Really shocked at myself for thinking this (tuition fees)

[Concordia]

I don't really want my kids to be paying back debt their whole lives.
I want them to be able to buy a home of their own.
If they want to do a longer course or a course at a more prestigiuous uni i don't want them to go for a less good option because they are scared of debt. i want them to achieve the best they are capable.
was at myself when i found myself wondering if we would inherit any money in the next 15 years which would enable them to avoid this.
feeling
it's rough that teachers and social workers will end up paying so much more for their degrees than investment bankers who can pay off quickly.
this government really doesn't give a sh*t about those in the £18, 000 to £35, 000 bracket. after all we must be pretty feckless to be that poor and our education isnt' important at all now, is it.

I think that's true, Bonsoir.

Both mine are bright and academically-minded but I am seriously wondering about university now. Whether it might be better to consider other alternatives for them.

And, having paid for private education since they were ten, there's no way we will have anything left to pay for university. They're on their own. And that is true for many of the children they are friends with. The pot will be empty. We feel we've done all we can for our children and won't be able to lose our house to pay university fees.

Granted - I'm just curious (tempted )- where in an english speaking country (I'm assuming most would prefer to study in their native language) is the cost of study cheaper?

especially if you are an international student?

you have to look at the bigger picture. if we don't stand up in the global economy with something to offer we will get into a worse mess.

the uk was renowned for science and technology. world leaders. we're falling way behind now. king's college in london is CLOSING their chemistry dept. what a travesty!

more students are taking the 'softer' subjects rather than maths and physics.

we can't compete with china and india for manufacturing.

so what the hell are we going to do?

i'm not saying close art and history depts. they have their value. but i see those as a luxurious choice.

all throughout history the arts have been patronised by aristocracy, wealthy classes, businessmen.

if you take away the means of making money, the arts will collapse.

you cannot rely on arts etc. to be money spinners, and hence expenditure on these areas should reflect that.

I think its something very shallow and uncivilised in saying education has no value unless you can make money from it. Britain is also known abroad for its cultural heritage.

Investing in young people is really important. You might feel that unless someone does a maths degree and goes on to earn millions its a luxury you don't want to pay for, but you might end up paying for mass-unemployment in a few years time. Masses of young people who never got the chance to find their feet in life.

Companies won't just suddenly start employing people without degrees. They will employ foreigners with degrees instead because they are more highly educated at better universities. this is of course already happening.

fairymum - or employ graduates from wales and scotland.

Britain has just come 25th in a list of countries ranked by education. China came top. The Chinese leaving cert. is apparently awesomely difficult. I can't remember where I read that. Times or Telegraph.

And yet every time someone suggests that A levels and other UK exams are now too easy there's a huge fuss and people are told they're being patronising or dismissive or whatever and they or their kids worked very hard and how dare you suggest their A level wasn't as arduous as it would have been in 1980.

When I worked at a RG university the academics compared exams from the 80s to mid 2000s. They all unanimously felt that they were easier now, but what Abride said.

They knew if they dared to suggest that they'd be flamed.

It feels as if the children coming up through the sixth forms now are guinea pigs in what may very well be a cruel social experiment. I feel desperately sorry for them.
We've all read autobiographies, haven't we, by people who grew up working class in the 1930s or 1940s, say, and who couldn't take up a place at grammar school because their parents couldn't afford the uniform/payments for extras which would be part and parcel of taking up a place. Or the parents wanted an extra wage coming in as soon as possible, so set their faces very firmly against their child's chance of betterment.
I know times are not anything like as hard and tough as they were then, but the fact remains we are in effect going back to the 1950s by making higher education something for which an eighteen year old has to put himself/herself in debt throughout his/her working life. How many working class kids who would have to take on the debt in its entirety, will do so? And what will the effect be if even half of the brightest working class kids decide against taking up university places, because they've been brought up to avoid debt?
I THINK this tuition fees bill is going to cause a lot of hurt and, very far from being 'progressive' (the buzz weasel-word favoured by the coalition when talking about it) - is going to go some way to restoring
'The rich man in his castle
'The poor man at his gate
'God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate'.
All Things Bright and Beautiful in Cameron's Victorian Values garden.
I hope I'm wrong, but I feel a social experiment of this kind is so potentially damaging, it wasn't worth the gamble.

