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?

" 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."

That's my point. What were once manual processes (titrate this, add that reagent) are now mechanised. The craft skills aren't needed at the same level, and a lot of the decision making during the analysis is automated. You need people who understand the machines, but those skills are more specific to the machines, less transferrable and more process orientated. You don't need an HND, you need a manufacturer's course.

Yes, I'm sure that there are specific cases we can point to as exceptions (although my response would be to add "yet" to the claim that it isn't automated), and my knowledge of medicine is far less than my knowledge of manufacturing (although, from a jobs perspective, the loss of skilled jobs in manufacturing is rather more of an issue than the loss of skilled jobs in medicine).

But my general general observation from manufacturing holds: manual processes are replaced by machines that require skilled tending which are replaced by machines that require less skilled tending. And as the assumptions of general education rise, the definition of skilled moves with it. A generation or two ago, the use of pretty well anything with a keyboard on it would have qualified as skilled, whereas now there are plenty of jobs on minimum wage that require the use of a computer.

No, actually, I think you are undervaluing technicians.

"lot of the decision making during the analysis is automated" - is a misconception which is frequently encountered in high-end analysis. Yes, the instruments get more complex, can measure ever more complex samples and detect analytes at lower and lower concentrations, but with this comes its own problems. You do realise that in order to develop even a fairly straightforward method for analysis of a sample can take months of work? This is all stuff which is essential before you can then start with automating the whole process. If a method is particularly complex, or is addressing a completely new problem, you can be talking about years of development. Well skilled technicians are essential in these processes.

Yes, the definition of "skilled" changes, that is so obvious it hardly needs stating, but that is progress. It does not wipe out the entire sector between completely unskilled work and highly educated work, it just means that this has altered along with everything else.

I'm an academic at a RG university and I've seen funding sucked away over the last 10 years. One of the consequences of this is a brain drain, especially to the US where good universities can offer a lot more money and a lot less teaching. This is the golden combination for many acdemics and our universities are in no position to compete. We lose good people and we can't attract the best here. We've had situations in my university where world-class academics from the US have considered moving here, but have invariably backed out as soon as they've realised that we have no real provision for spousal hire or salary or terms negotiation. I also see increasingly that a lot of what is needed to create knowledge in the academy operates on a sytem of good will and this will come to a stop before too long with pretty serious consequences. The universities are full of people who read articles and MS for publishers and journals and their colleagues, or applications for funding bodies for example, for pretty much nothing or a very little. If you want the world expert - or one of them at least - to examine a PhD thesis, you can offer them their fare and the princely sum of around £100-150. My lawyer friends laugh their heads off at the idea of Prof. Excellent spending three days reading a thesis for £150. I think we academics are very lucky in lots of ways to have our jobs, but I don't think many people know just how much work, paid and virtually unpaid, is involved. More and more people will leave if we are stretched still further and if funding is cut, and more of this important work will be done unpaid. How long can this last? Really good people are already paid salaries that people in the public sector would laugh at.

What can we do? How can we raise the money that's desperately needed for our sector? I would like more of this to come from direct taxation, but most people don't, and in any case I do think there is a moral issue about asking poorer people to pay for me or my kids to study and go on to a salary way above the average. It seems to me that aking the people who benefit to pay, in as fair a way as possible, is really the best solution. Doesanyone hav another one, apart from through direct taxes because we all know that most people will not wear this.

" Meanwhile the polytechnics and ex-polytechnics got on with training people for the future rather than the past."

I was rather hoping they'd educate people instead. Education is what you're left with when your training has become obsolete.

"You do realise that in order to develop even a fairly straightforward method for analysis of a sample can take months of work? This is all stuff which is essential before you can then start with automating the whole process."

That's that a write one, run many relationship. Of course you need technical developments to happen, but they happen in one or two place, and then arrive in other places done and dusted. Manual processes need skilled people everywhere they happen; automated processes need skilled people where they are developed.

"If a method is particularly complex, or is addressing a completely new problem, you can be talking about years of development. Well skilled technicians are essential in these processes."

Same point. If it were done manually, every hospital needs those skills. If it's done automatically, every manufacturer needs those skills.

jenny60 - I would be perfectly happy for university education to be paid for by taxation. If people end up with a high paid job after graduating they will pay more tax so will be contributing to others studying. I would like universities to go back to teaching the core academic subjects and for the numbers of people going to university to be substantially reduced. The higher education system needs to go back to the 1980s as far as I can see.

