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?

" A lot of children just want to get on with life and not mess around just studying adn putting off the day when they move from child to adult. "

Is anyone stopping them? You seem to be implying that unwilling students are being forced into universities. You don't appear willing to put your biography where your views are, either, as you yourself went to university. Ah, but of course, you did a valid degree justified by your intellect, not the waste of time that the little people are doing.

"Yesterday I went to visit an ex-polytechnic to see a course which is well regarded by employers here and in other countries. It's in a area of rapidly developing technology so many of its graduates are likely to go abroad. It is not a type of course offered by the so-called "best" universities because they are inflexible and slow to adapt. "

Behave. CNAA validation of polytechnic degrees was notorious for the time it took to establish new courses, while the universities were able to start up new courses on the back of a fag packet. I know of a department that had a course in the UCCA handbook before it was designed beyond a title, and the syllabus was being nailed together as the first cohort came through the door. This is not, in general, a good thing.

My father had experience in both polytechnics and universities and was struck by the rigour of how courses were offered by polys (CNAA validation and quinquennial reviews) and the fairly casual way they were offered by universities (mostly through external examiners). It may be that the ex-polys are taking advantage of the freedoms that lack of external validation gives them, but if you want to find a reason for the decline in standards, the lack of external validation may be a key issue.

And "well-regarded by employers" is not necessarily the hallmark of education, as it can simply mean that the course offers technical training that saves them money. For example, the rise of Cisco and Microsoft certification as a faux degree in the lower-tier universities, which is a serious problem for the industry in ten years' time. The supply of people who actually understand networking and computing dries up, replaced by technicians who can use particular brands of equipment.

Oh, and what LiliBolero said. With knobs on.

By the way, can anyone spot the cognitive dissonance between:

"My children? I would expect the younger two to go to university"

and

"A lot of children just want to get on with life and not mess around just studying adn putting off the day when they move from child to adult."

Perhaps we should re-cast the second point as "A lot of other people's children but not my talented darlings just want to get on with life..."

It seems off that you think so many people would be better off not going to university, and yet you are unable to convince your own children of this. Or is it that, in fact, you don't believe it yourself?

The average IQ is 100. Someone witha n IQ of 100 cannot get to university and shouldn't. My children don't have particularly low IQs. If they did then university wouldn't be for them.

My point was more general - that years of pointless studying isn't always best. In some countries you study to age 30 and that's fairly pointless in many jobs where experience on the job is where your real learning starts. I suppose I mean let's get what needs to be done early on and not extend courses without much point to it.

Why would it be wrong to say I have reasonably clever children so I expect them to go to university buyt 50% of children have an IQ under 100 and not to expect those to go?

Anyway the bottom line is we cannot afford what went before so it's changing.

Don't you know - IQ is a spurious science - read Stephen Jay Gould on this. And even if you do not accept him, many accept that the relationship between IQ scores and intelligence is highly debatable. As a university professor myself, I would not be the slightest bit interested in a student's IQ scores.

tokyonambu wrt your post @ 08:38

I was really pleased to see someone expressing this opinion so strongly. I too feel that education, for the majority, has improved, a lot. And that this matters.
Yes, there's room for improvement. But I strongly feel that unless the fact things have improved, for the majority, is embraced, and acknowledged, we can kiss goodbye to improvement. Especially in the current political climate.

And I agree with Lilybolero's post, with knobs on, too.

Phew. Just had to get that out of my system.

It's a pretty good indicator. Those with the lowest IQ scores tend not to be as bright as those with higher ones.

The tuition fee change is in effect to move the funding from state to pupil without new money. it is not being move to parents of course just students and only when they start to earn money.

"Why would it be wrong to say I have reasonably clever children so I expect them to go to university buyt 50% of children have an IQ under 100 and not to expect those to go?"

Some years ago, we knew a couple who were staunch advocates of the tripartite system. They'd been to comprehensive schools and felt they had suffered because of "low standards" and that grammar schools both benefitted the "clever" and provided more "appropriate" education for the "dim". I asked them whether they'd be happy for their child to attend the "appropriate" school were he to prove "dim", but they brushed away my comments.

