Am I missing something re tuition fees...

[Pheebe]

OK so tuition fees are not repayable until AFTER uni and AFTER you are earning over a certain amount

So why should your families pre-uni economic status be taken into account? Surely support for disadvantaged students should be focused on ensuring they have access and maintenance grants to support their daily living expenses while they are studying. Once they have their degree surely they on an equal footing to all other graduates?

Two students, both in a 40K job, one from a 'poor' background one from a 'professional' background. Who is more disadvantaged at that point by having to pay off 30K worth of debt?

What am I missing?

Riven, sadly 5 hours contact time a week at Cambridge might be worth 9k. That would be almost a day a week of attention when you include marking/prep and assuming the holidays are used to keep up to date and research.

Someone above said that a prof/reader gets 50-60k a year. If that is right and she gets a fifth of their time.....

I am assuming that an English undergraduate at Cambridge gets their tuition 1:1 if it is only 5 hours, which might be totally wrong (basing it on what it was like a number of years ago).

BTW should add that I totally understand why your son would be considering giving uni a miss despite being gifted. 'tis a sad situation.

People who think the fees will reduce the number of students - yes it will.

It's just that it won't be mostly only the brightest and the best going it will be mostly only those from advantaged backgrounds going.

This is what happens in America where high fees have always been the case. I don't think that's anything to be proud about at all.

To be honest 9k a year to get a degree from Cambridge is probably worth it irrespective of how many contact hours they get.

La - I think it's a good thing if it reduces the number of students, but not for that reason but because I hope it means that if universities see their numbers falling they'll have to up their game a bit. Idea being that there will only be a certain number of degrees that are worth getting into debt for and so places on these will increase. But of course in the meantime some will mis out, plus there will be people who will not want to get into debt for any reason, which is unfair :(

I was fortunate enough to do my law degree at a time when I didn't have to pay fees (although there was no living grant and so like everyone else I worked and was grateful for contributions from my parents).

When I came to do my post graduate professional qualifications I borrowed money from the bank (for my fees) and my parents (for my living expenses) I was fortunate enough to also get a significant bursary.

I qualified with a huge debt hanging over me, something that was made palatable only by virtue of the fact that my parents, whilst not wealthy have been able to help me financially at various stages of my life and have (I am embarassed to admit) always been able to provide something of a security blanket.

There is absolutely no way I would have taken on such a debt if my (my parents) financial circumstances were different and it was no coincidence that 99% of the people who qualified with me came from similarly privillaged backgrounds.

Additionally if I was having my time again and my debt was increased by additional grauduate fees then I would have considered the debt too great and chosen another path - there is a limit to what the state school educated daughter of an academic considers "manageable".

The public object to the arenas of law and medicine being a closed door to all but the most wealthy and this will just slam many more doors shut.

DH had a 6k student loan to get him through his PGCE, we had very little income that year as I was pregnant with DS2 and had given up work but we got through it. He got his first teaching job and started paying back a £4 a month at first, rising as his salary rose. The money is deducted at source so we never really noticed it going as it never 'came in' IYSWIM. He earns twice as much now as a consequence of his PGCE so it seems to make sense to us (he was previously a research scientist).

The country is in a real mess financially at the moment after a decade of greed and spending what we didn't have. Forgive me if I'm bitter but I was told two weeks ago that due to cuts I would no longer be getting any work and 6 months ago DH was made redundant and now works 21 hours a week. Everyone is in trouble at the moment, there is only a finite amount of money available and we're all going to have to suck up the changes, it sucks (trust me, Christmas with 3 DS and only 0.6 of a salary between is hard to take at the moment)

Can someone in the know answer this question please?
If, say, 200000 students start uni in Sept 2012, does the govt have to stump up £1900000000 (max) to distribute between unis so they can function for the year, and then wait 30 years for repayment?

I'm probably being VERY thick here, but isn't this a cumulative financial and administrstional nightmare?

Oh, and just a point about an earlier post.
ALL teachers and many nurses are graduates; MOST earn under £40k.

"dd1 is at Cambridge. She gets 5 hours of contact time a week. Thats not worth 3K let alone 9.
She can rarely find her tutors as they are busy doing whatever it is English tutors do (hardly research is it)"

Riven you posted this on another thread also, and I really think it's awful to be so disparaging when by your own admission you don't know what arts academics do (and part of that is research, actually). I can't believe you would do that about other groups of people. If you want to know what arts academics do, start a thread to put the question. The Oxbridge teaching model is incredibly labour intensive, with vast amounts of lecturers' time invested in individual students.

Many arts academics have been campaigning furiously against these cuts, including marching on the streets with our students and the lecturers' union. In the case of several of my colleagues, this has resulted in them being kettled and struck by batons. We are not the enemy here.

"Will be see university league tables that focus on teaching time/quality etc?"

These already exist, and they are constructed according to student views. See, e.g., The Guardian university league table.

We dealt with the Student Loans Company, they seem to have it all set up administration wise, it's been very easy to pay back. I don't think the admin side will change as the students would have had loans anyway, it's only the amounts that will potentially change.

