Outrageous University fees.

[Bulgarian]

You make a good point. However really aside from medicine, law, engineering, science and a couple of other things why do you need to go to uni anyway?

 

To avoid having to have to work ?

[llamatron]

Perhaps they will eventually be replaced with accredited (and therefore portable) training programmes offered by employers, the pre-requisite of which will either be good A level results or some kind of aptitude test.

 

It is a shame though as I do like the idea of learning for learning's sake rather than having a purely utilitarian higher education system. My degree hasn't served much purpose, however, I really enjoyed the subject and learned and read a lot that I wouldn't have done otherwise.

 

I worry for my kids, they're both clever and definitely university material. We're middle income and no way could we afford to fund them through a 3 year degree. I hate the idea of them being saddled with so much debt at such a young age.

 

But you really dont notice the debt, the pay comes out of your wages before tax and whatever wage you are on you pay such a small amount per month that it means nothing. I think you will start paying it when you are on 21000 (quite a good wage) and it will be £30 per month (before tax). Its nothing.

[muddycoffee]

.... A qualification that everybody gets is, by definition, completely worthless.

 

Only if you consider that the sole reason for the qualification is to give an advantage over the other applicants in a job interview.

Clearly if everyone in the population had a qualification it improves the education of the whole population, and there are many advantages to that like for instance people making more informed decisions in life.

 

However, in listening to the debates about this on Radio 4 over the last week it seems that many degree courses give only a small amount of lecture/tuition time per week. Three or four hours per week is not unusual. You have to ask the question why are these institutions allowed to charge full time course fees for a neglectful programme like this ?

I maintain that there are many degree courses which are not up to the standard, and should have a lesser reward than a degree if they cannot prove that they have the rigour of a full time degree course.

[llamatron]

I think the real issue about this subject should be why is it neccesary to have such a large proportion of the population wasting their time getting almost worthless degrees. Over the last 10 years I have met lots of people who have degrees in subjects like philosophy and art who have to work as gardeners and answering phones to get a job.

Labour decided that 50% of young people should go to university, all that has happened is massive expansion of university sector on the back of decades of student debt.

Many of these people have wasted their time because they have not improved their employment chances.

 

PS I totally agree. If you want to learn for learnings sake pay for the degree yourself as it is a luxury. If you want to be a doctor I am pretty sure your wages will make up for the debt and who else should pay but you.

[Conrod]

Maybe they should have chose a different degree other then Sociology. At least they got a Grant. Something students now can only dream of.

The old grant system was far, far better - but it was based on sensible attendance levels for higher education.

 

Back then, only a few percent of people went to study for a degree - those who had shown they were of significantly above average academic ability were the only ones capable of winning a uiversity or polytechnic place.

 

Now, thanks to the good-old socialist wish for 'higher education to be made available to all', we have all sorts of useless degrees being offered to people who are barely past literate, who hold a handful of meaningless over-inflated GCSE and A level grades which would have been outright fails 30 years ago.

 

If we stopped this nonsense of letting every dimwit go and waste 3 or 4 years 'studying' a useless subject, and instead concentrated on serious degrees for those with academic ability, we could go back to grants and free higher education.

[llamatron]

We had many years of the political classes arguing that everyone should be in the top fifty per cent, and that at least fifty per cent of us should be in the top five per cent. It's not so much scandalous, as just completely silly. A qualification that everybody gets is, by definition, completely worthless.

 

I do agree, you cant do much in science now with a degree because everyone has one. You need a PhD to get a decent job now. Even though many of the jobs dont require degree level undestanding-there is no point to this?

 

It gets people into debt for no reason although as the degree is being dumbed down because the students are now customers a PhD is becoming necessary. Its a strange vicious circle.

[Conrod]

Only if you consider that the sole reason for the qualification is to give an advantage over the other applicants in a job interview.

Clearly if everyone in the population had a qualification it improves the education of the whole population, and there are many advantages to that like for instance people making more informed decisions in life.

 

However, in listening to the debates about this on Radio 4 over the last week it seems that many degree courses give only a small amount of lecture/tuition time per week. Three or four hours per week is not unusual. You have to ask the question why are these institutions allowed to charge full time course fees for a neglectful programme like this ?

I maintain that there are many degree courses which are not up to the standard, and should have a lesser reward than a degree if they cannot prove that they have the rigour of a full time degree course.

It's always been the case that the vocational degrees like medicine, architecture, engineering and most sciences require hard study as well as 30 or more hours a week at lectures, while many of the arts subjects have weekly attendance hours in single figures - it's just disgusting that those people are given a degree at the end of three years.

[llamatron]

Only if you consider that the sole reason for the qualification is to give an advantage over the other applicants in a job interview.

Clearly if everyone in the population had a qualification it improves the education of the whole population, and there are many advantages to that like for instance people making more informed decisions in life.

 

However, in listening to the debates about this on Radio 4 over the last week it seems that many degree courses give only a small amount of lecture/tuition time per week. Three or four hours per week is not unusual. You have to ask the question why are these institutions allowed to charge full time course fees for a neglectful programme like this ?

I maintain that there are many degree courses which are not up to the standard, and should have a lesser reward than a degree if they cannot prove that they have the rigour of a full time degree course.

 

I was thinking about this the other day. The third year of history had I think 3 hours contact time a week, science had 24 hours. The fees were the same. It seems like history is overcharging (particularly as a history degree costs next to nothingin consumables whilst science requires very expensive lab materials and equipment), however you can think instead that history is subsidising science. As science is a far more useful subject this is acceptable.