When they moved for his job, one of the authorities within reach still operated the old 11+ system. So they chose to move there, with infant school aged children. As they said, the children of people with good post graduate qualifications are assured a better education in grammar schools, so they were looking out for the best interests of their children.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh hysterically at their decision, a few years later, to move into an area with comprehensive education (at some considerable expense), as their not-quite statemented son, whose reading age was behind his chronological age, was on course to fail the 11+. Did I know, they said, that secondary modern schools weren't suitable for their children and it was appalling that admission into a grammar school was done on the basis of an exam which wasn't suitable for a child who couldn't read properly? Oddly enough, their belief in the tripartite system was paper thin, and was simply assuming that their pfb would automatically get over the threshold.

The more appropriate education for the "dim" comes from the inverse of the grammar schools, of course.

" Those with the lowest IQ scores tend not to be as bright as those with higher ones."

If only such studies could be done by people who weren't racists and charlatans. With Burt and Shockley as friends, who needs enemies?

IQ tests, when re-taken after practice, yield improved results. That's the end of their claims, there and then.

It's the Libdems that are looking to help bright but poor students, not just me, so I made a suggestion as to how this might be applied if they get the concessions to the report.

I don't think comparing this to medical care is valid.

Well we need some measure and they don't do too badly but I agree they can vary. Mine have and I found some of my mother's after her death and they did a bit too but not usually massively.

"I agree they can vary. Mine have and I found some of my mother's after her death and they did a bit too "

You and your mother repeatedly took IQ tests and kept the results for comparison? Why?

Also providing means tested academic bursaries has been happening for years. The last uni we looked at provided £4,000 for students who meet the criteria. Effectively covering the current fees. The maintenance grant is means tested.

There was nothing in the Browne report which would guarantee giving any burseries so the lib dems are wanted something written in.

I'm sure the academic mums who are posting on here, and it's obvious I'm not one of you, already know this so are you all against the current system?

"There was nothing in the Browne report which would guarantee giving any burseries"

The bursaries given by the universities are not within the remit of the Browne report: they are given from funds the universities hold as private enterprises, such as profits on foreign student fees, endowments, donations, rental of land, etc, etc. The Lib Dems may think they can force the universities to provide money in bursaries, but unless they want to nationalise the universities, they can only ask nicely or threaten to withdraw other funding. And for extra fun, with HEFCE funding going away, the levers of power that the government have are much weaker, because they can hardly threaten to cut funding that isn't there anyway.

Vince Cable is lying if he says he can mandate university-funded bursaries. He can't. He can make threats that may or may not be effective, but he has no power to tell universities to spend their own money.

Most academics (like me) are caught in a bind, abouteve. On the whole of liberal (with small l) persuasion verging on the leftist (but not exclusively) they would prefer state-funded HE. And most objected to the introduction of fees and loans in the first place.

But faced with the chronic underfunding of HE, many have supped with the devil and quietly accepted the introduction of the fee-based system because not to do so would have been to reject the influx of funds.

However, the fee increases planned will do nothing for most universities, only for the Oxbridges and UCLs and Manchesters etc because the extra funding delivered by 7k+ fees will be immediately taken away by the comprehensive spending review next week. Most universities, including mine, will be forced to raise fees just to break even.

Thanks for clarifying that. I thought that due to the reconstruction of the entire funding that they may be able to state how the funds are utilised to a certain extent.

They should still be able to ask them nicely, I suppose, but there is no guarantee that anything extra will be offered. I thought that there was some compulsory bursaries in place currently but perhaps not because it does vary from one Uni to another.

It's the not knowing what's going to be charged that's worrying me. They will only have a year to sort out the finances if our current year 12's will be affected. DD wants to go whatever the cost.

Yes Wilfshelf, I do understand that, it's come at just the right time and to think it was the labour government that commissioned Lord Browne.

Do you think they will implement it as soon as 2012?

"Thanks for clarifying that. I thought that due to the reconstruction of the entire funding that they may be able to state how the funds are utilised to a certain extent. "

Quite the reverse. There's less funding coming from the government, and therefore less funding the government has control or influence over. HEFCE funding is subject to government control; student loans and payments aren't. So every pound moved from HEFCE funding to direct student payments is a pound less that the government can dictate terms for.

It's going to be interesting to watch the government realise that it now can't control universities. As well as student bursaries, HEFCE are currently in a position to dictate terms for recruitment numbers to specified courses. Even if the government wants to attempt to set quotas for student loans broken down by subject and institution, which is highly unlikely, they will now have no control at all over the universities' recruitment numbers when the funding comes from parents, sponsors, industrial partners, etc.

