay the loan back, disincentivises these students compared to students taking arts subjects with lower tuition fees'. He went on to say that 'the demand for STEM-qualified graduates is forecast to rise in the UK for the foreseeable future. There has never been a better time to study STEM subjects, yet here we are, suggesting we essentially penalise STEM students and incentivise arts students! We should be incentivising STEM students because we need them, and we already fall short of filling demand, not penalising them'.
In particular, Purves told The Debrief, it 'has been demonstrated' that 'girls, when they are able to overcome the barriers that dissuade them from studying STEM subjects, enrich the talent pool and supplement the graduate supply. This policy offering will put one more barrier in the path of young women considering STEM careers and can only result in even fewer female STEM graduates.'
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.