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?

But Riven, wouldn't your ds2 be entitled to a grant if your income is that low? There are still a few grants available.

Market driven privatized universities - and we all know how much of a success privatisation of the railways etc has been. God - how much more can we take?

"This more competitive market would also mean that for the first time universities could go out of business, says the report."
....the mind boggles.

But science careers aren't all about university research.

What about pharmaceutical companies, medicine, etc? They're all highly paid, and highly ethical ways of putting a science degree to good use.

The pharmaceutical company DH works for quietly donates half a billion pounds per year in cash and free drugs to the developing world, and the staff are all on very generous salaries.

This is the scary bit form the univesities' point of view:

'The report models an 80% cut in the teaching grant to universities, showing a slight drop in their overall income if all universities charged fees of £6,000, and a slight rise if they all charged £7,000'

So they have to charge almost £7000 a year just to stand still. There will be mass layoffs and decline in staff-student ratios.

Despite initially having reservations about the graduate tax, I now can't see another way. At least it is applied equally across all social classes.

For some daft reason I dreamt about this last night and woke dh up at 2am to tell him why I think the graduate tax is a good idea. He was not impressed.

From an economic view - this is the part of the BBC report i find strange:

"If you choose to go into a job which doesn't pay very much or if you choose to go out of the workforce to build a family, you won't have to pay it back."

we should be encouraging people to take degrees who need them for their jobs and these tend to be the higher paying ones. we should be discouraging people who don't actually need/use them.

Teaching is not very highly paid, and you have to have a degree for that.

most teachers that i know earn over 15k which is the cut-off point they are talking about. so you would be classed as a higher earner and have to pay the higher fees.

scaryteacher - this is actually a good example - we should be encouraging people to take degrees and go into teaching by making it economically attractive. as it stands we are discouraging them and encouraging teaching assistants and dinner ladies (who I'm guessing earn less than 15k and don't need degrees).

if you appoint a private school educated oxbridge graduate and ex-captain of industry to conduct an "independent" review you are unlikely to get anything other than a market driven solution

Higher education should be based on ability (and probably more restricted in number than currently)so I like the idea of discount on fees for better grade BUT only open to those educated in the state sector otherwise the wealthy will be buying up all the discounted places.

How about also seeking a one off levy/contribution from all of us who benefited from free university education - based on age and earnings/wealth (|this includes me btw and most MPs!)

Back of an envelope stuff :

I have two children aged 1 and 6.

I will lose about £20,00 in child benefit.

I may have to pay around £60,000 in university tuition fees in addition to living expenses for my two children.

We are middle income. We don't have anything like this sort of money. We have some which I have been saving in the hope that my children might be able to get on the property ladder at some stage before they reach middle age.

This is all so unfair. Why do we bother?

StuckIn I agree with the ccc thing although there will alwys be exceptions- access, or dh's place which he has on industry experience.

I am so lucky I have graduated rather than leaving it any longer; I plan to go into social work, another graduate only profession with decent but astounding pay.

We're almost lucky 3 / 4 boys wouldn;t manage uni (sen); we're in that group that won;t have raised any security (house etc) due to our circs as carer etc, but because we'll have tried we should be on a decent ish income by thn so will lose grants etc as well.
Sometimes you wonder if giving up would be the sensible route (not sure we know how)

(BTW the LDs were campaigning at DH's uni over the election, on the basis of their uni policies. A lot of very miffed students who feel they were plainly lied to in order to get their vote apparently)

Anyone any idea what is happening now. We have just been to our first open day. DD's UCAS application has to be in in 1 years time but she wants to defer so starting in 2013 or possibly 2012.

It's not that far off. We are a single parent household so it might end up on our side yet, but students and families need so idea to be able to plan. I need to know about means testing, income limits etc so that she has the best chance of financing Uni.

BTW the first year hall of residence we visited charged £100 per week, catered. Big breakfast and 3 course evening meal. I thought that was reasonable.

"What child is going to want to take on 12K a year?"

There's not the slightest suggestion that's going to apply to more than a tiny handful of courses. Do you seriously believe that there are 400,000 people per year (the rough university intake) who would pay that much money? A university that charged that - which would roughly double its income - would fail rapidly. Aside from anything else, it would make Harvard, Yale and the rest of the Ivy League (and their non-Ivy League competitors like Stanford, CMU, Texas A&M, Johns Hopkins, etc) look like bargains.

The problem at the moment is that good institutions aren't charging enough and bad institutions are charging too much, so the effect is that people attending bad institutions are in the long run subsidising those attending better ones. The myth that all degrees are equivalent is just that, a myth, and it's about time that the value of the qualifications (which, usually, reflects what it costs to deliver them) is reflected in the costs. When people talk about "free" education what they mean is "paid for by other people", and it strikes me as grossly unfair that people who scrimp and save to attend poor institutions are subsidising those that attend elite ones.

A degree from Oxbridge or the Russell Group is worth taking on £30K of debt for. A degree from (fill in your choice of ex-FE college here) probably isn't worth taking on the £11K of debt it will currently cost. There's cost, and there's value.

Hand-wringing about social workers and nurses is incidental: as the children of the affluent are hardly queueing up to do either of these courses, either the fees will have to be underwritten by future employers, or the country will find that it has no nurses and no social workers. Medicine might fall into the same category, although then the long-term earnings are high and secure.