"The higher education system needs to go back to the 1980s as far as I can see."

The eighties? You mean an era of falling standards and excessive takeup, dominated by new universities? Surely you mean the fifties?

The fifties? You mean an era of falling standards and excessive takeup dominated grammar school boys? Surely you mean the twenties?

The twenties? You mean an era of falling standards and excessive takeup caused by demobbed officers? Surely you mean the 1900s?

The 1900s? You mean an era of falling standards...

And so on. Cicero (106BC-43BC): "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book."

Miffy: we might be happy, but most people would not be happy to pay more tax. Graduates pay more tax today on the whole than non-graduates and still there isn't enough money to fund the sytem so saying the educted pay anyway for their education doesn't make sense. The 80s were a terrible time for universities and sadly lots of people who were there under Thathcer are bracing themselves for something similar now. The problem for me is not that graduates will be asked to contribute a fairer proportion than hitherto towards their own education, but that this new money will merely plug a gap which will be left when the Tories take away much of our funding. It's not new money at all, but the universitites will be told they are selfish and greedy for demanding more. We can't win.

"call it training or educating as you please - but you're accepting that it's still looking to the past, not the future."

No, I'm not. Because I'm sat here in a RG university about to head off to demonstrate for a course which is world-leading in a very new field.

tokyonambu, perhaps you should be the one to tell all the analytical chemists employed in biotech, pharma, agrochem, food science, CRO's, forensics, hospitals, academia and, yes, instrument manufacturers that their skills are defunct and they should be replaced with unskilled button pressers?

You show an astounding lack of knowledge combined with arrogance in this area. Do you really think that once a method is developed, it is automated and that is it? No need for altering things? I mean, it's not like a new method needs developing for each new analyte of interest (say a new drug, as an example) or for each new sample matrix. Oh, silly me, actually, that is exactly the reality. It is also not as though we don't need to develop better ways to investigate toxicity of drugs is it? (this being a completely perfect process by now, where everything can be analysed because we have all the answers?). These methods need to be developed from scratch each time.

This is not all outsourced, it is frequently carried out in-house, particularly in pharma where a lot of money is riding on each new drug and sensitivity of findings is such that it is not desirable to have external companies involved.

What qualifications to those analytical chemists have? I'm guess degrees and more...which is my point. That the jobs in between unskilled and degree level don't exist any more.

jenny60 - surely the reason tuition fees were brought in was because labour wanted more people to go university so the costs have gone up. If fewer people went the universities would not need so much money and could run fewer high quality courses.
I still don't understand why there are no tuition fees in scotland but soaring tuition fees here?

It is right for higher education to be funded by taxation because we need to have a certain number of highly educated people to be doctors, teachers, translate for companies etc.

Where has this argument come from that it is not fair for people who haven't been to university to pay tax for people who do? We all pay tax to contribute to services in our country, some of which we will use personally some of which we don't. The person who hasn't been to university may need an expensive operation on the NHS which others taxes will have paid for and he will be glad the surgeon operating has been qualified.

There are probably quite a few people who did not go to uni who would rather taxes were spent on education than fighting wars.

I agree that fewer people should go to university, but this doesn't solve the problem now. The question of how many fewer and in what subjects is in any case huge (why Classics, for example?). As I said we graduates do pay higher taxes now on the whole than non-graduates, but there still isn't enough money in the sector. Most people will not pay higher taxes to fund higher education so we are back to square one.
Yes, we all pay taxes which fund services me may never need, but I don't think health and secondary education are equal here. People NEED the health sector to stay alive in some cases; we can all survve without a university degree. The question of the right of all to equal access to good primary and secondary education is I think much more compelling, but that's another issue.

Sorry: I meant I don't think health and tertiary education are equal.

"The question of how many fewer and in what subjects is in any case huge"

Because, yes, what Britain needs is a less qualified and educated workforce, because if one thing's certain it's that the world is becoming less demanding of skills and easier to find economic success with just brute labour and natural resources.

" People NEED the health sector to stay alive in some cases; we can all survve without a university degree."

You're welcome to go to the surgeon with the GNVQ.

