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?

Yes but do you agree that people on 50k cannot lose £40 a month really Riven? The exceptions I can think of are single parent families who have to work and pay childcare but again this is time limited and going off on a tangent about childcare costs and whether they should be tax deductable or something.

The alternative is that they do not go to university and either

a) Earn less overall (and therefore would have been better paying that outlay)

or

b) Still earn the same amount and therefore we need to question why we are encouraging so many students into higher education.

Of course there will be a group in the middle who get affected. Possibly those who earn around 30 - 35k I think who end up paying for 30 years. I can't work it out properly but they would probably end up paying the full amount back with interest on it. Those less would pay lower payments for the 30 years and those over would pay it off quicker and therefore pay a bit less.

It is still a small part of overall pay. I have now got a job in the mid thirties and yes would miss my child benefit but that is more to do with childcare costs than anything. I would give it up after they had finished. I pay back about £150 a month on this system.

Mumnwlondon - yes I think students should really think now about whether their degree will benefit them or not.

Saying that I think we run the risk of perhaps a minority going to uni, runnig up these debts of 27k and never paying them back because they did a 'surf studies' degree and couldnt get a well paid job or decided to stay home and have a family. Won't pay a penny back then.

Ok I only read this thread until this afternoon, but get the impression that all the lecturers are scrapping at trying to justify their jobs and how important they are, welcome to the new world that is a free market of HE! You will lose your jobs unless you can justify your value to the students paying 9K a year to you.

Horses for causes etc. It's not your fault or your new customers fault it is the governments fault.

Maybe you should give up your salaries to the big society and volunteer.

Pisses me off that our useless students, i.e future managers, doctors and leaders are being treated this way when everone else got a reasonable dealt, yes everyone under 17 today!

Nick Clegg should resing!

Bad typos [blush[

My friend is professor of engineering at very well respected uni and she said they are not concerned about fees. The course costs £15k per student per year to run and they will charge the full £9k. They already have 50% overseas students paying £15k and its so heavily subscribed that they now ask for 3As at A-level for their UK students.

She did say though that some of the less good universities might find it harder to fill their places.

Several of my students have told me (and been kind enough to write to me and say) that I have made a massive positive contribution to their lives.

Not necessarily their earning power, you understand. But I believe that is not all there is to life.

And if I gave up my salary it wouldn't pay for much of anything else. I guess I could stack shelves: I have worked out that on a night shift it can pay more than my hourly rate at the moment.

And I do volunteer.

Mum wonderful that the courses on offer are will be taken up by overseas students. Pisses me off this sort of post but guess there will be other mumsnetter in the know that will shout me down.

Let's face it we import most of our goods so why not students, at least we will keep the HE going in England and these lecturers that supported this disgusting policy in a
job for a short while.

My friend said that the problem was that the course costs £15k to run and the government funding/fees has been for way less than this amount. She claims that the ONLY way for them to offer world class degrees has been to offer half places to those who would pay full £15k fees.

Be pissed off if you like, but the reason for the overseas students has been due to the lack of government funding over several years. Not the universities fault.

Reckon the academics are bricking themselves now. Big Society, tripling student fees, making them work for their money. Closing down of crap unis soon, good on them they should have supported the students and our bright kids.

I don't have any sympathy for them losing their jobs.

Students are the taxpayers of the future and I feel they should receive support. They are trying to further their education and improve their lifechances, they arent idling on street corners with the 'gissa pound' mentality as I see many grown adults do. Students are also the doctors, lawyers, bankers, therapists, carers etc of the future..if Unis are full of 'hooray henrys' then it strikes me that if we need their services in the future, unless we have money to pay for their services we can toddle off and die quietly. There wont be any NHS and these people certainly wont treat you for free. I will never believe that this government is prepared to assist Uni students of low income families and wont be at all surprised if a government announcement (worded very 'subtely' of course) comes out soon to prove that point.

No country can prosper if they dont care about the education of their youth. This is supposedly the 'United Kingdom' and yet in Wales Uni fees are heavily subsidised and in Scotland, its free. How exactly is that fair to English students? Students here are villified, yet the bankers who are taking the p*ss out of taxpayers and doing very nicely out of it thank you, wont have the government clamping down on them. Id rather pay tax towards funding education than to fatten up banker's bonsues.

There are many people who benefited from free Uni education in the past, but would begrudge that same chance to young people today. As for EMA - I have 2 children at college and with this about to be cut, it will be problematic for me. They now arent even sure they will go to Uni. They dont fancy incurring debt.Why would they? Young people can actually think for themselves; as adults we wouldnt necessarily want to have huge debts around our necks, so we cant expect young people to be happy about it. Its not as if there are jobs out there either, there are many young graduates who are unemployed.

I graduated in 2008, went straight into a graduate job at 19k - two and a half years later after pay freezes I'm just shy of £20k. I have a degree in accounting and finance and 16k worth of debt.

I'm not worried about the debt I pay back £50 a month - however I would love to know where I can get a job which is 40k a year!!

christmaseve I don't believe you are real. However can you point out where these lecturers are who are supporting this rise in fees and why they would be doing so?

