Riots in the streets?!

[LRH]

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.

[Atelier]

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.

[LRH]

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.

[m0ds]

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.

[Calin Leafshade]

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.

[Atelier]

Calin do you know if the government is reconsidering after the protests? I can't find anything on that.

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.

[LRH]

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?

[Calin Leafshade]

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.

[LRH]

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.

[Wersus]

You should try free education. It's great 

[Anian]

...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.

[Calin Leafshade]

Foreign students have it even worse i'm afraid.

[Anian]

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.

[m0ds]

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.

[Ali]

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?

[Stupot]

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.

[Nikolas]

I think I feel fortunate that I managed to get out of the UK just in time! 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!

[Tuomas]

Hmm, 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.

[Snarky]

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...)

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

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.