Scrapping Tuition Fees

[fifi69]

AIBU to not understand why young people are not up in arms about tuition fees? I think young people have been screwed over by the government with regard to tuition fees, maintenance grant for poorer students and the compound interest that will be accrued on these loans. And yet I haven't seen many student demonstrations. I'm baffled as to why young people seem resigned to their fate. I'm not saying I was a firebrand when I was young, but I went on the Poll Tax riot and at least that worked!

Has any decent financial analysis been done on whether tuition fees have actually increased funding? Interesting discussion in Scotsnet at the moment. Scotland has no tuition fees and a higher participation rate than England (up until the last budget maintenance grants were lower and the repayment threshold for maintenance loans is lower than in England).

I strongly suspect that further increases to fees / reductions to grants have a negligible effect on government financing, since you need to earn in excess of £50k per year for the first 30 years post graduation to even repay the £27k. The impact on public finances may even be negative as in the past parents who could afford to may have covered the maintenance loan. There is now no point in doing this as it will hardly ever feature in the repayment schedule.

lurking - surely it is an investment for the person and the country if highly educated people are in the workforce?

I have a degree and a graduate qualification, probably around £40,000 in debt. I'll never pay it back because my degree is about as much use as a GCSE in Dance! I don't like the tuition fees but I don't know what the alternative is. My biggest fear is that they will change the rules and I'll have to start paying my loans back despite my wages.

But you could argue a lot of graduates aren't that highly educated when you look at their poor grasp of the basics (how to write a letter, simple grammar, basic office skills etc)

Who's to say that half of these universities are worth paying that amount of tuition fees?

But the people who teach degrees need to be paid, whether you think the degrees are worth 9k per year or not. In fact, most degrees cost more than 9k per year to deliver - 9k is not the full cost. If you want to cut the cost of degrees, then you basically need to cut the salaries of those who teach them - which are already amongst the lowest in the world.

It's £5k a year for the OU!

But the OU doesn't fund facilities, laboratories, libraries, the large numbers of contact hours required for STEM etc etc. I think the OU is significantly worse value for money given what they actually offer.

Elsewhere in the world, university courses are funded at 9k+ because that's what they cost. The difference is that in most of Europe this 9k+ comes from general taxation.

I think you need to do a bit more research on the open university if you think they don't offer much

Totally anecdotal but I have come across more than one graduate (including law graduate) asking questions like "so who won world war two, then". Not in a nuanced sense, in an "I don't know anything about it " sense. Not sure they got their money's worth if they didn’t pick this basic stuff up along the way.

surely it is an investment for the person and the country if highly educated people are in the workforce?

That's 2 of us. Only 19,999,998 to go .

Personally I've thought for a long time, the establishment doesn't like, or want well educated home-grown workers. They tend to be a nuisance with their odd "ideas" about social equality, and the like. Much much better to keep the indigenous workforce as deskilled as possible, and import the skills you need. Imported skills are easier to get rid of if they start having any uppity ideas above their station.

(looks at immigration debate, oh, fancy that, we are importing skilled workers).

Totally anecdotal but I have come across more than one graduate (including law graduate) asking questions like "so who won world war two, then". Not in a nuanced sense, in an "I don't know anything about it " sense. Not sure they got their money's worth if they didn’t pick this basic stuff up along the way.

And what use would that knowledge have been to them if they had known it ? (Is the question a Tory MP would ask).

From: www.stewartlee.co.uk/written-for-money/students/

In the late 80’s Margaret Thatcher, the then prime-minister, took a tour of our University. In a library she stopped and asked a young woman what she was studying. “Norse literature,” she replied. And Thatcher said, “What a luxury.” Now, Njal’s saga might not be to everyone’s taste, but in a civilised country surely we can make a space to allow someone to be the receptacle for such knowledge. As a hard and fast rule, we should judge a society by the value it places on Viking literature and the ladies drawn to learn about it.

I don't think that a country as rich as the UK cannot afford to fund its students. Most European countries do and I feel we have all too heartily swallowed this "austerity" message, whilst the super rich continue to reap the benefits.

