Students Protests - University Fees

[EggFriedRice]

I absolutely applaud the protests by young students against the rise in university fees, why should they put up with the blatant lies by the Liberal Democrats, I voted for them, I believed what they told me during the run up to the election, now I feel betrayed, like so many other voters, how could they say one thing and then do the opposite? I witnessed today a demonstration by ordinary young people who will be affected by the increase in university fees, I witnessed the heavy police presence, the batons ready to charge, the police filming ordinary young people who have been betrayed, I witnessed the sad state of the UK,

There's an expectation here in Wales that with fundingw e will lose a good number of our universities. having grown up in a county with no uni, I see that as a bad thing- as well as making it unattainable for someone who has other responsibilities, it simply doesn't even cross your radar ime- you never meet students, grads tend to stay away, just not part of your world.

And a lot of the unis I wouldn;t personally rate do ahve areas of excellence- documentary production and art locally, advanced technology where DH studies. It's a shame to pick those off as well as under performing depts.

Ds1 wants to be a pilot. For that he will need to find the funds himself, the amount being more than these students will ever need to pay back and he won't have the luxury of waiting until he earns enough.

Should he expect the taxpayer to fork out? He'll be providing a service after all.

If there is an issue with diddums having to pay for their education then perhaps they should consider something like the Open University. I paid around £600 per course, you can take up to 10 years to complete your degree and the degrees are held in high esteem with employers.

Definitely a middle-class thing this, an excuse for a riot as people from poorer backgrounds wouldn't get the chance to go to university anyway. Like I said previously, why didn't they "demonstrate" like this when Labour first introduced the tuition fees? Horse, stable door, bolted.

TwoIf you were lucky- OU fees rising too, theya re not exempt.

I am from a bloody poor background and went to Uni, admittedly had to wait until my thirties though. But I did, and Dh is there now.

For me the annoyance is in big part at the change of mind by the LDs simply as I know so many students who did vote becuase of the policy: highway robbery. But for some reason i cannot quite quantify, £3k a year debt that I have seems far less scary than £6 - 9K per annum. I seem to have a mental cut off at 5 .

but I would still encourage the boys to go; ds1 is more liekly to do a HND in design in fact adn ds2 is looking at an HND in Animal Science but if ds4 wants to then he will. if takes the fee loan we will do our damnedest to top up any support loan or grant he gets to make it liveable.

Yes, OU fees will triple anyway. How else is the missing teaching grant to be covered?

TwoIfBySea 'Definitely a middle-class thing this, an excuse for a riot as people from poorer backgrounds wouldn't get the chance to go to university anyway.'
I think this is an incredibly patronising comment - why shouldn't poor people get to go to university? - although you're right in that under this gov it will be only the rich that can afford it - and for your information there were large protests against the introduction of tuition fees (both for the initial and the raise)under labour - but as usual the press vilified the protesters and unfortunately the majority of people accepted the erroneous argument that 'it was necessary' - this time it's not going to go away because the amount of debt is so huge for everyone except the very rich and because the cuts are going to affect people in such a drastic way - except of course the extremely rich, the corporations, and the bankers - who you might be interested to know are about to get bonuses of around £7 billion!

Well said, kate1956 - I find all the comments about it not being 'fair' that the bus driver should have to pay for the student ridiculous, as if bus drivers and students were somehow two entirely separate species!

The fact is, the introduction of higher fees will MAKE them into two separate species.

In the past, the bus driver (or son or daughter of the bus driver) could aspire to get a university education. Now that is simply not a possibility.

Bus drivers have been put 'in their place' in no uncertain way.

And all those happy that the poor will not be funding anyone else's education can rejoice in the fact that no-one else will help the poor pay for their own eucation, either...

So the poor will stay uneducated, social mobility will vastly decrease, and the dim rich will get all the graduate jobs. :(

exactly right, granted. The elite are using bus drivers as an argument not to fund students now. But all future generations of the poor will have to pay these huge fees, and many will be put off from going to university.

It is a huge change in our country, and a change for the worse. When will they start proposing the same things for the NHS? Soon the sick will have to pay more in what Labour's Charles Clarke calls co-payments.
Soon you will have to pay for the services that you access. Divide and rule will have been successful and the poor will be second-class citizens.

I've never heard a bus driver say 'bloody students, why should I fund their education'

Seriously, why should I fund an illegal war, MP's expenses the list could go on and on.

Quite.

I'd like to stop funding ALL bankers' bonuses in state-supported banks (ie all of them really, as the whole lot would have collapsed like a house of cards if we hadn't propped them up). I want to stop private schools being given charitable status. I want to stop funding Philip Green's wife's lifestyle in Monaco - I'd like her to pay up.

Let's see now - ooh look, we now have enough cash in the pot for free education for everyone!

Hurrah!

It's all about priorities, really, isn't it?

My dd was in one of the police traps and she said that when, at one point when the police were being particularly threatening towards the teenagers and 2nd and 3rd year students -one of the students told the others to get on their knees. They did. She said it worked - the police on that occasion didn't_ baton charge. I suppose they realised it wouldn't be good PR if someone filmed them baton charging kneeling teenagers. She said she had never been so frightened in her life. A friend of hers got the number of a plod who she saw smashing a student's hand with his baton; he broke his finger.
It's interesting the huge fuss about Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. It WAS all a bit horrible, that; not good (but I had to laugh when I heard that people were chanting 'Off with their heads')!