Another thought was that the universities will have the 'potential' to set fees UP TO 9k, so there will be a market and universities will have to show why they are worth more than each other (I would hope, I don't think they would fare very well if they all fixed the fees together).

As for repaying the loan/mortgage applications, we were asked to fill in the box for loans 'other that student loans' as our salary AFTER deductions was being taken into account.

"Also, they don't even enforce this 15k rule atm. When I graduated I started on 21k and they said I didn't have to pay anything back yet as the repayments would be so low and I live abroad, so it would be pointless transferring such small amounts. Now on 26k and they will review my repayments again in April."?????

I suspect this is more because you live abroad rather than anything else. If you are PAYE in the UK they most definitely enforce the 15k rule. In fact, when I started repaying the limit was only 10k

"Yes a midwife on 21k will start paying back immediatly but will pay about £7.50 a month. Think they can manage that!"

£7.50 a month is £90 a year, in 25 years that would be £2250. So monthly repayments will be considerably higher if total debt is 10-15 times more than that.

And whoever said worrying about debt is puerile is a bit infantile in her thinking.

Isn't the problem that the people already leave Uni and can't afford to leave home, now they leave with £40k worth of debt too.

Yes, Posie, but that's apparently so worth it and so much not to worry about.

I mean I'm pissed off right now because we need to fork out £1800 for some car repairs and we are two full-time working adults on 100K+ a year and won't find it a breeze. (Children not in private schools either.)

How about we means test parents...the rich (income over £150k start to pay and anyone else doesn't?)

So, on 100k a year, Cristina, do you have the 3 to 6 month's salary 'cushion' in savings - the amount which is generally recommended everyone keeps in place, in case of sickness, redundancy, etc.

Not a criticism, Cristina, just interested to see a relatively small amount (compared with income before tax) that is going to be awkward to find...

I suspect it is the case that many families spend what comes in and increase their spending as income increases (or move to a bigger home, or buy a new car more often) rather than put money into savings.

Reading about how much some will spend over Christmas, it comes as little surprise that a financial body has found some are still paying off Christmas 2009....

Rather than spend cash on the lottery, for example, people could put cash into Premium Bonds (which means you'd only need 1 month's notice to be able to withdraw a chunk).

Erm yes but 5 hours of contact time = plus many many many hours of lecture preparation, reading, marking, administration, training, organising let alone researching.

Her fees also pay for estates, the library, her exams...

It is not all about the contact time!!!

I've just posted on the problems of a 'consumer ethic' on another thread. The 'what they only get x hours for x grand?' response from students and parents is going to be a difficult issue for us who work in universities...

Like Riven, I have a 'gifted' DC, I'm a single parent and work 30 hours a week. She will qualify for full maintenance grant, thankfully, but will have to 'borrow' 14K per year. Over 5 years that is 70K. We have been so depressed about what they are doing with funding for HE. On the current sytem we worked out the debt would be about 30K, this was when we started looking into the possibilites this year before all this crap came out.

However, it won't stop her going and doing something she was wanting to do since she was a small child. That's providing she gets the grades which looks doubtful as her schools 6th form have admitted that teaching standards aren't up to scratch.

She won't qualify for the government scholarship because you don't actually qualify if a parent wroks at all.

Am a bit to see riven posting that!

The general public will need more information about how universities work and what, exactly, the average lecturer is doing for their salary. And they will have to decide if they want that.

If you want jumped up A levels, then carry on backing the coalition all the way. A levels are great, in that they give students a volume of knowledge they can learn. But when they arrive at university, hardly any of them know what to do with all the facts they've memorised. Perfectly good A* students cannot string together an argument, or compile an essay, or defend a claim, or conduct independent research. Or all the things we want graduates to be able to do...

The coalition will - I think - push universities to more centralised management of teaching and marking. This will - of course - standardise things and some of you will be happier with that. But you also have to ask what will be lost? Your kids will have less and less access to the real experts, and to real cutting edge knowledge. They will have less and less access to people who know how to judge the credibility of sources and to demonstrate how the latest ideas have emerged.

If you want training, carry on shouting 'it's all about contact time'. But teaching time won't - in and of itself - lead to a 'greater' level of education in your kids. It is something most of us in universities would prefer too: more time to see our students, but not at the cost of less time to carry on doing research and writing/marking our own courses. I have half a day a week research time. I have half a day a week 'scholarship' time. My students have an average contact time per module of 2 hours, plus additional office hours which they can make use of. Many students and parents do not believe this but other than my teaching, I HAVE A COMPLETELY FULL WORKING WEEK AND I DO NOT HAVE THE SAME VACATIONS AS THE STUDENTS. I get 6 weeks.

The bottom line is, if VCs make me teach MORE something else has to go. Consumer demand will inevitably lead to more contact time I think, and therefore if research is to be maintained, the only feasible economic solution is for the govt to centralise university learning. Ho hum. Slippery slope.

And a bloody good post it is. I wonder if I know you. If not, we all seems to be saying the same thing - but it is good of you to make it explicit to people outside the system.

seem