AIBU to think that for £3,000 per term...

[OneHandFlapping]

DS should get more than 40 hours of lectures and 24 hours of tutorials at university?

If he went to a private school, he would get 25 hours of lessons a week for a similar sum.

Why exactly are we now paying unis such massive tuition fees? I imagine they make a profit on students now, which seems wrong.

Like others have said, university is different from school. By only attending ALL his scheduled lectures, your son will just scrape a "pass". If he wants a good degree, he will have to spend extra hours (can't remember how many our lecturers told us now) reading around his subject at home.

You HAVE to do work outside lecture time, or else you will basically get a crap mark.

Dear God this is a depressing thread. Politics degrees are pointless, if you don't value education why not try the OU, go and get a free degree everywhere else in Europe. It shows why we need unis to teach research and critical thinking skills.

I think the OU gives a fanastic education. My FIL has done OU maths courses and he tells me that they are far better than the degree courses he did. I imagine that going to Europe to do a degree would give a student a second language as well as degree.

If we want to increase partisipation in higher education then we have to make it easier for people to combine work with learning.

I am sure that politics is an interesting degree, but the economics may not add up if you are doing a degree to get a better job. Is it worth getting into 60K of debt to get a politics degree?

There is no doult that the politics students subside the science degrees. Whether this is fair, I am not sure.

Plumcious, what did your university spend other £36m on?

i think universities spend huge amounts on unnecessary projects - such as impressive halls of residence - at the same time as cutting courses (Exeter a prime example, they ran out of money on a building project and axed music, chemistry and art to fund it)

the overheads are stupid, and much higher than they used to be. you can get the same knowledge living in digs as in en-suite broadband plumbed halls.

ReallyTired, first of all, thanks for the links to Coursera and the other organisation. It looks fascinating, I may even do one of their modules myself if I ever get the time. But forgive me, I have to disagree with you on a number of points that you made.

You have to keep in mind that organisations like Coursera are able to offer their free (or very cheap) courses only because the cost if borne by somebody else. The lecture recordings that they offer did not just spring up. They were created by people working for universities and getting paid for their work (even lecturers have to make a living), by taxpayers money and private donations that pay for research that creates knowledge that goes into the lectures, by universities paying the publishers to create their libraries, etc.

Then, distance learning courses that educate "tens of thousands of students" at once (as Coursera claims) have their uses, but they will not provide you with an opportunity to discuss something one-on-one with the researcher/teacher who created the course. They often do not provide good library services. How conducive the online environment is for learning as opposed to physical interaction is also highly questionable (e.g. attempts to build Second Life universities have all flopped).

Yes, we have to make it easier for people to participate in education. But why does this have to be while these people work? Why do degrees have to be primarily about getting jobs? Why does everything have to be about people providing labour to corporations? Why should not societies instead focus on raising thinking citizens and not employees and on providing people with resources for this education? In my opinion, education should be free for anyone willing and able, and perhaps students should even get financial support for their living while they learn. Societies in the developed world are built on education. It is worth spending tax money on it.

Its difficult, because I did a history degree and had 4 contact hours in my last year. 4 hours, that was it. But, I am aware how valuable access to the libraries was and how much that costs if you try and buy membership to an academic library if you are not a student.

I worked every summer through my degree and all through my second year, but the cost of loans from my degree plus my PGCE year, means I will never finish paying them back. My investment in my education is never going to pay for itself - and I am reasonably well paid and needed my degree to get my job.

I don't know what the answer to university funding is, to be honest I have given up worrying about it because otherwise the idea of being in debt my entire life might scare me too much!

YABVU to think that the university is making a profit from the fees. But YANBU to resent your son paying fees. University funding is a very complicated business and the majority are currently making a loss from their traditional teaching activities.
It's debatable whether there is any graduate premium these days. The calculations cited in the media (and by the government) are ages old and date back to when less than 5 per cent of the population had a degree. Your son might be better off learning a trade IMHO. And that's after 8 years working as a university careers adviser.
I advise all to look very closely into the statistics regarding employment, graduate premiums and so on....
That is all.

You are paying for the facilities, for the libraries and access to journals (very expensive), as well as teacher's time and other staff.

You'll probably also find that people in research posts (funded by research grants) are also expected to teach. So, it's the R&D funders that are being cheated, not the students. :o

Full time academics do research, but that's what they are supposed to be teaching the students. A university is a place of learning, for students and teachers.
You cannot teach what you don't do.

PatronSaintOfDucks

"
Then, distance learning courses that educate "tens of thousands of students" at once (as Coursera claims) have their uses, but they will not provide you with an opportunity to discuss something one-on-one with the researcher/teacher who created the course. They often do not provide good library services. "

The nice thing about coursera is that you can try out different degree subjects. I have enjoyed one of the computer science modules. There is no degree certification so it is definately learning for learning's sake for me. I have a physics degree already so have no desire to do another degree full time. The course I chose had bullitin boards and facebook page. You can discuss the course with other students and if there is sufficient interest an academic might choose to contribute to the thread. Its a different way of working.

The costs of Coursera or EdX have been bourne by a mixture of philanthropists, tax payers and the insituations themselves. There is huge difference between listening to lectures over the internet and the marking involved with producing course work and assessing a degree.

