I was walking through the mall and I quickly caught the last few seconds of a news flash about riots breaking out because of tuition fees in the UK. I was just really curious as to what had happened. Sorry for the overly dramatic title.
Basically, the government is making people pay for the rest of their lives for wanting to better themselves. There have been walkouts and protests since they announced a rise in tuition fees; the worst of which was earlier this month. Check this vid dawg:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11726822
Suffice to say, the violence wasn't entirely sparked by students. Anarchists from around London joined in after they heard what shiz was goin down. Ahh, it takes me right back to 1381.
Heh. I'm from America, paying massive tuition is nothing new here anyways. It's just good to have multiple perspectives. A lot of people there were scoffing at "how ridiculous it was to go so crazy over tuition", but we've never had cheap college, so it's hard to understand.
Mental, I was going to go do some filming for bj2 at the Radcliffe camera (Bodleian Library) today, but didn't go in the end.
But glad to see the students are still making themselves heard. The planned fees are ridiculous.
Domithan, it doesn't help that a neighbouring country (Scotland) gets it for free. It wasn't an acceptable increase on fees either, it was something like a 400% rise.
Yea, those in academia are not happy...
Essentially we currently have a Liberal/Conservative coalition government which is pretty much unheard of.
One of the core Liberal policies is to abolish tuition fees altogether.
However they acknowledged that the economy simply wasnt strong enough for that right now but alot of Libs did sign declarations saying that they would oppose any rise in tuition fees and now the coalition of which they are part is proposing trebling the fees putting the tuition cap upto £9000 per year
This alleged betrayal is basically why the students and those in academia (a huge proportion of liberal voters) are so damn pissed.
With maintenance loans and stuff that has the potential to put students about £36,000 in debt after a 3 year undergrad course. If you do a 4 year course or a post-grad then you could possibly be looking at £50,000 worth of debt.
Now this was done once before (again by a conservative government i think.. although i may be wrong) and the fee cap was raised from about £1000 to £3000 to 'create a market'
The idea was that the good universities would charge more and the less prestigious universities would charge less and you'd have a free market thing going.
In reality all the universities just started charging the full amount because a market was already established by the entry grades. So it's likely a lot of universities will just go straight to the 9 grand.
The last time we had a conservative government they also tried shit like this. Privatising the telecom industry for instance. Which now means pretty much our entire telecommunications infrastructure is controlled by a single private company which is why they can pretty much charge and do what they like.
I was hopeful that the Liberal side to the coalition would rein all this in but it seems like they have pretty much sold out.
Nick Clegg has essentially killed the Liberal Democrats.
Calin do you know if the government is reconsidering after the protests? I can't find anything on that.
Quote from: Nick Clegg
I hate in politics, as in life, to make promises that you then find you can't keep... We made a promise we can't deliver - we didn't win the election outright and there are compromises in coalition.
Lol compromises.
"Vince Cable has denied breaking promises on university fees, saying the Lib Dems are bound by the coalition deal - not pre-election pledges."
Hmm, they still remain the same party. Their ideals should be the same no matter what, and not try to defend themselves with technicalities.
Yeah, I was reading about the cap of 9,000, which is a huge increase indeed.
I'm trying to get a better grasp for it, myself. Here there are both private colleges and state funded colleges, and funded community colleges. It's nothing unusual for any graduate to be 40,000 USD+ in debt, even after attending the significantly cheaper funded colleges (probably closer to 80,000+ for private schools), but there are all sorts of options. Scholarships and financial aid are actually pretty easy to come by, I'm getting a fairly nice scholarship myself just for keeping my grades up. Also, the cost is cut significantly (or sometimes even eliminated in the cases of RA's and such) if you get a job on campus. It's a fairly complicated system.
My long winded point here being: I know nothing about the financial system of universities over there, are students given similar opportunities to bring the personal cost of college down?
Atelier.. I doubt the government will reconsider due to protests.. they tend not to do that.
Domithan, members of low-income families can get relief although its not particularly easy to come by and I dont personally know anyone who got a scholarship of any kind.
The saving grace for us in britain is that you are guaranteed a student loan pretty much regardless of credit rating and you only need to begin paying it back once you earn more than £25k a year.
The main consequence here though is that students will pay 3 times as much for their education but, due to funding cuts, actually receive a worse education.
Science and education funding has really taken a beating in the UK which is unlikely to save us money since most analysts agree that they tend to pay for themselves and, in the case of science funding, actually turn a profit.