 

Also degrees are about learning self teaching (or they should be), contact time is there for advice/debates rather than teaching, in the case of arts subjects anyway.

[llamatron]

It's always been the case that the vocational degrees like medicine, architecture, engineering and most sciences require hard study as well as 30 or more hours a week at lectures, while many of the arts subjects have weekly attendance hours in single figures -it' s just disgusting that those people are given a degree at the end of three years.

 

thats not true they are entirely different subjects which require different skills. A history student needs to be able to read an analyse text from many different sources, they will not necessarily need to be taught anything other than the technique of collating the information.

 

A science student will need to know and apply facts, therefore science can be taught in a lecture format whereas history cannot.

[espadrille]

I can understand the outrage - nobody wants to see fees rise. As Vince Cable said he went to university at no cost - got a grant etc.

 

But I do think that there's more than a little political showmanship going on and some of the things which are being said are (morethan slightly) ludicrous.

 

F'rinstance: Earlier this afternoon a political commentator was saying that as from next year, the government was changing the way it calculated inflation (for the purpose of calculating increases in the old age pension) from the RPI to the CPI.

 

He was outraged! (He didn't quite foam at the mouth, but he did a pretty good splutter ) "This will mean that on top of losing child benefit, OAPS will find that thier pensiosn will increase by 1% less than they would have done using RPI!"

 

Splutter, splutter splutter (that was me laughing - I was drinking coffee at the time and it went down the wrong way.)

 

How many OAPs are going to lose child benefit? How many OAPS earn enough to lose it ... and how many have children young enough to be eligible to get it?

 

Last week we learnt that some fairly well-off people were going to lose child benefit. Hardly the end of the world, but an excuse for:

 

(a) Righteous indignation from a handful of mothers who were concerned that they would no longer be able to use the CB to pay the fuel costs of running the Chelsea Tractor. - They weren't worried that they would have to stop using it, but rather that they would have to use some of their other money.

 

then

 

(b) More indignation that there would be some people who wouldn't lose the money because they had dual-incomes both of which were lower than the cutoff point.

 

I can see why people might complain that they are losing a benefit, but surely complaining that somebody else isn't is rather petty?

 

Either way, significant numbers of people found that they had an excuse to hop up and down and be indignant.

 

Now we hear about university fees going up. I've no doubt that some people are still hopping up and down about CB, so they may be too busy to get worked up about university fees. (Political timing?)

 

I heard earlier that the Students' Union at Sheffield University had a meeting tonight to discuss the proposed increases in fees.

 

Waste of time, but no doubt a lot of people hopped up and down, spluttered and made a huge fuss.

 

A few questions:

 

1. How much money is Sheffield University going to lose this year? (are they losing any this year? - There have been no announcements.

2. By how much will Sheffield University be increasing its fees? Don't the University have to know how much they will need to raise before they can decide how much they have to charge?

3. Who will pay those increased fees?

 

Given that the changes don't take effect until 2012 at the earliest and it's likely that most of the people who attended the meeting are enrolled as students at the university now, how much extra will they have to pay? Does 'Nothing' sound about right for most of them?

 

If you've just finished GCSEs and you've just started 'A' levels you will probably have to pay the higher fees. I wonder how many of those people were at the meeting?

 

Fees for EU students at Sheffield (and at other English universities) are currently capped at £3800 (or thereabouts.) That is very probably going to change. If fees at Sheffield were to increase to, say, £12000 a year, how would that compare with the fees paid by non-EU students?

 

According to the spluttering political commentator who was so concerned about OAPs losing child benefit (or one of his buddies) foreign students are paying between £20,000 and £30,000 a year RIGHT NOW at some English universities. Are all those foreigners amazingly wealthy, or do they think that what they are paying is value for money?

 

If £30,000 a year would be value for money, how would £12,000 a year be a rip-off? - I'm not advocating the (inevitable) rise in university fees, but UK students will still be paying less than the (Non-EU) foreigners.

 

If English universities are such poor value for money, there is nothing at all to prevent English students from enrolling at far-cheaper universities elsewhere in the EU ... assuming, of course that other European universities are indeed cheaper. Those universities can't charge English students any more than they charge their own students.

 

There is nothing to stop English students from enrolling on courses at universities in non-EU countries either. - Apart from the price.

 

There are some universities in Europe - notably the university in Prague, (which is regarded very highly) which offer courses in English, so the students wouldn't even have to learn Czech.

 

I read an article about 5 years ago which compared the cost of a medical degree in Prague with that in the US and with that in England.

 

The Prague course was far cheaper than the American course and slightly more expensive than a course in England - but as the cost of living in Prague was considerably lower, the overall cost to an English student was about the same as it would've been at home.

 

If UK universities are going to charge more, it will pay to shop around.

 

I've no doubt that when English universities set their fees, they will be aware that students are likely to shop around.

 

I expect that there will be a lot of huffing and puffing and a lot of indignation during the next week.

 

Another bit of political timing. Isn't next Wednesday the day that the government announces the details of the public spending cuts? - If everybody is still hopping up and down about university fees and one or two are still making a fuss about losing child benefit, that should distract people from considering the effect of the public spending cuts.

 

As ever a detailed and very informative post. Plus it made me laugh.

 

I can visualise the hopping up and down bit very well...and the huffing and puffing.A lot of hot air springs to mind really. I guess that your post puts it all in to perspective.