I think the whole debate is depressing and difficult.
For me the problem is that I left university with £30k's worth of debt to a poor starting salary which has risen but in the current private sector was frozen and has now taken a pay cut but I sit in the banding that means I am paying back my loans but I don't actually have loads of money to spare.
I started university in 1998 and studied architecture. My parents did not support me and was a minority in my degree course as a state educated and self funded student with a disability and oh i'm female so definitely in the minority. If I have £30k's worth of debt in the current system how will anybody like me ever get through the proposed system?
It is the minorities and those who struggle to get into university now who will be wiped out of the system. This is a loss for society as it is these peoples broad experiences of life that will contribute to a balanced society.
In my particular subject I have always found it is those with life experience not necessarily those with the privately educated highest grades, who produce the most enriching architecture that actually works but it saddens me that we will lose at least a generation of these people.
I would rather that we concentrated our efforts on reducing drop out rates at university (in some courses these are shocking - I am saddened to say that architecture is one of them) and making sure that the people we send to university are actually those who want to go. Going to university shouldn't be promoted as the be all and end all for our school students - it should just be one of the choices available. However it has become the only choice in many schools with vocational and other options often promoted as a poor second choice or for those who aren't clever enough to go to university.
I am one of 4 kids we all were pushed to go to university - I was the lowest achieving at school (mainly due to my health) however I was dedicated to my career, and I am the only one of us who has used our degrees as they were intended. My brother and sister both have firsts in professional subjects and neither work in the areas in which they were trained or even use their degrees. My youngest brother started university reluctantly and quickly dropped out after finding a talent in a job he had taken up part time to vend his education, he now is head chef in a trendy restaurant....so 3 out of 4 of us took were wasted degrees, sure they got life experience but who is to say that that they wouldn't have had the same on another route there.....
I'm just saying that education takes more forms than university alone and perhaps if we started encouraging our kids to look at life as achieving on broader terms then perhaps we could focus on spending our money in the right places rather than just spending our money.
Personally I will be supporting my son however his life takes him and will help when I can but university well we'll see what he needs.

wonkylegs, I think you are absolutely right. Education does take on more forms than university alone and as a society we should value other forms of education as highly as we value a degree (within their context). However, what I am not happy with is to use finance as a means to force this.

It's likely that in the future, there will be a stratification of skills. The days of technicians will be over. Deep, complex jobs requiring creative skills, the sort of stuff computers are bad at, will still be done by humans; unskilled jobs are mostly cost-effective to be done by humans as well. But the middle has been, and will continue to be, sucked out: the long line of jobs that were done by people with HNDs forty years ago - draftsmen, small-batch electrical manufacturing, a wide range of jobs in chemical engineering, all the white collar administrative tasks - have been or will be automated or outsourced.

Trying to go back in time and create a huge range of jobs that require less training is simply a fantasy. Flexible, adaptable people with creative skills? Yep. Unskilled, low-cost manual labour? Yep. But all that stuff in the middle? Well, think about insurance: what happened to all those white-collar jobs? Banking? Remember when there was a manager who had a couple of A Levels who'd and had risen to be in charge (in charge) or a high street branch? Manufacturing? Been in a drawing office or a model shop or a tool room lately? Medicine? Note how all those lab tests that required skill to perform now require skill to interpret but are actually performed automatically. Architecture? Seen many drawing boards around?

Automation and outsourcing have sucked the middle out of the workforce. That's why the middle has been sucked out of education, too. There's people with high-level skills, and there's unskilled work. The whole process of the past fifty years has been to deskill what had been skilled jobs. And as we all live longer, it's a brave woman who stakes her career on what she learnt at 20 being still profitable at 65, so the ability to adapt and retrain will be key. Anyone who thinks the answer to this is to encourage their children to have less education and fewer skills is simply hankering after a past that isn't coming back.

tokyo, whilst I see your point here, and agree with it to a limited extent, I don't agree with it entirely. The comment which would apply to my area

"Medicine? Note how all those lab tests that required skill to perform now require skill to interpret but are actually performed automatically."

Actually, there is still an awful lot which needs a good technician to do. It is definitely not unskilled work and a technician who really knows their way around the instruments is worth their weight in gold. In my area, the basic equipment can cost upwards of a million of so. You don't leave the running of that to someone who doesn't know their stuff. Yes, many tests can be performed automatically, but you know you have a lab with a good technician when it runs with no problems. Ever been in a lab that doesn't have good technical support? I'd rather rub up some big name in my department than get on the wrong side of a technician!

Oops, I put that last bit very badly. I meant

"I'd rather rub up some big name in my department the wrong way than get on the wrong side of a technician!"

.