Student Tuition Fees Increase for 18/19 to £9585/year

[bromleygirl]

If we didn't think it was bad enough the cap being lifted from £9k/year for 17/18, I have found out that for the 18/19 year, fees are set to rise for Gold and Silver uni's under the new TEF to £9585/year and then 3% each year after - subject to parliamentary approval of course. I know the uni's try to spin it by saying think of it as a graduate tax but the 30 year debt will still go against our children as they start to apply for mortgages. It makes me really upset English kids stuck paying outrageous amounts of tuition to fund the greedy uni VC's when Wales and NI are paying £3k/year and Scotland are paying nothing at all.

Yes - staff other than VCs are paid according to a nationally negotiated settlement. But the settlement is one between UCEA (the body representing universities for these purposes) and the university unions. No public sector/government involvement at all
I suspect what he may be saying is that, because it's a national pay deal, individual universities can't choose to pay their staff more or less than the nationally agreed amounts, depending on how much income they've got. Which is true (although they can, and do, choose to progress staff in different ways through the pay scales, and employ more or fewer hourly paid staff)
However, the pay deal is affected by how much income universities are getting nationally. What I'm told is a particular issue nowadays is that universities who are struggling financially are blocking more generous (i.e. in line with inflation) pay rises, which richer universities probably would agree to. And one of the many reasons why some universities are struggling financially is because fees haven't gone up in line with inflation....

but the last statistics I saw EU students alone owe in excess of £4 billion on student loans

which ones were these?

The most recent parliamentary briefing paper (24th July 2017)

researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7976

stated, section 6 page 13, a figure of 1.7 billion, or less than 2% of the total outstanding student loan debt

Also worth a browse is the latest house of commons briefing paper on student loan statistics

researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN01079#fullreport

Salaries aren't linked to public sector pay awards at all I do hope your dh understand that.... As gannet says they are nationally negotiated but there's no government body dictating what those pay awards should be, inline teachers and nurses.

user - has your university not implemented the annual pay increases?

Do you count a pay increase that is below inflation as an increase?

Yes - staff other than VCs are paid according to a nationally negotiated settlement.

Not quite true - there are no national pay scales for professors, and wide variations in professorial pay.

Also, although there are national pay scales for other academics, the way they are implemented are very different i.e. the requirements to get to Reader level can be very different between different level institutions.

That last linked document is interesting and includes

"The latest data are for 2014/15 when estimated maintenance loan take up was 89%.
Estimated fee loan take up was 93% for students in England and 69% for EU students in 2014/15"

In other words virtualyl all students take out a maintenance and fee loan which is what I think is the case too ancedotally from my older children and the twins' class this year where they say most boys in their class have parents who will ensure they have no loans (like I do) is apparently the case but those boys may just be making it up to my sons. I have heard more people this year than before say they will fund their child fully because of the high interest rate - including two work contacts -one a business person and the other a lawyer and I don't think with the first loans that came out they would have done as the rates were lowm, repayments kicked in later and starting point to repay was indexed.

User, also the large UK uni my DH works at has not seen any drop off in EU applications this year and they have also increased applications from outside the EU. The academics there have not had any of their research time reduced either.

But you need to look at the sector as a whole, not one single institution.

My own university has not lost EU applications. Nor has the teaching load changed considerably, as it has not increased student numbers since 2012. But this is simply not true for the sector as a whole - many universities have taken on a lot more students since 2012.

BTW I don't believe there is any institution in the UK where academic research time hasn't decreased over the last decade due to the ever increasing requirements imposed by the government - REF, TEF etc. It is much worse at some institutions than others - again, I am very much protected myself compared to institutions where I am an external examiner.

titchy - My DH has worked in finance all his career and has been a Uni Finance Director at 2 large universities for the last 20 years so I know he understands like I said I will ask him what he meant but maybe I misunderstood.

Gannet - thank you for your explanation.

boys - infuriatingly I cannot find the article, I know it was a FOI report (and it wasn't the Daily Mail). Thank you for your links. What are your thoughts on whether this current system is sustainable?

I'm sure there will be a knock-on effect with Brexit but DH's uni are looking at other markets to minimise the effects as I think most Universities are.

