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?

I wouldn't say that teaching and admin are 'female skills', but I do think they are undervalued by a macho culture. I strongly agree that excellence in these areas should be recognised in promotion procedures.

In my area (Humanities) I'd like to see less pressure on the volume of research (a la REF) and more on quality. So if it takes you 15 years to write your book, and it's an excellent one, then that's what it takes. (This is the attitude post-tenure in US universities. American colleagues are horrified by the rate we are expected to publish at.)

I'd also like to see a move away from big AHRC grants and the focus on research teams, which I think in the main does not work for Humanities. It would be more cost effective to give smaller amounts of money to fund replacement teaching, which people go off and do individual research. In my field the groundbreaking stuff is done by lone researchers sitting in the archive/library/office, not teams of PGs and RAs.

interesting as ever. Both good points.

sorry unseen, I didn't mean any offence. But I genuinely have one colleague who must be doing a 10-15 hour week when averaged across the year. Male of course. Never publishes, does admin jobs so badly or rudely that he is no longer asked ... HoDs consistently let him slide. It frustrates the living daylights out of me. Plus there are two (male) colleagues suffering from long term depression who again do the bare minimum of teaching and then often can't do that either. I'm sympathetic but this has been going on for years (and guess which gender always picks up the teaching slack?)

Also I think the points about doing things for free (examining, PhDs etc.) is important but then again people become trustees or teach abroad and then use that as an excuse for being unavailable for meetings or unable to get marking turned around on time. Drives me mad.

I've come to the conclusion that the solution for every problem I have at work is to do more research. It's the only way to get high enough to be safe/change anything.

There are lot of people like that about in education and the public sector. In the private sector they might not have kept their jobs. It is too hard to sack people.

I disagree with your conclusion. My experience in the private sector is that people were far more incompetent (in the City) but that they 'looked' busy. I've never seen such corrupt and poor practice as I did in private practice.

I would second what others are saying about colleagues who seem to get away with only doing a few hours' lacklustre work a week while the rest of us do 10-12 hour days flat out. These guys seem to be waterproof, somehow. But when I worked for a large private sector media organisation I saw much worse, and a lot of waste at the same time too, so I think the idea it is confined to the public sector is pretty fallacious.

To be brutally frank, I think you are fairly doomed to less pay and harder work as a woman in the professions, unless you work for yourself and manage by fluke to tap into some kind of niche by being in the right place at the right time, and frankly that's only possible for a nano percent of the professional population (I tried to do this once and had a degree of success with a spin off before jealous blokes rounded on me and removed the clients. Sickening really. Two yars trying to fight back didn't get me anywhere either. This seems to be typical).

I am starting to think feminism hasn't even got us off first base yet. You just have to read all the stuff about Yvette Cooper being expected to be 'nice' and 'likeable' to see exactly how blokes want us to be - it's not enough to be competent, if you are woman you have to be extraordinarily good at sucking up too, whereas the blokes can go around being as messy, smelly and grumpy as they like and still get promoted.

It's a man's world. Still.

My theory would expplain why some few women make partner, get chairs, get Exec Directorships and so on.

BoffinMum, I fear all this utterly and totally reflects my expereince too; it doesn't help that if you are a female academic people also come to yopu to get help, support, love, etc because they know it's pointless going to male colleagues for those things. And inveteratenamechanger is definitely right about the AHRC... it mostly spews out pointless databases.

I agree, WhoKnew. This has also been my experience. There is a general misconception that in academia you can just tootle along for years being incompetent, but you wouldn't get away with that in the private sector.

glad we agree that the public v private bashing is too simplistic.

depressing re ahrc. esrc any better? When I looked through the list of assessors there were quite a few women that I knew in my field which seemed promising.

slowly, slowly I also know a few women coming through as chairs at major unis who are great for references or arguing your corner. having just put in a promotion application I was stunned at how much reliance was put on references, with decisions made by scholars in other disciplines and not even my own HoD reading my publications. is this widespread?

For promotions, at our place external references are required for promotion to Chair, but not IIRC for promotion from Lecturer to Reader. However, it goes together with miles of other paperwork. The decisions are ultimately not made by the immediate department, so yes, usually by scholars in other disciplines.

Sorry, appear to have hijacked the tread

I guess the point is that if you wanted to improve universities for students and keep costs down you need to tackle some fundamentals.

Merely privatising the education and letting universities carry on spending it along time honoured lines will benefit no one.

It doesn't seem to me that students are getting any 'more for their money' now than they did when HE was free and I can't see that they will when fees are £7k. That's what's so sad about Browne.

[p.s. unseen, Reader - if only! SL ...]

"it's not enough to be competent, if you are woman you have to be extraordinarily good at sucking up too, whereas the blokes can go around being as messy, smelly and grumpy as they like and still get promoted."

Oh god, this is so so true. Almost everyday I see my senior male colleagues and think "if you were a woman you would never get away with that". (Although most of the younger ones are v.g. at sucking up, which I think explains their sucess.)

Re promotions, we need two external referees for promotion to SL and Reader and three for Professor. A big weight is put on international esteem too, so lots of pressure to get people abroad to write for you.

Regarding incompetence, I think this is far less common now in academia. Where I work (RG) there has been a concerted push to get rid of people who were not pulling their weight. This has had a negative as well as a positive impact, as "pulling your weight" tends to be defined purely in terms of how much research you are producing.

"It doesn't seem to me that students are getting any 'more for their money' now than they did when HE was free and I can't see that they will when fees are £7k. "

But there are more of them. So although the individuals get no more, the sum total of education delivered is greater. Averaged over the student population, they're getting more than twice as much, because in order to return to the past you'd need to tell over half of them to leave.

