Tuition fees

[stoatsrevenge]

So we are to expect a massive increase in university tuition fees, as well as increasing interest ib student loans...

Here is the 6 year plan from the LibDem manifesto:

1
Scrap fees for final year full-time students

2
Begin regulating part-time fees

3
Part time fees become regulated and fee loans become available to part time students

4
Expand free tuition to all full-time students apart from first year undergraduates

5
Expand free tuition to all part-time students apart from first year undergraduates

6
Scrap tuition fees for all first degree students

How are they going to square this one?

By the way, my father was told by a professor that his year was the worst the university had taken in, that standards were slipping and that the massive increase in university admissions had come at the expense of quality. There was no way that sufficient people were bright enough to benefit from the courses available, and the government should return to earlier levels of intake.

It was 1955. University takeup was around 4%.

Here is a comparison for you.
In Australia university fees are paid either upfront (and you get a 25% discount) or you defer them and pay when you start earning over a certain amount and then it comes out of your tax at the end of the financial year.

You pay according to what you study. Degrees in arts and social sciences are the least whereas medicine and physio are the more expensive.

The majority of students get little support from parents, most have past time jobs, they get some money from the government.

I know only one person who had their university fees paid for by their parents.

I think the students of the UK should stop whinging and realise that they have it pretty easy. I came out of uni with a debt of over $35000. It has taken me 10 years to pay it off but I have and I am bloody proud that I did it myself without having to rely on handouts from mummy and daddy (or the government). I did it through sheer hard work and determination.

" if one course is 12K and one is 6K then it does matter"

Unless he's planning PPE at Oxford (the obvious candidate for a massive bump in prices) there's not being to be a rise above 6-7K in the medium term.

How about medicine at Oxford!!! I'm not saying she is planning to apply there or will stand a chance even at medicine but we were going to have a look at Oxford next spring at least until yesterday.

Serenity, no-one is saying that uni should be free but your debt of 35,000 Aus dollars is half of the debt some of our new students can expect. It is going to be pushed through very soon with only one year group being unaffected.

If Mummy and Daddy want to put their hard earned cash towards their child's university fees, then they can. As I said earlier, I'd rather he got the money now than when we're dead.

"How about medicine at Oxford!!! I'm not saying she is planning to apply there or will stand a chance even at medicine but we were going to have a look at Oxford next spring at least until yesterday."

Which offers better financial prospects: a degree from Oxford and debts of 2X, or a degree from a post-94 university and debts of X? There are exceptions, but in general terms the former is worth considerably more than the latter.

HTS that's about same as my student debt; and no aprental supportr here either, indeed I ws in my thirties, ahd 3 kids (4 for last few months) and was battling for two fo those to get a diagnosis of asd / statements / etc at same time.

Plenty of people battle far, far harder: I ahd my DH, I ws somewhat priveledged, he stayed in a job he not only loathed but the GP advised was making him ill becuase he refused to let me drop out.

Just hoping I can find a way to use the quals now!

Re bursaries:

An example

"Once you have qualified for the Grant and/or Scholarship you will continue to receive the awards on an annual basis so long as you make normal progression, regardless of any change in your assessed income."

Dh has been awarded a discretionary scholarship based on performance; turns up every march apparenlty, about £400. It helps.

Well in our case the choice might be an Oxford degree with 2X debt or a degree from another RG with 1X debt or perhaps uni's offering medicine will all charge the same amount. Whatever happens, the fact remains that if a student was born in 1993 they will pay fees of £3,290 per yr but if born in 1994 they will pay £7,000 per yr or possibly more.

" or perhaps uni's offering medicine will all charge the same amount."

I hardly think Penisular College of Medicine, or Hull College of Medicine, will manage that.

And for the case of medicine, where the provenance of your degree is almost incidental once you have your MRCP, the prestige of the "better" university is less obviously worth paying for anyway.

Peninsular, not Penisular. Although on the other hand...

Tokyonambu, your post of 10:18:37 is open to challenge. The university I work at, which has reasonably priced halls in a relatively poor area of the country, charges over £100 a week for some of it's rooms and NONE of them are catered. Paying £2,000 - £3,000 a year for self-catering is quite normal and I'm sure there are cities where you could pay more. IME, a student with £140 a week including accommodation costs is rarely well off.

Your post of 12:44 contradicts itself. If the provenance of a medical degree is irrelevant why wouldn't the less prestigious universities be able to charge as much as the big names?