The sheer depth of the cuts being made in europe right now are quite concerning.
So few scholarships? Wow, that's really rough. I have quite a few friends who have gotten free rides from scholarships. However, for every person with a scholarship there's 100 without them . Also, buying a college education can be quite a risk. There was an article in the paper the other day about some guy who had gotten his degree in math, but there wasn't any place for him to work with whatever specialty he'd gotten. He's working in a movie theater with some absolutely massive debt.
You should try free education. It's great :)
...so I'm going to get my college degree in a week or so (I hope :-\ ) and so you say this is not a great time to go searching for scholarships in the UK (at the British council here)...well that's just freakin' great. :(
Foreign students have it even worse i'm afraid.
Quote from: Calin Leafshade on Wed 24/11/2010 22:57:10
Foreign students have it even worse i'm afraid.
Great! ::)
The good thing is that I had a back up country - Ireland, good thing the economy there is just fine...oh, wait...damn it. Hmm, I guess Scandinavia here I come.
Quote from: Wersus on Wed 24/11/2010 20:59:14
You should try free education. It's great :)
Be unemployed and go to Open University! Just be prepared for a lack of diversity in subjects.
I'm an MA student in London I heard the protest go past the window. I was in a talk about how to identify your unique selling point and network with industry contacts to succeed in the creative industries, and somehow I felt that I was wasting with my life.
Does anyone have a fire extinguisher I can throw off a building?
Quote from: Calin Leafshade on Wed 24/11/2010 22:57:10
Foreign students have it even worse i'm afraid.
English unis love international students. They pay ridiculously higher fees than domestic students, but they usually have more options in the way of scholarships or grants from their own governments. That's not to say they don't still consider it expensive, though.
I think I feel fortunate that I managed to get out of the UK just in time! :D Then again I came back to Greece and things are not exactly better over here! ;)
Still, I always had in mind that the one thing that Britain had to sell was education and they seem to be screwing with that now! I think it's by far the most idiotic plan (even more than firing 500,000 civil workers!)
Riots CAN accomplish many things, if the students stick to it for as long as they can! If they give up after a week then nothing will be done!
Quote from: anian on Wed 24/11/2010 22:58:52Hmm, I guess Scandinavia here I come.
Welcome, it's free.
Seriously though, tuition fees have been a huge subject of discussion around Europe. They raised them in Germany, but there was no objection because they were low to begin with. It's a great thing the brits are showing how they feel about it. Our own government suggested entering tuition fees, which aroused a lot of anger in the student community. I too was protesting. It didn't go through, of course. It's impossible to make a change like that when the whole schooling system is based on equal opportunities by a state-run school+university. I go to uni free, and it's among the 100 best in the world, so their arguments fell flat. Had they raised the fees/introduced ones, there'd be a lot of lower middle class families who'd never have the money to educate themselves. I for one would probably be a car mechanic once my sister had used all the college funds my parents gathered. If.
I think the students are whiny, entitled brats and should just suck it up. When I was at uni during the protests against the last fee raise, few things annoyed me more than seeing my classmates, well-off Cambridge students, getting all indignant about having to pay more than a token amount for the cushy life and first-class education they were enjoying.
Or to put it more seriously: Universities are currently not allowed to charge anywhere close to what it costs to provide an education (or the value of an education: a university degree is worth much more than it costs to get one). They have to make up the difference in government support (and by extortionate fees on international students), money that comes from taxes. Students are disproportionately from middle-class families, most of which could afford to pay it themselves. In other words, the state is taking money from everyone in order to give rich people a freebie.
So raise (or abolish) the fee cap, reduce the government subsidy, and use some of the money to provide more means-tested scholarships and favorable loans for poorer students. You shouldn't be barred from going to university because you don't have the money, but at the same time the government shouldn't be paying for well-to-do college graduates to send their kids to the same good schools they went to. It's the subsidized perpetuation of the class system.
Take me, for instance. After I finished my undergraduate and Master's degrees (in the UK and US, respectively), I paid down my student loans in four years of working. On top of what I borrowed, my parents gave me some support during my student days (primarily the tuition fees), which they could easily afford. By any fair measure, I didn't pay enough for my education. (Now, partly this was because I got interest-free loans and grants from the Norwegian State Education Loan Fund, which is a more favorable system by which to fund your studies, and similar to what I would propose for the UK only with more means-testing. But still...)
