Cost-sharing and equity in higher education: Implications of income contingent loans

This paper explores the fitful saga of cost-sharing in European higher education, and some implications of the current (2003) interest in income contingent loans for recovering a portion of the costs either of student living or tuition fees or both. Europe is the last bastion (some might say the last refuge) in the world of fully (or almost fully) tax-supported higher education, extending in many countries beyond free higher education to at least some governmental, or taxpayer, responsibility for expanding higher educational participation and equity with need-based grants covering some of the costs of student living. However, there is a long tradition in Scandinavia of the student bearing all or most of the financial responsibility for food, lodging, and other costs of student living—generally through partially subsidized student loans (in Sweden, loans of the income contingent variety). This long tradition of student contributions in Scandinavia, plus the increasing expenses of student living costs everywhere in Europe, coupled with low and frequently diminishing (in the UK virtually disappearing) cost-of-living grants from the government, has kept the question of student contributions--and thus of student loans--at least on the table in many countries of Europe