This sounds very much like the thoughts of somebody who is politically in favour of Brexit. I would be absolutely fascinated to know which university in the UK thinks they can minimise the effects of Brexit by "looking at other markets". We already work with "other markets" as much as we possibly can.

Above I was referring to loss of investment by EU companies. We are still applying for and getting EU grants, and will be hit by that loss later. But I know of a number of large technology sector investments that were lost post June 2016.

And BTW I would be utterly astonished if any university finance director had any idea about how much academics actually have to spend on research.

user - no, not at all but resigned to the fact that it is happening.

They are really concentrating on expansion in other overseas markets. I'm not saying Brexit won't impact all I was saying was that your posts came across as very negative.

People who are teachers and lecturers tend to be 100% negative about how things are going in their jobs. It was the same in the 1940s onwards and always will be. We get it - it is very tough job being a teacher or an academic and we are very grateful people are prepared to take it on.

What are your thoughts on whether this current system is sustainable?

Not remotely so.

However education policy in the UK, and even more so in England - be it primary, secondary or tertiary - is largely driven by political dogma, as opposed to any genuine evidence of what actually works. That particular nut may prove difficult to crack.

It is an increasingly odd world never mind Trump and Brexit yesterday I found myself agreeing with Lucy on something, and Nick Timothy's beard removal suddenly had me nodding at some aspects of his recent Telegraph piece.

ok spoken to DH - nearly all universities (some have opted out) subscribe to national pay bargaining between universities and colleges employers association (UCEA) and the trades unions. Evidence that will be used in those negotiations will include the fact that tuition fees were capped at £9,000 and that public sector pay increases have been extremely low in other sectors. Many universities often recruit staff with local authority or NHS backgrounds so this is used as a relevant benchmark. It is all fed into the negotiations.

People who are teachers and lecturers tend to be 100% negative about how things are going in their jobs.

Academics aren't usually negative. The trends in HE over the last 10 years or so in the UK are however mostly negative. Please introduce me to academics in the UK who disagree with that statement. (Don't point me to those who work in professional services such as finance in universities - as the changing HE climate has led to HUGE expansions in the numbers of professional staff, so perhaps they don't see it as negatively as academics do.)

user - we can agree on this and this is an issue my DH has raised on a number of occasions. There has been a huge increase in professional staff in some areas of his uni. DH has not increased staff in his areas and in some sections has managed to decrease. He has very strong views on this.

You could argue why go to a low grade university from which you won't get much of a job like an ex poly and that to take on £50k of debt for that is just a con. and therefore if you go instead to a good one you are likely to get a high law type salary

...because you have to have a degree to do so many jobs that are never going to earn you big bucks. Teaching and Nursing are the most obvious one in the public mind, along with things like SaLTs, OTs, Physios, etc. but there are thousands of people who work in jobs that have asked for degree educated people - far more than what I should imagine is a tiny % who go into banking or the few top law jobs.

They are really concentrating on expansion in other overseas markets. I'm not saying Brexit won't impact all I was saying was that your posts came across as very negative.

Any sensible university has been concentrating on expansion in other overseas markets for quite some time without any reference to Brexit. Partly because of the demographic dip at home - fewer 18 years olds - and partly because more overseas students (who pay roughly double the fees) means a better funded university with smaller class sizes and helps with metrics. Brexit provides another reason to - but overseas markets aren't unlimited, and, depending on how things work out, post-Brexit Britain may be less attractive anyway.

Of course any organisation is trying to mitigate losses from Brexit -that's just basic responsibility. But very few people think there won't be substantial losses - not just knock on effects, but direct losses.

BTW I don't believe there is any institution in the UK where academic research time hasn't decreased over the last decade due to the ever increasing requirements imposed by the government - REF, TEF etc

I calculate that I personally lose around a year's equivalent research time for every REF.

The thing that even the best university administrative/professional colleagues don't really see or understand is how/when academics do their research. The thing is that a lot of research work is sort of invisible - not the outputs such as books and so on - but the time we take to do that work. Researching and writing an 80,000 word book is hard hard work. Done at odd times snatched from other stuff.