Higher education participation rates were between 10% and 15% from the mid 1960s until the early 1990s (source, p19). Up until 1950 they had been below 5% (ibid). They are now around 35%. If people want a return to some alleged golden age, as appears to be popular here, you're talking about denying places to more than half of the current students, and carrying out the closures of around half of the course places, by whatever means that takes.

Sorry arriving late to this one so just wanted to add a vote for Graduate tax - for all graduates including myself at 52. I was lucky enough to get my degree with a full grant before tuition fees and I'm incensed that the ladder was pulled up behind the last lot with their wall to wall PPE's and LLB's. I would happily pay an extra penny on higher rate tax FOR LIFE to prevent today's graduates having to follow where America leads.
This isn't about the elite it's about all kids getting a fair swing at life

ESRC is a right old mess and their peer review process one of the most corrupt there is, but to their credit they are trying to sort that out with their new college of reviewers training scheme, or whatever they call it.

WRT problems of promotion, the question is not whether it happens, but how we females can bring our considerable brain power to bear as quickly as possible to sort this out once and for all.

Minward, as I keep saying, in the US higher education is tax deductible for parents, and many local colleges are a lot cheaper than higher education here, yet they still have a low tax regime. Don't listen to the headline figures of £30-£40k per year for Ivy League college fees/accommodation - the high figures we hear about are the equivalent of the 'rack rate' in hotels and surprisingly few people pay that kind of money to go there because donations to these institutions are tax deductible as well, so they have handsome endowments.

Here we have a higher tax regime and will now be paying full whack. It's monumentally stupid as a policy, as it's going to affect UK PLC extremely badly - fewer well trained employees, less innovation, semi-literate nation, increased race/class/gender discrimination, do you want me to go on?

A penny on higher rate tax wouldn't raise remotely enough money. A penny on basic rate income tax raises about £4bn, and the rate of people who are graduates, over the whole population, is probably less than 20% (5% rate for everyone over 65, 15% rate through to about 35, rising from then). So a penny on basic rate for graduates might raise £1.2bn if graduates have 50% higher income than the population at large.

I don't know the value of higher rate tax, but it's only paid by 15% of the population. Obviously, graduates are more likely to be higher rate tax payers, so let's be generous and assume a penny on higher rate would also raise £1.2bn.

HEFCE's budget is about £8bn, so to replace that you'd need 3p on both basic and higher rate tax for every graduate in the country. Good luck with that.

Rest of EU seems to be spending more on HE at the moment, not less.

UK politics is starting to baffle me, really.

Having not experienced the ESRC, I can say that the peer review of the science councils (for me, predominantly the MRC), is not great either. There is plenty of the "old boys network" at play. The tactic of damming proposals with faint praise (such that a negative review doesn't scream this person has a grudge, but also doesn't attract a high enough score for funding either) is now being recognised and allegedly action is being taken against it. We'll have to wait and see. Personally I'd be all for having either a double-blind review or a completely open review as I can honesty say that I've never made a comment on a review which I wouldn't be prepared to say directly to the applicant.

Anyway, sorry, I seem to be straying off the point.

WhoKnew, good luck with the promotion.

Surely the point is that you only need to raise 2.3bn or whatever figure we're talking about because they're taking it out of the block grant. Don't take it away and we don't need to raise the money. [Trident anyone?]

But then I don't believe all this shroud waving re the debt. It's not as if we're going to get any funding once the debt is cleared are we? It's all about a smaller state. It's an ideological decision to make students (or their parents) pay.

I do feel that Steve Smith etc. have let us all down enormously = he's been arguing for fees for years. I've never understood why. Why does it benefit universities to transfer the obligation to students (&/or their parents?)

Presumably it's A'levels next because you get a better job and earn £££ more if you have A'levels than if you just get GCSEs and only X% of the population do A'levels so why should the other Y% subsidise them etc.

Why are we disincentivising learning?

and btw I was asked for 5 RG Profs as refs. How many women have that kind of network? (I managed 3, plus one US and one non-RG). It's a joke. I think the only female solution is to try to network as much as possible & to pull other women up the ladder if/when we go.

"It's all about a smaller state. It's an ideological decision to make students (or their parents) pay."

I voted Labour. Those that voted Tory or Lib Dem can justify themselves.

I did the Springboard thing at the elite university I worked at. All the senior women that came in to speak to us about how they had made it had one thing in common - they had all had nannies on the way up.

That's easy then. Out of your stipend of 12k-16k or after tax research salary of £16-£20k you just have to live in an expensive university city and pay out 110%-150% of your salary in childcare costs for roughly a decade in order to be able to compete.

Sorted.

'Cos being a graduate is all about lifestyle and spending power, isn't it? So the users should pay ...

you've both made me laugh.

Tokyo bc I saw your cognitive dissonance point about the Lib Dems on an earlier post and hung my head in shame. yes, you're right. but let's face it, Labour commissioned Browne and introduced fees in the first place. I now officially hate them all.

Boffin because it's just so sodding depressing.

Maybe we can be the next generation? (she says in Pollyanna stylee (which is why she's still working at half ten at night ...

Well, we sodding well don't have to give up and let these idiots cock it all up. We have a choice. We can galvanise and policitise and refuse to give in.

"Out of your stipend of 12k-16k or after tax research salary of £16-£20k you just have to live in an expensive university city and pay out 110%-150% of your salary in childcare costs"

Male postgrads are hardly funding wives and children out of their stipends either, though.