Sooner or later people need to realize there's no such thing as a free lunch. When the government provides ANY service it is paid for by the public at large, often against their will and desires. This is called theft and only lasts as long as there are enough people to support it. If you want an education you should be prepared to pay whatever is reasonable (and by reasonable I mean an honest fee that factors in the cost of the necessary materials and instructors). I'm completely against gouging people for money (and everything I've read would suggest this isn't the case in the UK), but seriously, people who protest paying their dues just come off like lazy motherfuckers who want someone else to pay the bill.
Quote from: ProgZmax on Thu 25/11/2010 11:33:28
...just come off like lazy motherfuckers who want someone else to pay the bill.
I don't think like that. If people changed their minds once they graduate and started supporting larger fees, then that would be the case. I expect most of these people are prepared to pay for the education of the future generations too (or are they backstabbing the ideology after graduation?). I think that makes more sense as once they graduate and start making money, it's easier to put a small sum aside every now and then than it is to put a huge amount of money aside when you still have no income.
I don't want to argue. But the way I see it, a well provided and equal education and access to it only works for the good of the society. Tax money is equal in the sense, that everyone pays for the services everyone else has access to, payers included. When all the members of such society feel equal, the agreement stands flourishes. If you then decide to cut back this input so that people would only pay for what they needed or wanted, you'd create not so much a society but an environment of capitalist individuals who'd in the end compete for such basic elements as health care, education, and other state provided welfare. Such societies exist, where say, health care is not accessible to everyone but only those who can pay for it, and the fees are as high as the provider wishes, where the natural demand makes the market.
Something like education and health should not be something you'd have to fight for in a modern society, especially when the society could easily provide this to everyone with lesser costs if it weren't for the greed of certain individuals. I have noticed by living in a socially built country, that a tax-funded education not only makes the country a better competitor against others, cuts back the number of joblessness and provides an altogether happier environment to live in with a minimal amount of poor people. A high tuition fee system would result to two major setbacks: 1. educational areas such as humanism and art would be only studied by the elite, who had the money to invest in something that never readied on to a prober job. Say philology or literature for one, or drawing/painting /contemporary arts, paying for the education would be a lousy investment. 2. When the payment the universities was used to raise the level of the faculties performance, there'd be no limit to how high the prices could go, and in such cases the schooling system would end up like the health care in the US: only those rich/working could even consider attending classes, while those who had nothing to begin with, would just have to prepare for a life of no chances. A society that includes people with equal rights should provide equal possibilities, and this in the sense of positive freedom, which means that you have been given the chance to better yourself, NOT the way conservative countries work, now called negative freedom (the American dream) where you have the right to do what ever you want but you never have the means to do it.
And when we live in a society of men and women and children and the rich and the poor, there's no "it's all up to you", when everything you do help everyone, and everything the people do in the end makes the world a better place for you too. As I said before, I wouldn't be at the university at the moment if we had tuition fees in Finland. But when I graduate in a few years, I'll be the one paying back for my own education with the work that I do, the work my free education allowed me to at least try out.
Quote from: Snarky on Thu 25/11/2010 09:46:22
Or to put it more seriously: Universities are currently not allowed to charge anywhere close to what it costs to provide an education (or the value of an education: a university degree is worth much more than it costs to get one). They have to make up the difference in government support (and by extortionate fees on international students), money that comes from taxes. Students are disproportionately from middle-class families, most of which could afford to pay it themselves. In other words, the state is taking money from everyone in order to give rich people a freebie.
Dear lord... You mean that when you buy anything you should expect to... make less than you bought it for? What a preposterous idea indeed!
Unis are not allowed to make more than they earn for a very good reason: They are not there to make profit, but to provide for the people and the society. If they were to make profit, then the system would be flawed and the degrees taken by such universities would mean nothing (basically you would be buying a degree, since you would be offering profit to an institution).
Tuition fees only seem to lead to lower social mobility.
Higher education students are already disproportionately from middle and upper class backgrounds, and this would simply make matters worse.
Unless you have a flat tax system, "free" education doesn't really exist, since you'll be paying it back with future taxes. Long expensive educations lead to high paying jobs, which will be heavily taxed.
Course, you could always go through a long expensive free education and then not use it, which would be the closest thing to "theft". A most brilliant scheme.
Means-tested tuition grants can prevent or even reverse a decrease in social mobility, loominous. The current system is actively regressive, by handing out perks that go disproportionately to those who are already better-off.
