Tuition Fees

[KateMumsnet]

As you've probably heard, the government has announced changes to the way universities are funded, and this means that, starting in 2012, the amount that students will be expected to pay for university tuition will rise to a maximum of £9000 per year. Here's the BBC's story.

We thought we'd test the water to see if there was a strong consensus on this issue amongst MNers, so do let us know what you think. Whether you're for or agin', it would be very useful if you could indicate (briefly!) your reasoning.

Those of you who are firmly against the changes might like to know that there will be a rally for students, future students and their families, on Horse Guards Avenue SW1 at 11:30am tomorrow, Wednesday 10th November. The event is organised by the NUS and supported by the British Youth Council, which includes organisations like the Scouts, the Woodcraft Folk, and St John Ambulance.

Against the financially elitist situation, that I find deplorable, but I would only wish to back a campaign that considers a complete restructuring f the whole university system. The Govt and taxpayer cannot sustain the current system whereby worthless degrees are handed out like sweets.

Has to be a new system built on the old method of elitism for intellect. Sorry, probably not a popular view. Means tested grants to fund all with limited financial resource. Access to former-polys-then-new-unis-now-back-to-polys-and-colleges for those needing further training. Focus on on-the-job training for mature students paid for by businesses.

We already have the OU, which has a lot of prestige (though they still have a campus, face to face tutorials, and residential courses; a 60 credit arts course will cost you £650). Other universities have different kinds of prestige and different resources which many people consider immensely valuable. I don't think that can all be written off as 'snobbery'.

This thread is about who should pay the fees, and my view is that there should not be a financial bar which stops the poor from attending a non-virtual university.

I would like to see a huge increase in industry sponsorship/scolarships - proper scholarships that pay the lot (like the army currently does, and, I think, the NHS). and I would like to see a huge step-change in the quality of secondary education - so that kids aged 17-18 can compete for uni places and scholarships on the basis of merit, not where they went to school. I think that for too long we have been looking at the wrong place when it comes to issues of access - the focus has been too much on the unis, and not enough on schools. equality in schooling is so fundamental to the whole debate about uni. (though, not so much re funding - more of a general issue)

Thank you, cat64 - looking forward to my shiny star!

The OU is losing a huge chunk of its funding under the current proposals. I think they stand to lose over £100m which may well push up the prices of degrees with them (although clearly not to the £9000 a year mark). I think this is, if anything, worse than the fees increase, as the OU fills a fantastic niche for people who simply cannot commit to a full time degree course. And they are there throughout one's life whereas other universities are much more geared to the standard model or leaving school and going more or less straight there (tho obv you can go as a mature student to any university). I do think, though, that an OU course requires a kind of commitment and self-driven desire to study that lots of 18 year olds simply don't have (yet). Most need more structure, I suspect.

I don't know if I would like to see more industry sponsorship unless it was to be very general sponsorship of a 'we commit to supporting X University with £Y per year for three years' or whatever. I think that the more practical and vocational degree courses such as engineering, medicine, chemistry are already being prioritised highly over say literature or foreign languages or music, not least in terms of the possible eventual monetary rewards which will become increasingly important as degree prices rise. Obviously engineers and doctors are essential to us in a way that viola-players or actors aren't, but I think we will be much much poorer as human beings when places like music colleges lose 100% of their public funding as some are set to do shortly.

I think contact hours are a red herring. It all depends on the quality of those contact hours. If you're doing an arts subject at Oxford, you may only have a few direct contact hours per week (and lectures). But they are likely to be direct contact with one of the finest academic brains you are likely to come across. There's no point in having twenty contact hours if they are substandard contact hours.

how about industry sponsorship where they (have to) support 1 viola player for every 3 engineers/biochemists/medics? I completely agree with your point that the world "needs" viola players. but I also think the big industry players need to put their hands in their pockets.

It would be really good if MN could come back onto the thread and say a little bit about what they had in mind when they raised this issue as a possible campaigning one. It really does seem odd to be taking as a campaign issue something that is so deeply enmeshed in such a wide range of deeply political issues, rather than a relatively stand-alone and non-political issue like miscarriage support.

Can you say what sort of activity you had in mind, and what you propose to do with the responses generated by your thread? The child benefit thread was left hanging a bit and it would be a shame if this one was too. If there is going to be any sort of campaigns-related document or whatever arising from the thread, can you tell us about it. (E.g. can you say if there is going to be a press release, or some tie-in with the more commercial 'Family Friendly' stuff on the home page.) Thanks.

Yes, a quota system might be a good plan. Agree that big business should be giving something back since they benefit (and profit) as much as anyone from highly educated intelligent young people.

It would be interesting to see what MNHQ have to say about the thread, the direction it has taken and what kind of campaign they had envisaged.

good libraries are v. expensive to run - and it'll be a long time before they are made redundant. journals are largely available electronically but the vast majority of books just don't exist in electronic form.

