new gov policy of restricting student numbers in some degree courses

[justanotherdaduser]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66216005

Wondering how people feel about it?

I am unsure - in one hand, it feels needlessly prescriptive. People should be free to study what interests them without government's guiding hand

But also, not everyone signing up to such courses fully understand the degree outcomes.

Or, why should tax payers fund courses that are not good value for money? But by that logic, over time, we can lose many other valuable courses (IMO!)

Confused!

@xenia it would be interesting to see how grants and loans are accounted for. Effectively no upper household income cut-off in Wales. Over 62k ish in England it’s just minimum maintenance loan, about 4.5k, in Wales a student from above that income threshold can have the full maintenance loan still, and below that it’s a mix of grant and loan.

Wales and Scotland have both broadly followed the IFS view on what the max maintenance loan could be given inflation.

@singingstones that’s a bit of a generalisation though. The higher education landscape in London is very different to any other English regions, even when compared with the South-East. Welsh take up is about the same as that for the North-East and only slightly less than that in the Yorkshire and Humber or the South West. So yes, HE participation is relatively lower but Wales is not an outlier by itself. The picture is more nuanced than that.

So if we just stop the wrong sort of people from going to university in the first place, then obviously they'll all start votingConservative… 😂

So yes, HE participation is relatively lower but Wales is not an outlier by itself. The picture is more nuanced than that.

I didn't say it was an outlier, just that it was low compared to England. Even looking at the breakdown of English regions, Wales is third lowest I think, out of maybe 20 total?

Obvs as nations they are difficult to compare, because England is so much bigger and their policy is the same everywhere. I only went there in response to the "English taxpayers giving £1000 to Welsh students" thing. But I am not surprised that the Welsh (Labour) govt reckons the relative poverty of Wales might be partly responsible for the relatively low progression to HE, and is trying to remove financial barriers to education.

9 English regions.

I quite agree there is a gap. Although going back to 2006 the progression rate for England and Wales was almost identical back then.

as with many things the Welsh Government perhaps needs to take a good hard look in a mirror.

I’ve Welsh heritage so I’m not going to trivialise the deprivation particularly in those former mining communities.

however if you look at parliamentary constituency level the gap in Wales between those with the higher take up and those with the lower has widened not narrowed.

For the Cardiff constituencies, and the others at the higher participation end, the likes of Monmouth, Newport, Vale of Glamorgan at worst a 10 point percentage point participation increase as compared with 2006.

at the other end the likes of Torfaen, Islwyn, Blaenau Gwent, Rhondda, Neath, and out to Preseli have seen single digit increases, mainly less than 5%. Preseli has actually gone backwards. If there is a silver lining Blaenau Gwent has moved from the lowest rate at 15.5% to 23.8%, though still leaving it third lowest, and less than half the take up in Cardiff Central or Cardiff North.

@boys3 Bucks is poorly served for local unis. Look at where Bucks New sits in league tables. It used to be great. I went there when it was a HE college.

I also think HNC/D courses were better when taught by post 92 unis. We had the same staff that taught degrees at Oxford Poly. Far higher quality than my local FE college.

It's hard to know what to make of those numbers without more information - good news that participation is rising in most areas. Really good. But if WP is what you're after (I don't know what the WG goals are, whether they are targeting specific demographics or not), it would help to know who is now going, who wasn't previously, iykwim. There are plenty of poor people in all the constituencies you mention who could be driving the increase.

There are obviously many factors in play apart from student finance - areas where few parents are graduates, lack of family support, poor attainment in schools, low numbers doing A levels, poor public transport, less choice of local universities for those who want or need to stay at home (a choice of 0 for many in Wales, including those in Pembrokeshire, so not surprised about that - this might be the biggest problem actually, if you think how many options Cardiff DC have compared to those in Ebbw Vale or Abertillery or even Neath.

It may be that the fabled squeezed middle is driving the rise, which is not necessarily bad if a goal is simply a better educated population. Or it may be that those from deprived areas in Cardiff / Newport / VoG etc only needed the financial leg up and they are they change. It might be that in some areas, other barriers also need to be addressed. I'm not sure how they can get around the lack of local options for so many though.

Well he may have been a Conservative supporter from age 11 but the majority of the population used become more conservative as they got to their late 40s, and this thrny translates into more Conservative votes.

It isn't university education that encourages people to vote Conservative but opportunities such as being able to buy a house and decent employment that do it.

@Reugny yes I remember reading an update on that in the press, ironically from research published by a conservative think-tank

The average Conservative voter is now older than they ever have been. The tipping point at which someone becomes more likely to vote Conservative rather than Labour has risen to 57 years old up from 43 in 2019. This means that anyone born after 1965 is more likely to vote Labour than Conservative.

The point is, the Conservatives don't give a toss about introducing policies which adversely affect our kids going to university because those students aren't going to vote for them anyway.

It's dog whistle politics as its worst – introduce a headline-catching initiative which is ill-thought through and may not even have the desired impact but hey, it plays well to the 50somethings (of which I am one, by the way, so no ageism here) who are their traditional supporters anyway.

although @thing47 as their own research shows they've largely lost a significant proportion of the 50s age group as well. Given who they have just announced as their candidate for major in London one can only conclude that they are increasingly becoming an ever more extreme right-wing fringe party. We need some uni to research as to whether the Callaghan government used the winter of discontent to put in place 100,000 plus youthful sleeper agents to be fully activated in the early 2020s. 😀

The new universities of the 1960s that changed the landscape of HE (Warwick, Essex, Sussex etc) were all agreed by a Conservative Government. I haven’t checked, but I suspect the polys were planned prior to the Wilson government too. Also the CATs became unis in 1963 after the Robbins report. So I do not agree conservatives have held back HE. To be fair they greatly increased it. Plus who was in government in 1992? Oh yes. Those anti HE Conservatives who truly set up greater HE opportunities for all. Maybe history is not studied by MN posters?

Maybe history is not studied by MN posters?

We can't tho @TizerorFizz, a degree in it won't earn us enough money 🤣🤣

Maybe history is not studied by MN posters?

I expect that most of us had left school by the time some of the events you mentioned had happened

@RampantIvy That’s not an excuse for not knowing about them though is it?

History grads do pretty well in the earnings tables. Far better than English for some reason. My history lesson actually shows why it’s important. The facts are always important. Learning from them and understanding why we did things is also vital.

Considering some of the plots in history, anythings possible