Tuomas, the problem with your preferred system is affordability. When the government is broke (like in the UK), they need to save money somewhere. Because students are currently getting their degrees at bargain prices, they can safely and fairly be asked to pay a little bit more. And chronically cash-strapped universities do need to raise money somehow, in order to maintain quality and compete in an increasingly international market (e.g. by attracting great professors).
The alternative is that you underfund the schools, end up with a country of crappy (or at best mediocre) universities, and the rich people just go to the US or somewhere like that to study. Is that any more egalitarian? This has happened, to an extent, in a number of countries with no-fee universities (I'll refrain from naming them so as not to offend anyone's national pride).
Quote from: Snarky on Thu 25/11/2010 22:09:08
Means-tested tuition grants can prevent or even reverse a decrease in social mobility
Could you elaborate?
If your point is that "taxing" well off students would allow institutions to accept more, potentially poor, students, why not simply raise the tax rate for those income brackets? Seems like a potentially messy way to start demanding tuition payments only from certain students. Are there any examples of this model being used in some countries?
As far as I know, there is a quite clear correlation between free education and social mobility.
And while it's true that countries like the US are able to offer rather unique first class educational opportunities for those with the means (or the scholarships), the downside is relatively low social mobility.
I hoped to get away with a flippant remark and not be drawn into a political debate. But...
The Coalition Government's actions in this area and others will have the effect of broadening the gap between rich and poor (something the Labour government also achieved back in the good days). Creating a free market in education is a mistake because better university courses will inevitably be more expensive. The prospect of looming debt will surely keep young people from poor backgrounds from attending better universities and no doubt put some people off attending university at all.
This will be a great shame, because the merit of the individual ought to be the decisive factor. I fear we may be living with the consequences of the government's socially divisive decisions for years to come.
There you go Internet, that's my opinion.
Quote from: Snarky on Thu 25/11/2010 09:46:22few things annoyed me more than seeing my classmates, well-off Cambridge students, getting all indignant about having to pay more than a token amount for the cushy life and first-class education they were enjoying.
As far as I'm aware the planned changes to tuition fees won't affect the majority of students curently in Higher Education. It will only come into affect for new students starting in September 2012. I guess those hoping to go on and do a masters might be more affected, but there will be (as there always has been) ways of getting outside funding for that.
Not much has changed as I understand it... Okay, so maintenance grant is supposedly being scrapped... that's not a big a deal as it sounds because it will just be added to their student loans. So yeah, they'll have to pay it back eventually, but it's not going to kill them... as has always been the case, you dont have to start paying it back until you start earning a reasonable salary, and if you havent paid it back after 30 years, the debt gets wiped clean anyway... that's always been the case. I think thats more than fair.
I think a lot of the students 'protesting' are just enjoying the prospect of waving a banner around simply because it the current 'studenty' thing to do...
The ayes have it, the ayes have it. A few minutes ago the motion for £9000 tuition fees was carried 321 323 to 302.
I employed an infrequently used method of funding my education (Masters+) that was quite effective. It's called "JOB". The idea is that you do work that is of value for somebody. In return they give you a quantity of money that bears some kind of proportional relationship to the value of the work and the amount of time required to complete it.
The downside is that it's necessary to, some extent, forgo the excesses of youth and save one's money. That means not having the latest fashion, not having multiple girl friends or taking them to expensive restaurants, and no recreational drugs. :=
The upside is one is more committed to one's education. In my case for example, tuition for full time students carrying 12 or more credit hours per semester was the same amount regardless of how many credit hours. Electrical Engineering students such as myself typically carried 15-18 credit hours per semester. Since I was paying I wanted my money's worth so I always signed up for extra classes and usually carried 20-23 credit hours per semester. If I wasn't paying I probably would have carried 15 hours and complained about how difficult it was. ;D
I think the problem with the US and EU countries is that there are too many slackers who "... get money for noth'in and chicks for free...". They don't need any more encouragement IMHO.
I'm planning on UK, probably Scotland. Student visa, as far as I am aware, allows 20h of work per week. I plan to stretch the Masters from 1 onto 2 years (part time or some similar expression), but still am in search of a scholarship to at least finance the tuition so I can rent according to my budget (job+parents)
Rick, this may shock you but the majority of british students *DO* have jobs. Living in university cities is very expensive.
In fact, without maintenance loans and government subsidy it would be *impossible* to study in London.
Nah, British students don't have jobs! They just stay at home enjoying all the free bionic limbs they get on the NHS.
EDIT: For full disclosure, I am an MA student in London and I don't have a regularly job. But in my defence, I am seriously running out of money.