I take it from this that you don't think your children should go to tertiary education. Or is that you're another one of the "my children deserve it, it's the other people that aren't up to scratch."

Oh, and poking fun at Classics degrees is more convincing in the Daily Mail letters page. Elsewhere it might make you look a bit philistine.

Tokyo, You've completely missed my point(s):

The health sector point wasn't about the quality of education, it was about the question of the right to free tertiary education being equivalent to the right to free medical care. I don't think it is.I think my children should go to university if they are able and interested enough and if they are willing to pay for it. I assume that if they are educated to degree level, they will either get jobs that will pay them enough to enable them to pay back university fees through their taxes, or that they will work in low paid jobs and will thus be able to defer payment to when and if they do earn enough. What I don't think is that they should get a free education. I wish everyone could, but I just don't think we (the nation I mean) can afford it.

I wasn't 'poking fun' at Classics at all, rather choosiung, for the sake of an example, a subject which is often held up as pointless. I don't think it's pointless at all.

But if think people should pay for their own education, why do you think fewer people should receive that education? I can see an argument (although I think it's a bad one) to offer heavily subsidised education to a limited number of people, but if it's an open market, why does it matter how many people attend?

tokyonambu - that depends on the individual role. I know (very good) technicians who have been in their roles since 16 or 18 and have trained on the job with perhaps day-release for a HND or degree. The education system in the UK does not allow for anything between school leaver and graduate, though. In the (european) country I worked in before I returned to the UK, there were various different levels of qualifications that technicians would have, which were generally more appropriate to the role than a degree might have been - but were not necessarily lower level. In the UK, because the education system has gone down the lines of calling everything a university and every qualification a degree, it degrades the respect of providing people with the appropriate high-quality education for the role they want to go into. The jobs are there for people at those levels, but the qualifications are not available to allow people appropriate training. As a consequence, when I was advertising for a technician recently, a good proportion of candidates had PhDs! A PhD level person would be frustrated in the job, but it needed more skills than a school leaver. I have heard similar comments from friends in the pharmaceutical industry.

OK, so it's circular, and may be created by the qualifications rather than the requirements. Difficult to know how to address that, though, as an individual giving career advice!

I don't in an absolute sense. If people can afford to pay, are able and the institutions exist to educate them, fine. However, I suspect that too mnay people are paying too much for not very good quality education while others are probably paying too little for very good quality education. If we can find a system which equalises this and makes it possible for all who are able and interested enough to go, that works for me. THis MAY mean that fwere go in the end as some courses are seen not to provide enough value for money to justify a lagre debt, but if, on the other hand, they lift their game and provide a good degree to their students who know what they're getting and are willing to pay, that's ok too.

"However, I suspect that too mnay people are paying too much for not very good quality education while others are probably paying too little for very good quality education."

Absolutely agree. And whilst people are waving their progressive credentials around, it's quietly ignored that the people paying too little for good educations are usually already advantaged, while those paying too much for weak educations are already disadvantaged. "People like us" can rank institutions and departments into rough quality order, and if we can't, know someone who can or have children at schools that can.

The most common problem is that children from educationally impoverished backgrounds are forced into seemingly vocational degrees that are in fact almost worthless, whilst those from advantaged backgrounds are encouraged to do less obvious, but far better regarded courses.

Enjoying all of this.

Does anyone think that there are cuts we could make in academia? In particularly that some people in depts could be required to work more? Or that teaching could be valued for its own sake & promotion to reader/chair should be achiavable that way? I'm social not natural science but I look around in disbelief at a minority of my colleagues. The thing is I can't see how Browne etc. is going to change any of it, other than make it harder for those of us who do work hard.

What we need is a complete rejigging of university - say even recognising the more female skills [would you agree?] in teaching, admin and pastoral care?

WhoKnew - come on, of course we can all work more.... Many in my department sometimes have a whole evening off, or maybe even an occasional Saturday afternoon off...

I know just one person who was promoted on the basis of teaching excellence. This is one of the biggest reasons for women not reaching top jobs in academia - they come back from maternity leave and are shunted into teaching dominated roles. In science, engineering and technology, the Athena project was supposed to help with this. However, that has largely become a box ticking exercise for departments to prove their political correctness and "enthusiasm" for equal opportunities (excuse the scepticism).