And just to humour me, could you explain why lecturers currently don't work for their money?

And also what is your job just so we can decide whether we think you should lose it or not please.

I am really hoping you are not as ignorant as you sound.

Oh and strangely students don't pay me 9k ...

Here in Nature jobs - lectureship position

For those who don't know, Nature is the top British science journal, and the jobs that are advertised in it are the cream of the crop. A lecturer in Britain in biological science can expect to start on 37k. That isn't just after a degree, that's after a degree, a PhD, and at least three years of postdoctoral work. So they will be at least 27 (probably more). Plus the person who gets the job will have to have an impressive set of publications and presentations at conferences. Lecturer positions are very competitive.

So a graduate who is highly intelligent and productive and in a very hard core field will have to wait until they are at least 27 to get close to 40k.

The other point is that all the people on here complaining about the lecturers should know that they are anything but lazy fat cats. They have to study for at least 6 years, for a start (as long as medical doctors). And then they work extremely long hours. My DH and I decided that he would not take a lecturer job that he was offered, because we actually wanted him to see the children occasionally.

They don't just teach, and even that takes a lot of preparation and marking - it's not just turning up on the day! They also have administrative duties (particularly the more junior staff). And they have to do their own research so that they can publish, and supervise their PhD students, and they have to write grants to get the money to fund the research and PhD students. Which is harder and harder to find in this environment. My old boss was a professor (top rank) in a highly regarded medical school and he was getting grants rejected all the time. For the junior lecturers that we knew, almost every weekend was spent writing grants or in the lab trying to get that elusive result that would get them a Nature or Science paper, in order to get more status, in order to get grant money.

christmaseve

The places on the courses I teach will never not be filled -- it's massively popular and competitive. There are people who'd be willing to pay a lot more than 9k for it. Like melezka, I also have a clutch of thank you letters telling me what a difference I've made to people, and those really keep me going through long hours and intense stress.

The trouble with the fee increase from my perspective is that I want to take the best candidates, not the subset who are not put off by a massive debt burden. There is zero reason for me to be "bricking it" for myself, but I certainly am grieving for the damage this will do to access.

In times of recession you and old turn to education as there are no jobs so it's not surprising there is current high demand.

Places where no one will go and where lots of people drop out will have problems but that is simple market forces.

As no student pays then even the poor (who will have unfair advantages given to them under the scheme as it is) are treated no worse than anyone else and only if their IQ is 80 and they cannot sit down with a calculate and work out some XYZs earn £200k a year or whatever will they put off. If they are so lacking in ambition and intelligence that they cannot do those sums then they are better off remaining on the sink estate in minimum wage jobs.

Riven, I can understand why it's strange for you, comparing what your DD does with what you did at university. My parents are exactly the same: they spent long hours doing lab work and attending lectures and found it very odd seeing me not doing those things (I did the same course as your DD). I think it's additionally hard, because of course we all speak English and we all read books, so people tend to think that English research is something any fool could do from the basis of general knowledge. It's not, but it has taken me the best part of 10 years to convince my scientist dad of that! I suppose what I'm trying to say is, it might be worth taking it on trust that the academics who run the course do know what they're doing, even if it looks oddly unstructured to a scientist like yourself.

I'm absolutely sure that degree sets you up with great skills and makes the idea of structuring your own time much less scary than it is to most new graduates.

christmas, for what it's worth, I've spent the last two weeks, and plan to spend the next four, preparing my teaching course so that it's as good as it can be. I've looked at feedback sheets and emails and talked to students and I'm trying my damndest to make a really exciting course that my students will enjoy and that will do exactly what they want.

I'm a PhD student; I'm not even on the employment lists and this is something I volunteered to do.

Ta very much for the support though.

Yes I'm real just a bit wound up with the rises. I think some people working in the profession were in favour of it as it will ensure that funding for all the courses will still happen. The alternative might have been that a lot would be for the chop and that would threaten jobs.

It will be interesting to see the rush of applications for 2011 and what will happen with numbers applying in 2012. I can imagine that a fair few students won't get a place in 2011.

The last thing these rises do is guarantee funding for courses. There are some in the profession who are in favour, or neutral; the benefit they see is more freedom for institutions.

The fact that numbers don't drop as a result of debt doesn't mean that the best candidates are getting onto the best courses, just that someone is. There is a massive problem with poorer/educationally disadvantaged students effectively deselecting themselves by not even applying to institutions perceived as elite. The institutions themselves need to work harder to smash this idea, but it is also often reinforced by teachers and parents who are basing their views on hearsay or outdated anecdote. For me, working in one of those institutions, the gauge of how these rises affect intake will not be how many apply, but who they are.

Agree.

It was said of tuition fees previously, that they might be encourage only the brighter people to apply. Surely no-one thinks this actually happened, so why expect it to happen now?

Those poor who are being so silly as not to be able to go on line and get out their calculators are may be people we don't want in universities anyway. It's not very hard to see if I do X degree I might earn X and that the repayment on the debt is not very high and if I don't get a job then I don't pay the debt.