So uni fees are going to increase?

[nearlylovemyusername]

University sector calls on Labour to raise tuition fees to ‘stabilise the ship’ (ft.com)

Given paywall, the essence it this:

"One former university vice-chancellor said the fact that Labour had acknowledged the sector was “in crisis” indicated that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and Phillipson, who have not ruled out a tuition fee increase, were likely to act.

“The short-term pain of putting up fees could be blamed on the Tory inheritance . . . and then traded against a transition to a better deal for young people, which Labour can deliver before next general election,” he said."

So it won't be limited by VAT on PS, uni fees will be up, potentially significantly and repayments for higher earning grads will go up much more - this is what artical says.

We really don't need yet another Bristol cheerleading event thanks..

Every single HE thread.

Bristol quickly glossed over the fact that in the previous years some students were accommodated in Wales and bussed over to Bristol every morning for lectures. Luckily dc saw through the sales pitch and went somewhere else.

@user29759764277 We didn’t need incorrect info either. Who are you to be so judgy??? As for HE - which unis have threads all to themselves? Oh - I know! Oxbridge. They have hundreds of cheerleaders. My post was factual. I don’t give a flying f-ck where sc choose!

We now have the situation where young people don’t even get interviews for basic jobs if they don’t have a degreee or equivalent.

This was caused by New Labour and I can’t see the current Labour lot fixing it.

Funded out of general taxation, as in Scotland.

I started working many years ago two weeks before my sixteenth birthday. I had reasonable O levels after attending a Grammar school. Only 'clever' pupils stayed on to do A levels and only the really 'clever' ones even thought of going to University.
But in those days, there was afterwork classes in O level subjects at local colleges. l needed and passed Biology. At the same time, l was released from work (NHS) one morning and had to attend an evening class each week. This involved difficult bus journeys to get there. These classes were in the theory structured around the department l was working in at the time, taught by experienced people working in the same field.
We took exams after two years and gained a higher qualification after another three years.

Much later on this all changed and a degree became necessary to start in the job.
New starters had not got the practical experience we had gained while being trained.
My DGson, taking A levels this year, gives me odd looks when l say l had been working for three years by the time l was his age.
I posted this because l find these discussions so interesting and wonder if it is realised just how much education has changed for young people these days.

I'm baffled by your post. Excellent teaching is of course a good indicator of a university. That's literally what a university is for. It's not teaching OR research - all lecturers will have a PhD.

My God, you sound truly awful.

Oh man. Tory HQ are really majoring on mumsnet. It’s SO obvious.

That poster is not Tory HQ. In fact anyone who says those exact words now cannot be taken seriously anymore. The debate is the debate. It isn’t bloody partisan. There’s no good vs evil here, this is not Trump America.

Well - if you are kicked out of PS, the money can be diverted to ensure debt not accrued in Uni, which puts them in a great position starting out

Who should set up and pay for alternative training provision for our 18 year olds?

disagree. It’s a bit unsophisticated to be honest.

Also, I really don’t know what you’re on about with the trump references and simplistic ‘good versus evil’ stuff. What do you mean, can you explain??

Should the only criteria by which we judge university courses be how much the graduates end up earning? I'm quite conflicted about that.

@Araminta1003 Are you talking about me?

@HowardTJMoon Do you not think we are past people having a really expensive education and then putting little back into society? I truly believe education is the key to families improving their life chances. I would like apprenticeships to be far more widely available for 18 year olds. We don’t need so many young people with degrees who then have to do jobs that don’t need degrees.

Yes, they have grown up, had a blast living away from home (or not these days) and are possibly more self reliant but we all know some degrees aren’t great for social mobility. Therefore we need better careers advice in school and at uni.

A friend’s DC wanted to do a masters. An absolutely great one with excellent job prospects.At the best uni for the course. Decided a dead end job was better. No real money issues for masters as full loan guaranteed and masters was at home uni so would live at home. There’s just no ambition. This is a science grad, first class from RG uni. What was the point? The uni even gave a bursary. Lack of ambition is killing the uk. Even people who are bright, well qualified and essentially hard working don’t want a job in a very exciting scientific field. So what is the point of a degree (that costs £27,000 pa if you are an international student) but you didn’t remotely need it?

So we need higher expectations. If someone just does a job any 18 year old could do, why are we using up all this money? There used to be an understanding that grads got the best jobs. They trained for professional careers. This is now impossible for thousands so working and studying makes more sense.