Most bursaries are assessed on an annual basis using the Student Loans Company's household income figures for each student, IIRC.

To use Tokyo's annoying 'quote' back style for a moment:
'If popular departments can expand, while unpopular ones contract, that's good for everyone, surely?'

I don't think it is good for everyone actually, because I don't know what you mean by popular. If you look at it in terms of subject, for a couple of years something goes out of fashion, so the departments close. Then it comes back in fashion, and the expertise has gone and the ability to study (or work) in places of your choosing contracts.

You can even look at that in terms of cities. I hate this notion of a consumer-driven sector, without thinking about the wider context of knowledge. A dept might be excellent for PhD work but less attractive to BA students - one year anyway. So what do you do - let it wither, or keep it alive. All of this is not some finely tuned machine you can oil here and dismantle there. These are processes that take place over time. Personnel change. Networks are built up. Impact of research or certain exchanges builds slowly. Courses develop. Students have different needs.

'Popular' sounds so logical but actually it smacks of the rhetoric of satisfaction surveys. audits, feedback loops, paper trails - all that distracting and unscientific baloney. Or does the invisible hand of the market just work its magic and students know where the place to go is and because we live in such a rational world, that is somehow the right place to go.

Or what about protection of expertise - Paleographics at King's College being one of this year's examples (only centre in UK, threatened with closure till there was international outcry - ditto Continental Philosophy at Middlesex - now moved to Kingston. Both these cases are instructive in relation to the fluctuations and anomalies of 'popularity'.

I'm wondering whether there are gender implications here.

If you wouldn't start paying back until 21k and there is a 30 year cut off (presumably including time away from work etc?) there will be quite an incentive for women to work part-time, earning less and not pay back their fees. Plus getting CB. Until they are say 51 (21+30?)

Is this a progressive way of the rich and more men paying for poorer and women's education?

(though I agree that it raises fundamental questions about why we are sending teenagers to university in the first place).

btw completely disagree that international students are more motivated - not my experience at all.

I'm come from a working class family and graduated from university and now teach. Oh which I need a degree for (aimed at the person who claimed teachers didn't need a degree). I have a BSc in Mathematics. I now resent the fact that my brother and sister who didn't go to university are better off financially. The suggestion that education for educations sake is beneficial is ridiculous and for the rich only. Us on around the 25K mark (which means we never get means tested grants) only go to university for the sake of getting a better job.

At the comment about mummy and daddy paying. This is not something that currently only applies to the rich. At the moment middle class families and working class families who have savings (my parents did and they were higher paid working class - just out of grant level) can afford to pay their child's way. This is not a "spoilt little rich kid" privilege, it is a parent providing what they can for their child. If these changes come into place then it becomes a "spoilt little rich kid" privilege and I really don't see how this can do anything but widen the class divide. Which to be honest is all this government seem to be trying to do.

I agree with the principle of student loans. I was desperate to go to university in the early 70s. I had a place but my parents refused to sign the grant form. I would have jumped at the chance of taking out a student loan, but alas they didn't exist in those days.

I don't, however, agree that students with just a few hours contact time a week (usually arts and humanities students)should have to pay the same as those with many hours contact time. For example, students studying English or History are effectively subsidisng medical students. Nor do I buy into the argument that medical students will be saddled with an enormouse debt at the end of their training period because, for one, they receive a good salary during their postgraduate training as hospital housemen(they may say different but then their financial expectations are very different to the rest of us) and two, they have a guaranteed highly paid job at the end of it, unlike a student of English or history. As they will walk into a good and very well paid job as soon as they qualify they will be able to pay off their loan more quickly, thus incurring less interest over the lifetime of the loan.
There is an inherent unfairness in it all. I will be glad when students start thinking about value for money and questioning the amount of contact time they receive.

I agree with dreamingofsun. The very poor will be state funded and the VERY rich can afford it. As a "middle", but classed as "rich" by the government, we can currently only afford to fund our three at university by them taking on the maximum loan and hence debt, and a generous grandfather. The youngest (10) will presumably face a life of enormous debt. They are all bright children and will be excellent scientists and engineers and a musician. They will be an asset to the country. Why this scheme to penalise them so cruelly? It is demoralising and crazy. In the meantime the NHS is sucked dry tending to those with lifestyle choice illnesses.... but that's another rant!!

I don't see anything in the proposals to fund the 'poor' to a great extent.