What I'm hoping will happen is that, as numbers going to traditional-style university drop away, perhaps, we are able to afford to help with more funding. It was possible to fund university when only about 10-20% went. So more money could be given to very bright working class children.

fairymum - you are missing my point.

these things COST MONEY. how are you going to pay for it? who is going to pay for it?

some kid indulging their life-long ambition to be a potter is all very well but it's bloody expensive. communism doesn't work - there just isn't enough money to go around. if you are just given things there is no incentive to work hard for them.

have you ever heard of people in the US talking about their college fund? kids in school start getting saturday and holiday jobs to save up. money given as birthday / christmas presents are saved. parents put money aside if they can. this is how the rest of the world manages.

i'm so glad someone pointed out china's outsanding education record. the chinese government spends 15% of gdp. in the uk, we spend 55% of gdp. this is just unworkable!

the government is not good at spending money. they have no incentive to get the best deals and a huge amount is wasted. they should tax us less and let us decide how to spend our money.

why can't we?

The idea that the arts aren't 'money spinners' is incredibly short-sighted. Even if you don't believe that they are of intrinsic humanistic value, vast numbers of people visit this country every year to visit museums, exhibitions and galleries. British publishers produce books by many of the world's best writers. Arts and humanities academics, and their university departments, are continually called upon to provide free consultancy services for TV series and documentaries from which every interested person can benefit. These sell all over the world. Our cultural capital is very high, but it is not indestructible.

There are also a lot of industries which rely on arts graduates with acute skills of analysis and good writing. I have a pure arts degree. I used to work for a global educational publishers producing text books for primary schools. They employ a lot of people, from call centre workers to term-time only sales reps (mostly mothers with school-age children) to designers to techies. Nearly all the editors had first class arts and humanities degrees. The books we produced sold all over the world at significant profit, and were also very warmly received by teachers and schools. Obviously this feeds in significantly to the education of children, and who knows what they will go on and do with the things they learn? It is impossible to assert that the arts are some kind of introspective self-indulgence, of concern only to the individual. And the idea that maths will make you rich is also a fallacy; pure maths is certainly not more useful, in crude financial terms, than English.

i'm not arguing an 'ideal world' scenario, i'm talking about the REAL world.

we can't afford to fund everyone's degree so that they can do whatever degree they want. it's just not feasible.

how do you propose we pay for it?

we were the world financial leaders until it all blew up. now what? we have a massive deficit and everyone's wingeing about spending cuts that don't even address the deficit, they just reduce spending!!!

if we don't cut tuition fees, what are we going to cut? cancer drugs? not provide our army in afghanistan with boots?

you're also saying that if people don't get the chance to study a degree, then that's it. well that's crap. i changed my career by bloody hard study in the evening and on weekends. there are degrees through the OU. there are extra courses you can do in all sorts of things. if you're really passionate about something, you'll make it happen.

to be clear: i'm not advocating that students have to pay ALL their tuition fees. they do need to make a contribution, maybe a significant one. it's time we stop expecting the state to provide everything and start making plans for ourselves. the last time i looked we weren't in a communist country.

stop acting like children and start taking responsibility.

dreamingofsun: "who else is taking on this sort of pain in our country at the moment to solve the economic problems?"

Lots of people - and they're not being given easy-access loans. Describing the sort of repayments system that's been proposed for students as "pain" is pretty wide of the mark in the context of other cuts. Not to mention the sort of pain everyone would ultimately be feeling if the deficit kept growing.

Whatever way we were doing it, it didn't work! Either in financial terms, or in terms of social mobility.