To shamelessly quote Sir Humphrey Appleby:

"We have to look after the universities... both of them"

I hope they don't put fees up & I'm a Labour voter, ds starts in September & with the fees as they are now he will have £100k of student debt as his course is 5 years, foundation year, then 3 years for degree & 1 year PHD which he needs to become chartered.

Interesting, you say “new money” with an air of judgement. For what it is worth I wouldn’t consider us new money either. We are the squeezed middle, propping up the countries service industries with next to nothing left to show for it at the end of each month.

We are more fortunate than many in that we have thankfully paid off our mortgage, but we have only been able to do that as we live on one of the most deprived areas of the country and have made sacrifices in other areas.

There was no choice for our DCs education, but the local comp. Through nurture and hard work DCs are still coming out with excellent grades; though no doubt having to climb over many more hurdles than the ‘independent and boarding school children’ or children who are fond of ‘quads’.

If DC doesn’t feel like he with be comfortable in the accommodation of Bristol or Oxford or anywhere else for that matter, so be it. I’d much rather he feel at home at the end of each day whilst still studying the degree of his choice. Names and ‘old money’ do not turn our heads

All universities will try and sell themselves at an open day - that’s what open days are for!

Well, if we’re expecting students to take on £60k worth of debt and then pay it back, then the extra earning power of a degree is kind of important….

Our students often get reasonably paid jobs at the end of their degrees. However, that's not because our history degrees or English literature degrees are amazing. It's because it's a top London uni and a lot of our students stay in London. It's great they earn ok but by living in London they also fork out over 1k in renting a room in a flatshare. So yes they might start with 30k but they are also a lot poorer than if they were living in North of England. So what does it mean for a degree to be worth it?

Well, if we’re expecting students to take on £60k worth of debt and then pay it back,

We're not expecting them all to pay it back.

@RogersOrganismicProcess It’s nearly always reasonably well off people who will pay £9000 a year for a swish hall. It makes not one jot of difference to studying or making friends. It’s perfectly ok to go into cheaper accommodation and quite frankly, it’s good some unis still have it! You clearly have money to burn. Good for you. So do I but I’m not sneering at old fashioned accommodation. I actually think it’s great as do lots of others.

@Ifyubrgku The Ifs does the number crunching on that! They use earnings over and above what a non degree holder would get. Obviously grad tax matters too so it all needs weighing up. What you earn in year 1, isn’t your lifetime earnings. Or even 10 years in. So that’s the measure.

In London, there’s more mobility between jobs and some really well paid jobs simply aren’t in other areas. Also some students love London. Even students born and raised elsewhere move to London for the career they want. And the variety London offers. Also London based students just live at home so it’s win win for them.

@TizerorFizz as I said, I'm conflicted.

On the one hand then yes, it's a lot of money for a degree so economically it makes sense to get the most financial return on the investment.

On the other, though, I wonder where such a strategy would take us as a society and how we should measure that return. Teachers, nurses, physio's etc rarely earn much but provide value to society. On the other hand if you do PPE at Oxford and go on to work in hedge fund management then you could end up fabulously wealthy but are you actually contributing to society as a whole? Or just making a small number of wealthy people a bit wealthier?

On the third hand, there's people like my niece. She is absolutely passionate about anthropology. Got an Oxbridge Masters in it. Lives and breathes for bits of pottery and flint shards. She gets some work here and there checking construction sites for artifacts but it's never going to make her rich. But it does make her incredibly happy. Should she have been persuaded to do Computer Science instead because programmers earn more?

I genuinely don't know.

The only criteria, no. Nursing degrees are the obvious example: a nurse who takes career breaks to raise children won't necessarily pay back her student loan but that's not a problem.

But if the tax payer is going to massively subsidise the degrees of future low earners then the government probably gets a say in what they're paying for.

The hedge fund managers are doing their bit by paying their loans back in full with a bunch of interest, keeping the system more or less afloat.

The archeologists are more of a judgement call. I don't think there's ever going to be enough of those super-qualified experts to be a real strain on the system, and I see their value, but I do think there's a fair number of people (mostly women) with arts degrees in search of "cultural" jobs earning bugger all and being exploited in unpaid internships for years on end. (My mathematician assistant in the financial sector was supporting one). They get less flack than people who do media studies in an ex-poly because they're middle class, but I'm unconvinced.