Maybe in the future we can online video conferencing so that people can pay for a tutorial. I think that studying full time for a degree is a benefical experience, however education should be a life long pursuit. Learning new things and stretching the mind is what keeps us alive. I would love to do another degree in pychology and computer science, but its not affordable.

My issue is that many people are stuck with huge loans for the rest of their lives and that puts a lot of people off education. I feel we need to be imaginative in bringing the costs of education down. Prehaps coursera could provide lectures and a local university could provide marking, tutorials and assessment for some modules.

I lecture in journalism. Our students get up to 25 classroom hours and three tutorial hours a week, depending in their year of study.

As well a huge amount of access to latest kit and software, a state of the art newsroom and so on.

There's also Access to learning services, careers services, student support, one-to-one support for disability and some learning difficulties

I think some of the ideas of what university offers are out of date. Students access so much more than simply lectures and seminars...

Although the £9,000 a year my children are paying seems horendous, it is £15,000 for our local private schools. It is a shame that there is nothing more for the money than my son paying the £3000 gets. But it is still worth them going IMHO, even if they never earn enough to pay off the debt.

They are learning to learn in a way they did not have the chance to do at school. One is learning a language from scratch which they did not have the opotunity to do at school, and it is well taught.

Why do masters courses often cost less than one year of an undergrad degree though? The one I'm on costs 4600 for the year. You get all the usual library access and about 12 hrs of lectures a week. Plus many assignments which have to be marked, exams and a supervised project. But undergrads at the same university pay 9000 per year.

Depending on which University your child is attending you may be getting a bargain. Our ds attend not very expensive London/Surrey day schools. We pay circa £6,500 per term. Sounds like a bargain to me. We are looking forward to paying 1/2 what we pay now.

OP: state universities in this country are charities, any 'profit' they make must be used for achieving their objectives as charities, for the benefit of the public.

ReallyTired, I agree with "I feel we need to be imaginative in bringing the costs of education down. Prehaps coursera could provide lectures and a local university could provide marking, tutorials and assessment for some modules." But there is also another way - e.g. spending less on bombs and killing people in foreign countries because we think they may have bombs.

Also, as a lecturer who works for a university that has a zillion distance learning modules and foreign partners, I have to do loads of marking for these programmes as you suggest. From the perspective of a lecturer, it's hell. Marking, especially on an industrial scale and for students that you have never met, is mind-numbing, soul-destroying activity. I think we should be primarily thinking not how to make the degree provision cheaper, but how to change the social and state agenda from prioritising war and corporate greed over the human right to education. Savings can be made of course, but turning universities into distance learning production lines is, in my opinion, not the answer.

" But there is also another way - e.g. spending less on bombs and killing people in foreign countries because we think they may have bombs. "

I think that we should stop killing people full stop however we fund universities.

I like coursea materials produced by Princedon university. Its nice having mini quizzes every ten minutes to see that I have understood. If I haven't got something I can then go back and replay the lecture. If that doesn't work then I can post on a bullitin board. The traditional lectures I had on my undergraduate course were an hour and there was no opportunity to ask questions because of the sheer number of people in the hall. A minority of the lecturers I had were utterly awful, they were very bright but completely inarticulate. I remember a lecture on solid state and lasers where the gentleman just put overheads on the projector of notes that had been copied out the book in complete silence.

I am not surprised that endless marking is soul destroying. I think that students need face to face contact to discuss work. (Or at least Skype).

The world's population is 7 billion and if we are going to give degree education to 1 billion people then its going to have to be mass produced as there aren't enough academics on the planet to educate so many people by traditional means.

Im paying $39,000 a year for Ds2. He has class 4 days a week from 1pm till 7 pm. Outrageous

4 year college,just shoot me

I live in the US so it would be totally and utterly fab if that's how much we had to pay for uni.

oldtrout and Hopandaskip I'm in US too, Ds's UNi was $37,000 a year and no waiting till you are earning well before the pay back for loans start.
9 months after graduation they want money, working or not. Ds has 8 more years of payments poor guy.
He's in UK and until lately was earning under £18,000 all his work mates were whinging about starting to pay back recently till he told them what he's paying and it never goes away till it's paid off.

Well, OP, my friend's ds gets 26% of his week in lecture and seminars (much of his course being 'research-based' (e.g. Football Manager, Call of Duty...) I have no idea how they can justify this.

I've looked at the stats for ds's course and he gets just over 45% of the week in lectures and seminars, which looks slightly more encouraging.

(Whether he gets there, is another matter..... out of my control)

ReallTired, the UK academics do not have to educate the whole 1 billion! Most countries have their own. And we are actually not doing so badly in the UK in the past few years, even considering all the domestic widening participation and the fact that we teach thousands upon thousands foreign students here in the UK, on foreign campuses and through distance learning.

However, I do agree that lectures in massive lecture theatres with hundreds of students are vile. Lecturers hate them just as much if not more than the students. And online tools can be used to bring more interaction to the courses as long as the students are proactive themselves to take advantage of them.

alcofrolic, 45% of the week in lectures and seminars (not even labs, which would make it more sensible)? 20 hours a week sitting in classrooms? I am astonished. Which uni is that?