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!

Lavender - wholeheartedly agree.

Titchy - rioting etc all well and good and I'm not knocking that, but where do they go from here to highlight the inequality that this will inevitably cause?

I wouldn't disagree lavender. But which course at which universities do you intend to cull? Or should nursing go back to being a nongraduate career? As soon as you impose any sort of restriction, the disadvantaged are disproportionally affected. You may have made different decisions, but most students from your background would still choose to go.

And yes there should be better non university options. Maybe apprenticeships are the way to that. I'm not convinced but time will tell.

For what it's worth I don't think nursing should be a degree course but that may be because I've had negative experiences with hcps in general and nurses and midwives in particular. I accept my view is skewed. I think that the ability to care and show kind efficiency with patients is something you either have or don't have. Getting a degree doesn't get it for you. Nursing qualifications are valuable and worthy in themselves - calling it a degree makes it more robotic and less humane. Again I accept that my negative (and rare positive ) experience skews my view.

Lavender,
You've had bad experiences so your answer is to make those people less qualified? That makes no sense

Nurses are a really good example of why I am confused about how charging fees and abolishing grants will increase funding for tertiary education. An average nurse salary is around £25k, so with repayments only starting at 9% of earnings above £21k no matter how much debt they are notionally burdened with they will not even contribute the administrative cost of servicing that debt over their working lives.

In other words, "charging" nurses to study for their degrees does not increase university funding, NHS funding or any other sort of government funding. It does however impose an extra incremental tax rate of 9% on nurses which provides an income to the loan book administrators.

I always thought free tuition fees in Britain was a huge subsidy to people who were already tremendously advantaged (in having talent, brains, opportunity & a supportive background). So it's anti progressive, transferring money from poor to relatively affluent. This would be twice as true if university places were again restricted to a relative elite few. The idea that the govt. should preferentially subsidise people from comfortable backgrounds is outrageous. It happens a huge amount in the USA (see how funding for Harvard works).

I and my parents (in 1960s) all worked to pay for university (another country).

The loans were NEVER intended to be paid back in full. The assumption was that 75% would be paid back (now revised down).

The loans were NEVER intended to increase tertiary funding - merely replace one form of funding with another.

Nursing training was completely funded by the Dept of Health. Some of that training money has moved to Dept Business Innovation and Skills who will use it to fund nursing degrees (which cost more than £9k a year). The rest will be loans like other student loans, again with the in-built assumption that not all of it will be paid back. But some of it will, so there's the saving.

I didn't say make nurses less skilled. I said make nursing a specialised non- degree subject. As it used to be.

Which will immediately give us massive inequities in the female participation rate!

I said make nursing a specialised non- degree subject. As it used to be.

But this doesn't take into account that the nursing profession has changed, globally, and that those who teach nurses nowadays do research in health sciences, so belong in a university (as they are in the rest of the world).

BTW nurse practitioners, senior nurses etc earn 30-40k+. They don't earn less than many other graduates.

I have come across too many who are as elusive on the ward as doctors. Some are too high handed to comfort me when I am scared or to proud to help me wipe my backside when I need it. If they still teach these kind of people skills as an intrinsic part of a degree then fine. Just had a terribly nice nurse practioner prescribe me a load of things I didn't need (at cost and delay to me) only to have a doc say "actually, it's this and you didn't need those drugs you need thus drug".

The more senior nurses looking after my dh are also the rudest, more like doctors, and least hands on with caring of all the staff looking after him.

I'd fully back knocking nursing back down to a diploma entry career

I just don't even think about the debt I'll leave with. I think it will be nearly 50k. It just feels like something that we can't do anything about.

Maybe we are resigned to our fate. But it doesn't feel like real money as there is no upfront cost.

I'll probably never even come close to paying it back anyway. And even if I do start repayments after year of being stuck in dead end minimum wage jobs to be earning enough to pay it back will put me in a much better position than I could have been without it.

