Tuition Fees

[vampyrefate]

I heard on Radio 4 today that the Coalition (still sounding like a heel wrestling stable), was considering taking the cap of undergraduate tuition fees. Further, the spokesman said that "Students should think of this as higher income tax, not as a big debt

Comments

[davywavy]

This is the problem - higher education has become an alternative place to put the young rather than on the dole, and so it keeps the 'unemployed and claiming benefits' numbers down.

I agree that education is the great enabler, but that means the education system as a whole needs to give an education and prepare people for higher education, which universities are pretty much unanimous in their claim the state education fails to do. The failure here is really at the Comprehensive level, which serves little purpose except to ensure that smart kids from poor backgrounds get a shit education.

[vampyrefate]

It goes without saying that HE should not be an alternative to the dole; no more than being an MP should be.

I agree with the sentiment of your second point. The school system should, in my view, be preparing people for life; not necessarily for HE. For some people, school to HE is the right choice; for others, it really isn't.

Perhaps if we're keeping kids in education until 18, maybe at 16 they need to be invited to take the A level route into HE; or else leave for geting a trade?

[longrat]

Personally I chose to go to a Poly rather than a uni for it's vocational slant - and while that didn't work for me career wise (fell back into academe!) there is nothing wrong with reading for a professional based degree linked to a career path. In my view the new unis are still mainly doing their 'poly' role - vocational training - and that should be encouraged and not sniffed at. We DO need academic subjects - but we don't 'necessarily' need the number of people currently signing up for certain subjects. It's immoral to get people to work for 3+ years and rack up huge debt in a subject with no real chance of getting a career in that subject (media studies? foootball history? film appreciation?)

We also get a lot of students coming back here FROM the trades - it is not a dead end, and the maturity of those students means they generally do very well vs. 18 year old a-level students....

Industry sponsorship should be incentivised too - they want good grads - let them pay! (and let them get tax relief + other bonuses on their

[superfluffy]

'Oh no, there are lots more people going to university and it's costing us more money! What shall we do?'
Erm...how about look at the first part of the comment for the solution? Seriously, if more people going is costing too much, isn't it *obvious* that fewer people would cost less?

[cowprintavenger]

Although a requirement of my job is having a degree and a very specific postgrad qualification, I reckon it's one of the few teaching jobs that could be done without having gone to uni if such a thing were allowed. Most subjects require degree level knowledge which would be difficult to get without doing a degree, but all I need is to be able to speak another language, which I learnt far more of while living abroad than I did during my degree. If I'd lived abroad for a couple of years after my A levels, regardless of what I was doing there, my languages would be good enough

[salmon_of_doubt]

With you on all points. Uni is not for everyone (it didn't work fantastically well for me after all) but it should be available to all based on merit, not on one's willingness to take on a £20-30k loan.

There is something quite dishonest about the way sucessive governments have encouraged ever-higher proportions of schoolchildren to aspire to university, yet (kind of predictably) balked at paying for them all.

We need to take quite a serious look at what degree-level education represents. I don't hold with the elitism of the distant past but using higher education as some kind of buffer zone to soften employment statistics is [hyperbole deleted] really not the way we want to go, surely?