'dreamingofsun: "who else is taking on this sort of pain in our country at the moment to solve the economic problems?" '

For real? Unemployment is just a shade under 8%. People are losing their entire livelihoods.

NHS budgets are being slashed according to the news today.

Mortgage approvals at record lows.

VAT rising within weeks.

Fuel prices climbing, and rail fares increasing, but wages have stagnated.

Food and clothing costs up.

Many are losing child benefit. Those who keep it, it's frozen. Things like tax credits, frozen. But inflation up.

Still more are losing disability living allowance.

Oh, and, I'm sure glad I don't live in Ireland! They've introduced measures there that makes this whole thing look like a child's tantrum .

Jazz S - I was looking for a link I've posted before comparing the cost of unis around the world to here, but can't easily it.

Here are a couple of links quickly located - as you can see, there are many countries that are a farmore attractive proposition than the UK, at lower cost and teach in English too. Obviously, no English student can cope with a foreign language (despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of foreign students manage to cope with UK courses in English). Or so some seem to assume.

See:

lwww.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/aug/15/clearing-foreign-universities-british-students?INTCMP=SRCH

and

hubpages.com/hub/Comparison-of-cost-of-higher-education-around-the-world

Well said fairymum, dotnet and WintervalPansy.

The idea that everything other than science is just some kind of frivolous luxury that makes no money is ridiculous - it ignores the billions of pounds that our creative industries, for example, make every year. Think British pop music and fashion, which are world leaders. British litersture, drama, TV, likewise. British film punches well above its weight. etc etc British tourism is also v dependent on our cultural sector - I doubt the millions of tourists who come to Britin every year do so in order to admire our factories.

Obviously, it also ignores all the ways in which culture (in its broadest sense) improves our lives in non-commercial ways, and gives meaning to our lives - that without it, what are we actually here for? Clearly, if that needs explaining to you, you aren't ever going to 'get' it.

granted - interesting articles thanks. Two quotes that made me smile.

From the Hub:

"France has 82 universities, teaching 1.5m students. All are public; none charges tuition fees; undergraduate enrolment charges are a tiny ?165. All lecturers are civil servants. Universities cannot select students, who can apply only to ones near them. The results speak for themselves. Not a single French university makes it into the world's top 40 universities."

And from the Guardian:

" Dutch universities are not seeking British students for their money..... what the university gets is the opportunity to show countries further afield that their English-medium courses are so good that even UK students are enrolling on them,"

Now feeling proud to be British

Jackstarlightstarbright, the French situation is a bit more complex, as they also have the grandes écoles, which don't, strictly speaking, award degrees. That includes the écoles normales supérieures which are extremely competitive world-class elite institutions. ENS Paris definitely ranks highly. The most used rankings list is here: www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2010/results

But yes, the richness of British universities is worth feeling proud of. Also the fact that a British university is top of that ranking list - in fact, four of the top ten are British .

ok. i concede your point - the arts do make a valuable contribution. i hope you can see that i have made valid points too.

we still can't afford to pay for everyone's university degree. so what do you suggest?

expat - of course i know all these things you list are happening - but which of those is going to cost an individual 18k over 3 years?

Wintervalpansy - yes I did have a suspicion that the (US) Hub was being a tad unfair on the French Universities - but it was too comical to ignore.

dreamingofsun - ? It's not three years, though - the debt repayments are spread over 30 years (and are then written off if you haven't paid them by then).

Exactly, vesela.

And losing one's job? That can cost you: your home in addition to a huge loss in pay if you don't secure another job fast.

Losing DLA - yes, autistic people, go forth and find a job! It's that easy.

It also means their carer loses CA.

And their HB if they get it.

So yeah, £18K easily.

NHS cutbacks, have to pay for your own care and in some cases, care that can mean prolonging a life. Let's put a pound figure on that, shall we?

V. payments spread out over 30 years and if you earn under a certain amount, nothing.