AIBU to have submitted 2 fake applications to The New College of Humanities today?

[ManateeEquineOhara]

Namely Agnes Nitt and Draco Malfoy.

Am considering doing Bart Simpson in a sec. I hate elitism.

You are so right crystalglasses. As I said earlier both DP and I took out professional loans because our parents couldn't afford the fees for our post-grad studies. Twenty years down the line we are in a reasonable financial position, I guess far better than most people.

The problem I have with those who object to things like the NCH is that I simply dislike the idea of anybody, whether they are on the left or right of the debate, dictating where or how others should be educated

I agree with you Xenia. the system assumes at the moment that parents with reasonable income levels want to subsidise their children's higher education, but if they do not, then the student is stuffed basically, unless they were officially thrown out by their parents at least two years beforehand, (iirc) they cannot claim a bean.

Whereas students from low(er) income families (although actually the cut-off levels are actually quite high compared to the 'average' wage) qualify for a sliding scale of help with fees from the government, (some people get all of them paid) and can then top up their maintenance loan with burseries from the university itself. I believe average bursery awarded for a students who have already qualified for help with their fees is about £1200. That means that many students are automatically about £4000 better off per year than others.

Although parents are not 'legally compelled' to support their children, they are emotionally blackmailed into it, knowing that their will be worse off than students from low income families.

It beats me why parental income should be a factor at all TBH. In every other respect they are adults, not children, and they should all be treated equally, with an increased maximum for student loans to reflect the true cost of living whilst studying.

The government goes on about it being 'fairer' for students from poorer backgrounds, but the only truly fair way would be to treat everyone the same. It's not about fairness, it's about social engineering and positive discrimination.

"If people don't like the sound of it (I doubt I'd send my children there as employers won't have heard of it etc) why does it matter if someone sets it up?"

Just to wade in a bit late in the debate but to my mind it DOES matter for so many reasons, the first one being that this guy is a philosopher supposedly proposing a different (OK, American-style) version of how to do things in this current depressing climate and yet the proposition is so cobbled-together, so ill-concieved and so patronising (relying on the pull of a couple of celebrity academics), it makes me even more depressed. Set up a new kind of institution, offer a new vision of how higher education could work in the UK? OK, Great, why not? But then not even bother to design your own courses? I don't care whether it's OK under UoL regulations, it's lazy, the result of lazy, can't-really-be-arsed-style thinking.

Keep up the campaign I say!

We want people to be brave and take risks. We want them to do all kinds of things in the educational field particularyl which shake up others who may be complacent. We want them to think the impossible. We want a vast number of different things to be tried and yes some will fail and some will not. That is a free market. That is enterprise. That risk taking and chance even by long haired lefties is to be encouraged.

I think it's under the University of London so they can use their courses lawfully. They would be university of London degrees. The external people using U of L etc are allowed to use the courses.
We already have private instiutions anyway like university of buckingham and many others. There has also been the OU model.

Surely if fewer students take funds away from the state because a few go to this place that benefits us all (just as private school parents save the state so very much every year by choosing to pay twice)