Many schools are already closing their libraries

Really? That's awful.

nottirednow - agree in principle, except that in my experience all students are poor. do you mean students who have poorer parents. After helping 3 children through college i think we will qualify as that too.

As hatwoman says, it will be an extremely long time before university libraries are not essential (and there will always be a need for the rare books side of their work). Only a fraction of the material arts and humanities people need is on the web, and much of that is in unreliable formats unsuitable for scholarly use. Hence the OU producing their own booklets. Other campus resources include talks by visiting speakers, big group seminars, inter-disciplinary activities of all sorts, conferences, plus all those activities which may be academic-related if not an actual part of someone's course. Maybe this counts for nothing if you're the kind of student who will only do the bare minimum, but I optimistically think that people's minds are fired by more than just their set texts. Most people meet others at university who they might otherwise never have encountered (which is another reason to insist on the importance of equal access). The chance to meet and talk to people in person is not something most people think can be easily substituted with online activity. Lots of students set out on a path in life they first tried at university, which may not have been directly course-related but were available because universities provide an intellectual hub (e.g. charity work, journalism, politics and so on). Obviously there are ways into all those things without a university, but they provide a very real catalyst for many.

nottired, I do think it would be massively difficult to set up your own real and reputable distance-learning university which would undercut the OU on price. I'm not sure what you're proposing really -- to replace all on-campus arts and humanities degrees with distance learning? I feel that we should support the OU rather than claiming that the details of what they do are somehow inessential. That aside, I absolutely agree with your points 1-4.

nottirednow - we have decent jobs but we aren't going to be able to cover the tuition fees of our children - for the 3 its going to be 81k before tax. thats an awful lot of money.

another thing that I've realised about that exposure to different things - is that it is long-lasting - and it gets handed on. I was struck by this when a uni friend of mine invited my kids to see a tv program being filmed that she works on. I think it's one of the most awesome exeriences to have been able to give them - they met actors, camera operators, costume designers - and they weren't of another planet. they were just grown-ups, people that they could grow into.

Agree, hatwoman -- universities should be social melting pots which reshuffle people's ideas across generations.

nottired, if your current job was at a university you would be expected to produce research as well as teach, which is what the student vacations facilitate. Teaching and research are in a synergistic relationship courses are tied up with the research conducted by the people who teach them. The university administrators and buildings are occupied all year. Conferences happen in the vacations both research conferences and external conferences held by businesses, who pay to use the facilities, which helps support the institution's academic work. I think it's good to rethink our models but the idea that universities are lying fallow outside undergraduate terms, and that arts academics are just sitting around, available to slot in a whole other cohort of students during the vacations, just doesn't add up to me. It would be a refashioning of the whole idea of what a university is supposed to be. As for those other opportunities, I didn't say it was just 'being away from home'. It is being in a centre of activity in which there is a dense variety of opportunities. But like I said before, if it's not worth it for you then it's right not to spend money on it. That's not an indictment of anyone who feels that way, just an expression of the fact that people have different personalities and reasons for taking a degree. I just really don't want those opportunities denied to students from poor families because they are deemed to be universally 'not worth it'. Many disagree.

nottired, it has never been suggested that students pay for research and that would obviously be wrong. What you say about conferences is not my experience -- there are certainly many academic conferences at both Christmas and Easter. It is pretty hard to find a slot for a conference booking where I work, but obviously I can't speak for everywhere. Insitutions vary in their resources and how they use them. The fact that you could rent a room is a good sign that the university was maximising its resources (though what room rentals facilitate is mostly the keeping on of cleaning and maintenance staff rather than significant profit). Providing the infrastructure and academic resources for a multi-disciplinary summer school is a much wider project. We could go on with this forever, but I don't really see how that's productive, since the core aims you describe are all points I absolutely agree with. All I have said is that there are massive implications to this idea of taking over other institutions, and when you look into the detail there are a lot of reasons why it would be very difficult to do and why it presupposes first destroying other academic work and sources of revenue. Once you go into the details, the vision you present seems, to me, hard to align ideologically with the other things you say you want. The kind of refashioning you propose seems to boil down to turning universities into an extension of schools. That's not what the rest of the world thinks they are for, but of course it's a proposal some would support.

Will Mumsnet PLEASE take this up as a campaign! One of the things that saddens me is that this is being portrayed as a student issue - this is an everyone issue! Particularly as mums - we want our children to be able to go to university without being saddled with debt. I want my children to be able to choose to study the thing they really care about and are interested in - not just a science subject simply because they're the only thing that will be funded. What about the value of learning - the Arts subjects - for the whole of society? This is a massive issue for all of us and particularly for us as parents - please Mumsnet don't leave this one to the students to protest about