The grant is available for household incomes up to 60K, maximum 25K and under then reducing. The only way the 'poor' will be funded is through burseries and no-one knows what is happening with these. Most of the existing higher value bursaries are for academic excellence together with a poverty level income under 21K which I can imagine will only apply to a few rare cases .

You dont always need a degree to do a certain job, but what happened to going to university to further an interest? when i went to uni the most important thing i came away with was an awareness of options, a feeling that with enough hard work anything was possible and a knoweledge there were amazing options being run by graduate schemes, volunteer posts etc as long as i looked for them. If i hadnt have gone to uni i wouldnt have ever known that.

I personally dont think that 50-80k debt is worth any uni education from any institution and will be encouraging my children to find another way unless they are certain they want to become some sort of professional, they are unlikely to feel so focussed ages 17/18 to know what they want to do with their lives. the whole system is a mess!

" If you look at it in terms of subject, for a couple of years something goes out of fashion, so the departments close. Then it comes back in fashion, and the expertise has gone and the ability to study (or work) in places of your choosing contracts. "

How long should we have kept funding mining engineering departments? How long should we artificially restrict entry to rising subjects in order to protect falling subjects?

"'Popular' sounds so logical but actually it smacks of the rhetoric of satisfaction surveys. audits, feedback loops, paper trails"

Or just the number of applications of sufficient quality.

"Or does the invisible hand of the market just work its magic and students know where the place to go is"

They appear to think so, as they fill in forms making those choices. Some universities get so many applications for English they can demand AAA, whereas you can do it at Roehampton with (if I'm reading the tariff correctly) CCC. That looks awfully like a market based on popularity. If fewer people applied to RG English departments, they couldn't demand AAA. If more people applied to Roehampton, they'd be asking for BBB before long. Are you saying that's all smoke and mirrors, and in reality people are applying blind?

There's an argument for keeping palaeography going. But if undergraduates aren't applying for the courses, you need to do something more than just pump money into an empty department and run it on the basis of the empty hotel in Don't Look Now. Why aren't people applying? If it's considered desirable to keep the department going, an absence of undergraduates now means an absence of postgrads in three years and an absence of lecturers and researchers in ten years. You can't just continue to fund that status quo ante, you need to consider how to rebuild the subject's popularity.

"Your post of 12:44 contradicts itself. If the provenance of a medical degree is irrelevant why wouldn't the less prestigious universities be able to charge as much as the big names?"

One argument is that there won't be enough students willing to pay it. And it then only takes one university to break out of the cartel (no one has yet raised the issue of the Competition Act, but if all medical schools were to handily set the same price there would be an obvious action for collusion) and they get all the good students.

Another argument is that there will be enough students willing to pay it. In which case, what's the problem?

" The suggestion that education for educations sake is beneficial is ridiculous and for the rich only. Us on around the 25K mark (which means we never get means tested grants) only go to university for the sake of getting a better job. "

And to think that Browne has the temerity to suggest that some teachers are uninterested in education and aspiration and only view universities as opportunities to study for work-related qualifications rather than about the widening of horizons and options. The very thought.

In terms of the cost of paying back the loan - I found this comment on a blog interesting:

'One implication that?s not being focused upon a great deal arises frm the recommendation to start charging commercial level interest on student loans. The suggestion is for 2% above the rate of inflation (so 5.1% at today?s rates). This is compound interest, just like that payed on mortgages. Consequently a £30K debt, paid-off over 30 years, would end up costing more that double the amount initially borrowed. The real cost of a degree under the proposals?'

I'm going to be shot down, but I'm now beginning to want an american system so that we have a more honest world with respect to fees and salaries.

I would love to see how graduates will be paid if they've clocked up 50k of debt. Will salaries go up? If not, then the working world obviously does not value a degree and teenagers can sensibly choose not to do one.

I am also interested to see how companies will deal with all of this. The big accountancy companies are already offering jobs for 18 year old with good A-levels. I would have loved this kind of option because I was desperate to be independent from my parents.

As it was, my thoughts whilst at university were dominated by worrying about getting a job (I don't know why I worried - I did an engineering degree at Cambridge!) and I would have been far more confident if I had already been in that job!

I think that the world will be a better place if more 18 year olds are working, rather than having adulthood delayed for a few years. Then, when they understand work, they can think about doing a degree or further training.

Anyway, I'm hoping that the 80k of fees will enourage my girls to think clearly about what they want to do in adult life rather than just jumping on the university bandwagon. Unfortunately for them, they will have the mental pressure of being aware that nearly all their relatives went to Cambridge and may feel they have to do the same.