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?

Cheer up, Jenny. The word is that there won't be an REF 2013, because apparently they cost a huge amount to do, and there won't be any money anyway. At the top too, salaries are a lot better - a top professor might get 85k in my discipline (Humanities, not a well-paid clinical one), so it is worth struggling on.

Crikey - is this still going on?

I can't remember who said that there had been a push to eliminate the 'inbetween' qualifications but you might be right. Back in the eighties I can remember standing there (at parties as a partner) with a glass of wine in my hand and listening to august and powerful people in educational policy making telling me that the economy would no longer need ANY unskilled people and that only a highly skilled workforce would be employable within the next twenty years. Oh ... thats now isn't it? Anyone know a good plumber?

Still all these extra students have created a lot of extra academics which personally I think is a good thing.

By highly skilled I meant degree educated preferably to masters. I think - I had been drinking and it was a long time ago.

alicatte, sadly though if I look around at people that live close to me, all those who seem to have money are the builders, plumbers etc.

See - it was all a massive plot to skew supply and demand so that wealth would be redistributed to small businessmen.

from eastern europe

I didn't mean the bit about eastern europe.

Thanks sieg, but if not REF, then something else will be imposed. We're certainly being primed to publish as though there is one coming up. We should be accountable, but I don't know that the REA/REF is the right way. Crikey, though 85k; where? Can I apply?

" the economy would no longer need ANY unskilled people and that only a highly skilled workforce would be employable within the next twenty years. Oh ... thats now isn't it? Anyone know a good plumber?"

Plumbing is, by most metrics, a skilled job. If you think it isn't, buy yourself a pipe bender and a blow torch and install a new sink.

Read the next post tokyo

just as an aside - I LOVE the way you use the words 'by most metrics' where 'in most people's opinion' might be more usual must remember that one. I'd love to learn plumbing a friend of mine did that course in Islington plumbing to City and Guilds for women only (it was about 10 years ago)

Still reeling.

How can they take away all teaching funding for non-STEM subjects. This isn't about the deficit, it's ideology.

Are we still public sector employees if there is no public funding?

Interesting reading all the academics here: we had a thread but it died - maybe we should revive it. I have three children and work full-time (where's my MEDAL? ) but I get by only by realising I am doomed to mediocrity. And with poor REF output. I gave up worrying too much about it years ago: the structure is stacked against me. I have very full teaching and admin load and am undoubtedly mostly a good girl, in an old university but with limited resources. The reality is that in my position, research is done via external funding routes, or in the spaces in between. I simply don't have those spaces in between. Not and do all the other things the university wants me to do and which I think are important.

I tell myself that I make more difference to the 100 or so students per year whose lives I affect in some way than the 1 or 2 people who will ever read my shitty article. I'm not curing cancer in my field and I'm afraid I've given up on the vanity that my work will ever be 'important'. Perhaps this is a midlife crisis. I dunno; it is certainly borne of exhaustion at years of permanent revolution, adaptation, restructuring only to be restructured back again a few years later. Ho hum. Dead wood? Moi?

Have they announced the CSR already WhoKnew? I knew this was on the cards.

Funnily enough the amount they are taking away is exactly the amount that will be made up by increasing fees to the new basic threshold. That's how they can take it away: ie we run to stand still and receive no increase in funding from the fee increases. Some universities WILL close I predict.

And yes, utterly ideological. Scandalous but predictable. Last time this happened in the 1980s though (the attack on arts/socsci) student applications for those subjects went through the roof

" Last time this happened in the 1980s though (the attack on arts/socsci) student applications for those subjects went through the roof"

Which is interesting, isn't it?

Another thing, which I've not been able to find the answer to: Scotland has free tution. Is takeup by disadvantaged students (of whom, sadly, Scotland has no shortage) any higher in Scotland than in England?

Will you be public sector if you're not paid by the public sector? That's a good question to raise. In fact Cambridge has plans it might if necessary simply to totally private. Only 18% of its income is from Government anyway and if it broke away it could take in what students it chose and various other things.

I am not in academia so don't know entirely how the system works but if the plan is that students will pay but the Government helps with that with loans etc those that break away totally dopn't get the help but I am sure they could set up their own funding for students through banks anyway.

"Only 18% of its income is from Government anyway and if it broke away it could take in what students it chose and various other things. "

The research councils could also tell it to get fucked, of course. Cambridge are the single largest recipient of research council funding, at £95m (source). The University of Buckingham, the only private university, receives £75K from the BBSRC, in the form of one single grant for one single project (source). It would be interesting to see how Cambridge would function as a PhD factory with all the ESPRC money pulled.

But, since tuition fees only account for a portion of the income for most universities, but staff on normal academic contracts are paid directly from HEFCE, does this change with tuition fees changing or not .

One thing that concerns me however is that the "student as a customer" attitude may well increase with changes in tuition fees. This can mean that some students perceive that if they are paying their fees, they expect to be dragged through the course at all costs. It may also increase the number of calls from pushy parents wanting to go through exam results or coursework and have every mark awarded (or declined) explained to them. Ultimately this may be disastrous for HE.

"ut staff on normal academic contracts are paid directly from HEFCE"

That's not right, is it? Surely your employer is your university, and your pay cheque comes from them. The source of the money may be elsewhere, but the responsibility isn't passed through: if you were unfairly dismissed, it would be your university at the tribunal, not HEFCE. Most local authority money comes from the rate support grant, but local authority staff are employees of the authority, not the treasury.

But see other MN threads about private v state schools, how pupils are treated (better) in private schools etc. If a customer pays usually people get better deals and more consideration, thus moving to a customer led system should improve things for students - the paying customer.

Yes, Xena, but the point beng raised (and I have friends who have been there) is teaching students who believe it is their right to get a first becuase they have paid (despite all academic proof to the contrary) and also believe YOU should be rewriting their work to achieve that first......That is NOT what university is about and the learning contracts Browne bangs on about will be crucial.....

I'm not at all sure that the paying customer improves things. I can see it coming where Universities have to inform parents of progress because the parents are paying. I much prefer it at the moment where as a parent you can't get any information at all because the student is an adult.They simply won't tell you a thing.
I think that they could shorten many degrees and that fees should reflect the amount of contact time a week.

" I can see it coming where Universities have to inform parents of progress because the parents are paying."

The parents aren't paying, though. The students are paying. The source of that money - parents, savings, earnings, loans, sponsorship, profits on their drug dealing - is none of the universities' concern. Parents can, if they wish, draw up a contract with their children which makes any payments contingent on access to, and satisfactory outcomes for, exam results. But beyond that? No university is going to be stupid enough to operate courses on behalf of parents in the manner of block-release, and once the policy is in place that "I am so-and-so's mother" is met with a firm "goodbye", that's the end of it.

Interesting way to fund a course.

I hope that you are right tokyonambu, but I can already see changes. When my eldest went he got the train all over the country and went to open days on his own, but with my youngest we went too and he would have been an oddity on his own. We took him to the first because public transport was difficult and we intended to slip away and leave him to it, but we discovered that it was the norm to stay. That is a change in a very short space of time -10 yrs. Parents know that they are paying (however you dress it up) and they want value for money.