Lurking - you may disagree but I think it is important to understand the driving forces in your country's recent history. What drove civil rights, pop culture etc. As well as the formation of the EU for the upcoming referendum. I would like to think that basic general knowledge is not only an end in itself but a help in understanding more about how we got to where we got to as a nation. You don't need a uni education to know this stuff but, if you have one, you should have some basic general knowledge to go with it.

fifi we can't fund the NHS, we are letting people die. We can't house people, we are letting people live and die on the streets. We can't help the disabled, we are letting them struggle and oh.. die.

1727895 in 2014/15. Times that by 9k fees x 3 years = £46,653,165.

You can either have 20% of school leavers going to university for free, or you can have 50+% going and paying fees. Successive governments have decided that paid-for but widened access education is better than free for a small number

However, it isn't true to say the economy has proportionally benefited from the increased number of graduates.

What has actually happened is job spec inflation, which means that receptionists, PAs, retail managers and other jobs which were previously open to people with A-levels now expect people to be graduates.
And jobs which were previously graduate roles now expect applicants to have a Masters.

So we don't suddenly have 3 times as many 'graduate level jobs' in the economy. We just have lots of people needing an expensive degree to get a job which doesn't need a degree to do it.

The biggest benefit to the economy is from the massive increase in the HE sector - more building being built, more staff employed, more students renting student houses

Grays - don't get me started on housing!

Which would you rather have, free healthcare or free education? We can't have both

Lurking - you may disagree but I think it is important to understand the driving forces in your country's recent history.

I don't disagree. In actual fact we could do with a lot more history lessons the UK. Then we might realise the despite nigh-on 1,000 years of stuff happening, 90% of land in England is still owned by the families of the Norman cronies of William the Bastard. No wonder the rest of the world has been so keen to nick English "democracy" when it can entrench privilege for a millennium.

Which would you rather have, free healthcare or free education? We can't have both

Actually, you can't have either, anyway. Nothing is "free".

Ok, let me rephrase, free at the point of use

I'm a student currently coming to the end of my degree and was part of the first cohort to be charged £9,000. I'll be coming out of uni with £40,000 worth of debt, and I'm one of the lucky ones because I was given a bursary to cover part of my first year fees, and have done a year abroad which has a set fee of £1,750. My boyfriend will be leaving with close to £60,000. Neither of us will even get close to paying it off in our lifetime, we worked out that getting the job that I want will mean that I will pay roughly £18,000 back before it gets wiped in 30 years.

It's not that students are apathetic, but a lot feel like there is literally nothing we can do to reverse the decisions made about fees. Noone listened to our protests before the fees were introduced, and they still aren't now - the £9000 fees are going nowhere whether we protest or not. Also, a lot of students use facebook and social media to protest rather than actually being in the streets doing it, because saying something online has so much more of an impact these days. Petitions get hundreds of thousands of votes because students have two minutes to do it, rather than spending a day protesting when you could be in the library. My opinion is that if I have to pay that much I might as well get as much as I can from it and protesting will not get me a good grade, nor will it wipe my debt.

sparechange - I agree that having to have a degree for jobs that don't require them has definitely been a downside to the increase in graduates. And maybe we do have to provide alternatives i.e. good training and proper internships, thereby, ensuring that only people who really want to pursue a degree go to uni. Then fees could be scrapped.

I think if it was a big enough demonstration, we would all hear about it.

Unfortunately the right-wing press is extremely selective about which demonstrations it will report on, and I see little chance of this one getting much publicity at all unless it turned violent.

BTW, have people seen that letter from Osborne from 2003 that's going the rounds? He told her that the Conservatives were absolutely opposed to tuition fees and would make sure that they were abolished if they got in. That went well, didn't it?

I'm wondering exactly where the OP was six years ago when the students were protesting? How did anyone miss that?

So you want to limit the number of places at universities in order to make it free to attend for a few?
That sounds very regressive. Surely then those excluded from getting a university education would have cause to be 'up in arms'?

More was posted while I was writing - even as someone with a tonne of student debt I would still rather have the NHS than free university, if there were a choice.

By the way to get back to the participation levels of 30 years ago you'd have to make teaching and nursing non-graduate careers, which I'm guessing no one really wants...