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Yet it’s not always clear to what degree a student can call on his parents to help defray the cost of tuition. For many students, the impact of the fees will be felt only in the years after they graduate, when it comes time to repay their student loans. Without knowing in advance what their income will be, or even whether they will be employed, this can understandably instil feelings of dread.

So while the OSG is an improvement on previous efforts, it still leaves the system in broad need of reform. The problem isn’t so much the cost of higher education — the premium accruing to graduates over the course of their working lives, in higher incomes and lower unemployment, will typically be worth many multiples of the initial investment. Rather, it’s an issue of cash flow.

Whatever the numbers might say on average and over time, a student cannot be sure he will be earning enough in a given year, especially early on, to make his student debt payments. Reform efforts, then, should be focused less on reducing fees — indeed, as the primary beneficiaries of higher education, students ought reasonably to bear the full cost themselves — than on changing when and how students pay them.

There’s no particular reason why students should have to pay anything up front, at the time they are in school. Nor is it necessary that assistance should take the form of conventional loans, with the relatively short timetables and fixed payments these imply. Rather, imagine a system in which students paid for their education over the course of their working lives, and as a percentage of their incomes.