It's all just smoke and mirrors. Nothing to strongly incentivise enough.

I'm actually more upset about the cost of student accommodation. That is a more pressing issue IMO

Hasn't nursing effectively been divided into many different categories? Some degree-educated, others only have NVQs (or similar)?

When I was in hospital for 5 days, I soon became aware of at least 4 different types of nurses (distinctive uniforms) with different types of roles, some were hardly more than glorified orderlies, and others really took charge and could make treatment decisions. So I suspect nursing already is a non-degree profession for those who want to do nursing at a more limited level. The range of options seems like a potentially good thing.

From what I've seen there are

Hca's who seem to do the actual looking after
Registered nurses
Nurse practitioner
Matron
Staff nurse
Sister's and senior sister's

Aside from HCA'S I don't know what the difference is between the rest

Also APs, another non-degree option to get into nursing is apprenticeship.

And then there are the volunteers, who just come in to give you a cuppa & try to cheer you up.

There have always been different levels in nursing. It just seems to me that by introducing a nursing degree it has lessened the importance of caring skills that used to be valued at all levels.

Nursing absolutely should be a degree subject. The scope that nurses have now in their jobs.. well. Healthcare Assistants have took over the majority of the hands on care roles, even though Registered Nurses are desperate to sometimes get back into the hands on roles they are obligated to do other things. We have more and more specialist nurses now who are absolutely vital to us, the AKI specialist and Diabetic specialist nurses we have are beyond valuable to the doctors and rest of the team.

There is no non-degree nursing option llkjj. All nurses must now have a degree to be placed on the register.

The DoH have been thinking about implementing a apprenticeship degree, but it's in consultation stage.

And AP's and HCA's aren't nurses. There's the nurses and there's staff like AP and HCA who work alongside. Like I work alongside a doctor but I'm not a doctor. I'm an assistant.

So is there a how to care element to a nursing degree because us poor patients are labouring under the misapprehension that nurses care for you? And I have now hijacked this thread with my own bugbears about some nurses I have had the misfortune to encounter.

The whole ethos of nursing is entrenched in the 6 C's and the Nursing Code (so all about care and compassion and all that), and from what I've spoke about with student nurses it underpins all their theory and practical work.

You've had some bad experiences with nurses, that's obvious, but it doesn't mean that degree nurses aren't caring or compassionate. Did you even know if they were degree nurses? It's only a couple of years ago the degree became mandatory.

I've seen time and time again patients complaining about nurses, take this one for example 'oh that nurse there shes fab she's made me tea and taken me to the toilet and had a chat with me. that other one though she's rubbish, she's just handed me medications and sat behind her desk all day'. Now the first 'nurse' in that scenario was a HCA. The second was a registered Nurse. Both have very different job roles. So whilst the patient thought the HCA was going out of her way to be nice and help her, and that the second one was mean and lazy, it was in fact both of them doing their own job roles. It's the same in my job, I get patients telling me I'm crap because I don't know something when in fact I'm not a doctor, it's just I do some similar things.

That's not to say that nurses wont try to have a chat, or make someone a cuppa, but it's the changing job responsibilities that have taken nurses away from patients And there have ALWAYS been nurses with a heart of a swinging brick or just plain rude - that's nothing to do with a degree.

In fact going back to your first point, student on the degree course have to pass 'competencies' when on placement otherwise they fail the placement. We had a student who didn't pass the first time because she wasn't communicating with patients appropriately. It ended up being a language barrier issue I'm not sure if she ever came back actually I never saw her again.

The quality of teaching is frankly shocking but i won't lie it suits me, I get my piece of paper that opens the required doors for minimum effort. Frankly I wish I could give them the £18,000 now and they had over the document because that's basically what we are doing, the whole three years is a farce. I wish I could show you the assignments I'm being set you'd actually laugh.

I find it odd the students don't demonstrate about many things.
I know they have done over fees, but I wonder if schools do not teach youngsters the same way as perhaps older generations?