Interesting, this concern about Charles and Camilla - because I haven't heard the same horror expressed by the Metropolitan Chief Commissioner at the police violence which caused that young student to have a stroke and end up in neurosurgery.

DD was shopping in a city yesterday, it was teaming with police. Top Shop was shut because it was ransacked and all the clothes were on the floor.

kate, I'd probably be classed as poor as I earn a very low wage. Tuition fees may not yet be as big an issue in Scotland but that is only a matter of time and certainly will be an issue by the time my boys are old enough.

If they want to go then great, they can do what a lot of my friends did and work part-time jobs to pay their way through schooling. I'm also saving as much as I can to help them out.

Agreed that the bankers have gotten away with it all and should quite honestly have some tougher deterrents or this will happen again.

@Rachy91 yes you have wasted 10 grand and several years of your life by the looks of your post. I would ask for your money back and spend the next 2 years working on your basic spelling and grammar. And if you are really at "Uni" it must be the one Jim Royle went to what was it called? Oh yeah "The University up my arse!"

I think the social mobility thing is a nonsense. It makes people less socially mobile if 50 pc go to university.

It means a degree is required for a lot of jobs that don't actually need it, so 18 and 16 y old school leavers are utterly kippered. There's no choice any more. Unless you're some amzing entrepreneurial type. It's unfair the way things are right now.

I don't see the point, if you got dde or cde or something, why go to uni? You either could't be bothered to study or it was beyond you. Doesn't mean you're a rubbish persn who doesn't deserve a decent career. You could be fabulous in HR or management or social work, or music production or banking God I don't know a million things. But the choice is taken away from you then and there. It's either three dull years at Uni leaving with debt (yes now) or a crappy job. bsolutely nothing socially mobile about that.

The good thing about the tuition rises is that it will stop this madness.

Claig, you cut through the drivel and you talk a lot of sense, I am glad you look at it objectively and are not too partisan. Labour did start the ball rolling on this and are now just scoring cheap political points as our kids are the ones who will suffer. Re the Bank bail out, as you say the writing was on the wall (Wall St to be succinct) years ago. There is a book called F.I.A.S.C.O written by a trader in NY in the 90's and he tries to describe what a CDO, and Swaps are in layman's terms but as he says even he (with his Masters from Harvard Business School) did not understand what he was selling. Bad debt was constantly being packaged and passed off with a fancy new name dreamt up on a weekly basis. In fact he explains how Orange County went bust because they had over leveraged in the 80's and bought too many of these dodgy repackaged debts and were seduced by the supposed returns, he says that the same thing will happen to a country before long as one by one the big banks will crumble under the weight of debt. The book was written in 97 the year Gordon became Britain's "best Chancellor".

Apletrees also has a good argument coming at it froma different angle.

Thanks Klaus. Granted -- 50 pc cent of people going to uni means you'll get people being bus drivers and the like who could have had a pefectly decent non uni career. But if that's what you want...

I see absolutely no reason to fund people at uni who don't get good grades. What's the point? Where's the benefit? They had a good fourteen years of education, that's enough to set someone up for a decent life and rewarding career.

If they didn't or couldn't take advantage of it, they shouldn't be in FE, it's obvious.

My mum was a fantastic nurse really really practical and she did not need a bloody degree, I have one and it has not helped me one iota in my job searches in life. Horses for course I say.

"I'd like to stop funding ALL bankers' bonuses in state-supported banks (ie all of them really, as the whole lot would have collapsed like a house of cards if we hadn't propped them up)."

And exactly how will that help?

If the bonuses are paid then the Government will claim a fairly hefty proportion of them back in tax.

If they're not paid do you really believe that a single Sharehold, e.g. the Government, would be able say "I'll be taking all of that then." For example the Government owns about 40% of Lloyds, the other 60% might somewhat object to this.

And then there's the fact that to not pay the bonuses the Government will have to be able to tear up peoples contracts of employment. When the state sector is looking at laying off a lot of employees do you think it would be a good idea to give the Government the power to ignore someone's terms of employment under some pretension of "national interest"?

Bailing out the banks was a one off expense that should in time be an investment, already the shares the Government bought have increased substantially in value.

The problem this country faces is that year on year on year we're spending far more than we're earning. A relatively small one off cash injection won't do anything other than delay the moment you need to sit down and balance your books.

Every week the Government has to borrow about £4 billion to cover it's prolific overspending. The bonuses are nothing compared to that.

I'd understand all this 'keep the poor and stupid out of university' drivel, if the government were proposing apprenticeships, training - or even heck some jobs. But they are not. They are restructuring us, taking the opportunity for a wild assault on those without capital and consigning them to the scrapheap. I didn't notice them promising to fund 20000 new buses, 2000 new hospital (stuffed with excellently (and - praise to the lord - non-degree trained) nurses, a massive expansion of social services, road sweepers, lamppost technicians, etc etc - in fact they promise the opposite. Still Tesco's is expanding, eh!

"drivel" ?

ridiculous

It is drivel.I teach in a university and know the potential that lies in everyone (my university takes people who have no prior A levels or any exams at all - and prodices 1st and 2:1s like anywhere else). Who among you is qualified to say who should be allowed to go and who not. And the reality is that it will be only the wealthy who dare to go in future. Grotesque.

They are also scrapping Aimhigher, a scheme aimed at making sure the best candidates get to university no matter what their background. So the nature of this vision is absolutely not one in which there are fewer university students, but everything is done to make sure they are the best. There is no commitment whatsoever to social mobility.