I feel really battered, each day something new to clobber people with (can't wait for the comprehensive spending review!) - like there is no point trying to think about the future of our families because we've been made to throw it away in the name of 'Capitalism and the Market and the banks rule....'

"the LDs were campaigning at DH's uni over the election, on the basis of their uni policies. A lot of very miffed students who feel they were plainly lied to"

How do you tell a Liberal Democrat is lying? Their lips are moving.

Why do people hate Nick Clegg as soon as they meet him? To save time.

Anyone who voted for the LIb Dems without realising that they're a bunch of lying shits who would sell their children for medical research if there was a sniff of power in it is so naive as to not be worth worrying about. The Lib Dems: putting the N in CUTS.

Right so let's reaffirm the class divide in the university system. Tons of money flows into Oxbridge etc where the wealthy can afford to go and become the next ruling class - and everywhere else sinks down to the bottom,(before closing), because without the teaching grant, they will have to charge £7000 a year and students will not be able to pay that, given they won't recoup it in subsequent employment, because they have a degree from a crappy university etc.....very very rational. .

Actually I know youa re wrong Tokyo.

I voted LD nnot for ideological reasons but becuase when I needed help with getting support in school for a non verbal incontinent child, the LD Am was the only one willing to get up and help us: she is and was a good person, but that's not reflected by Clegg et all I think (I still ahve vague hopes for Cable and Hughes but they diminish daily).

I amde that decision in a Labour safe seat but Dh grew up in LD South West and had a lot of time for his MP (paddy) and the LDs.

You cannot dismiss all people voting one way as liars; I wouldn;t lower myself as to even try with themtories whom I am hugely ideologically opposed to (indeed I posted on a thread earlier that I felt 98% were probably OK).

I won't vote LD agin, ever. Not becuase of teh AM but her 'superiors'

Well, since posting earlier, I've been out and had a bit of a think - we have 1 DS who's 9months old, and are planning a second DC but not for a couple of years.

As it's best to plan for worst case situations, (or best, if you see it that way) I might have produced a bright child who'll get into the top uni, and therefore need to pay £12k a year, add living costs and the £50k debt levels doesn't sound stupid.

If I double that, and if I want my DCs to leave uni not massively in debt, we've got to find £100k. As I'm hoping to leave it a couple of years to have the second child, I've got a bit more time to find this money, so I think we need to save £5k a year from now. Works out at £416 a month.

I think that might be doable if we don't do things like go on holiday, replace cars, spend money on things like clothes and going out. It'll be a squeeze and a massive drop in our lifestyle, but doable.

And that would be the only savings we have, there'd be no retirement saving, no rainy day "oh shit the boiler's stopped working" fund, no 'bigger house' moving fund. I can't see we'll practically be able to live like that for the next 20 years, we will end up having to dip into it.

If every middle class family starts saving that amount, that's a hell of a lot of money being taken out of the economy. Or if every graduate starts working life paying back a massive loan, that's a hell of a lot of money taken out of the economy.

Of course, I could have produced a thick child who won't go to uni and I can spend it on a world cruise, or having a Demi Moore style total body lift in my 50's.

"because they have a degree from a crappy university"

Why would a university charging £7000/year be "crappy"? That means that a small humanities department with an intake of fifty students per year would have a budget of a million pounds per year to deliver a course. Given contact time is currently about ten hours per week, they would need to deliver 1500 contact hours per week for 25 weeks a year, or about 37500 student-hours. If you taught every student individually, that's still 26 pounds per hour, and if you taught them in small seminar groups of ten, as is done at Oxbridge, you would have a budget of £260 per hour. When they're all in a lecture theatre, you're got £1300 er hour available. Slice it how you like, it's still a shitload of money.

It's perfectly possible to create a top-quality university out of thin air: Warwick springs to mind, or UEA, or Sussex. That large piles of money have also been poured into creating less distinguished institutions may be a lesson in the weaknesses of planned economies, but it's entirely naive to believe that all universities that are not old are low quality. I'd say that these days Warwick rates with, or probably above, most of the redbricks. So, if universities don't want to be "crappy", they'll have the cash if they can attract and retain the students, so they should be able to improve.

Want to know one thing that keeps universities "crappy", by the way? HEFCE want quality to be maintained, but threaten to punish universities whose drop-out rate exceeds 5%. So you can forget the days of failing exams: it costs the university too much money. If a university could simply sling out people who aren't up to it, and replace them with a student who is, you'd have more chances of degrees being worthwhile.

I was agrreing with post until the thick kid bit and feel duty bound to establish that ine are not thick; he has maths with year 6 in year 3, just he has SEN.

And we need a variety of people- less academic as valid as the nest.

"If every middle class family starts saving that amount, that's a hell of a lot of money being taken out of the economy."

No, it isn't. Unless they keep it under the bed in dirty oncers, that is. At the moment, the middle classes pump their money into a property bubble, buying and selling existing houses (there's no new build to speak of) at ever inflating prices. That really does take money out of the economy. If instead you're saving for education, that money's going to be in bank deposits and unit trusts and income bonds and (as we've done) national savings certificates. All that money circulates nicely through the economy.

I don't understand why parents say they will be paying x no. of £sss for uni fees. The debt is on the student, not the parent. They can still go if you aren't rich but will have to pay it back themselves when/if they get a job with a good salary.

Also I wouldn't worry about your toddlers yet. Who knows what will change by then. It wasn't that long ago they introduced the current system.