University

what really pisses me off is that I know so many people who cost the tax payer a fortune by doing an expensive degree in something like Music and then becomming a recruitment consultant. I am not saying we don't need musicians and I'm not saying there is anything wrong with being a rec con. What bites me is that appalling lack of allocating suitable uni places as many sensible people are saying what we need are more vocational or on job training and less "mickey mouse degrees". This doesn't at all mean I think we should penalise degrees in say the arts, but we need to get numbers right. We also need to project gaps in the marketplace and predict what people we need and say okay we need x million nurses, x hundred thousand art historians, x hundred thousand hairdressers graduating by 2010 and allocate places accordingly. the universities themselves are to blame for a lot of it. It would be nice if we could study something for the sheer pleasure but I don't think this should be at taxpayers expense. If we allocate places correctly there would be enough money for all the students. I could ramble on forever...

It is hard to quantify the economic value of a given subject. I suspect the vast majority of arts and humanities graduates go into populating the layers of middle management and become very productive members of the economy (and possibly even the society). In my experience history graduates become lawyers, english graduates work in fashion, and fine arts graduates work in burger king (and later write for magazines). Engineering degrees are easier to place, but even then most will only teach you the basics and you will have to learn a lot on the job like anyone else. The specifics are too broad to possibly approach. Hard science degrees (Maths Physics, Chem etc) are roughly on a par with humanities, you either stay in academia or move into the same jobs as the engineers do. There are very few jobs that actually require a Mathmetician. I know more physicists working in banking than any other field. The most important thing you learn in a degree course is how to learn. When you next encounter a problem you haven't been baby fed the answer to you will at least be able to research it and find a solution. The most important thing you get out of a degree course is a piece of paper that certifies you are kinda smart.

I was beefing up the hours to avoid howls of protest from the henstoat brigade. When I was at business college on day release from work I did a Higher National Certificate for 7 hours a week, while friends went off to university to do a Higher National Diploma (which was a course that lasted 2 years like mine, and was ostensibly 'full-time'), spending 6 hours a week in lectures. Admittedly this was 1990-1992 and times may have changed, but I do think that we are sort of wasting a lot of money in the university system if we are paying lecturers to work half a week because we only expect very limited hours from the students.

I suspect the lecturers are taking several tutor groups a week Andrew and are in fact working what passes for a full week in academia. I agree with both yours and Judes hypotheses completely.

lecturers work so much more than 6 hours a week... they take seminar groups for a substantial amount of the time, preparing hour long lectures, mark assignments, and many are expected to have published pieces several times a year to be able to continue in their post. An easy life it isnt, i suspect... I think that making Uni post 21 entry only is a fantastic idea.. it would stop the gap year whinging, it would also allow people to really know what they actually want to do (mind you, i didnt have a clue what i wanted to do til i was in my mid 30's) so that they didnt dither their way through farty useless degrees because "it looked intereting and i didnt know what else to do" Maybe another good idea would be to require people actually have posts in the sector that they are training for before they were admitted to Uni - the organisations could then pay or contribute to that education.. similar to the forces university sponsorship deals - maybe keep them on retainers, doing one day a week in the workplace voluntarily or working during hols for them to build up knowledge of all levels and jobs etc... it would work with loads of degrees.. teaching, dr'ing etc.

i propose that we whip everyone out of school at the first appearance of a pubic hair ... then we put them to honest grafting so they can do something useful ... after that education would be totally by choice and free ... forcing those hormonally ridiculous people through compulsory schooling is a complete waste of time ... as all of us parents know school post puberty is just state funded child minding ... after the poor buggers have worked until 18 or 21 or 25 or something some of them will be gagging to get some good education and all the money that is presently poured into frogmarching spotty gimps to french and biology and the like could be sensibly spent on marvellous education that is suitable and worthwhile ... *puts on Fish For Minister of Education t shirt*

Um, excuse me Jon, when I type 'society' I actually mean 'society' and when I type 'economy' I... OK?

English lit being a case in point really. Having a bunch of people who know a great deal about Jane Austen (but would have to convert to a teaching degree to convey their knowledge to anyone else) isn't in any sense inherently useful to an economy, other than hopefully in the course of learning about a subject the students feel interested in and passionate about, they also learn analytical skills, the ability to argue a case and consider opposing views. I have to say, I do consider it important that the state helps fund this sort of degree, which then leads me into dubious areas. It is possible (even likely) that my tolerance and acceptance of English Lit as a valuable (though not inherently economically productive) degree is in part due to my own interest in literature. So, if we start dividing degrees up into 'proper' and 'pointless', who does the dividing? Is there a difficulty in saying that university should be open to all who are capable, regardless of financial background, but make the degrees more challenging and rigorous - essentially restoring them as a meritocracy? The thing that troubles me more than anything is not students going off to do degrees that I think are trivial, but the idea that a degree retains value if half the population have one. In a sense, what is being asked of the non-degree population is to fund something which will make themselves less competitive in the job-market. If degrees are ten a penny in the job market then those of us who don't have one (myself included) will be at a disadvantage that we helped pay for. I still feel that further education should be about more than converting A Levels into future earnings and the fact that a couple of modern students are making me question assumptions I had brought to this debate is at least some reassurance that my tax dollars are being well-spent.

you dont have to convert to a teaching degree to teach it.

As a sidebar, given the university top-up fee vote and hutton, do you think the Tories want Tony Blair to be critically injured and hand-over to Gordon Brown, or be tainted and limp on in office? My view is the latter, but I'm not sure to what extent the Conservatives, and Labour view Tony himself as a vote-winner and asset.

I'm not sure that a tainted Blair is any worse than his jaw-cracking side-kick... what you can look forward to is more spin than a bey-blade convention.

"I was beefing up the hours to avoid howls of protest from the henstoat brigade." Very kind of you, I'm sure. I agree with you and Missi about most of this. My friend Nick quit school after mediocre GCSE's to take a joinery apprenticeship, and it was a good decision - he's doing what he likes. And it's baffling that these kind of courses aren't publicised more, or made attractive, to the extent that most parents don't seem to think they exist as an option. But then, I'm doing what I like too. I didn't need to take a gap year to decide what Uni course I wanted to do. But you can be committed to education for its own sake, to understand more, and equip yourself with skills that are more than a fast-track to a weighty paycheck. Why do I *have* to be doing this for the sake of the economy? Why is it a waste of time if, as is the case, I come to my last semester, and am still unsure over what kind of career direction to take? "And I still think that an awful lot of degrees could be compressed into two year full-time courses rather than 3 years of 15 hour weeks." If you want 'the henstoat brigade' on your tail, this is the right way to go about it. True enough, I don't spend every day labouring 9 hours, but every unit I've done in the past two and a half years has been positively hurtled through. The process is too condensed as it is. I'm sure, if you wanted, you could get through an arts degree by reading three books a term and throwing out a handful of essays at a thousand words an hour. If you're clever, you might even get good marks. But there's no point in doing the degree if that's your attitude - if you're serious about getting what you can out of it, then reading books and writing essays takes about ten times longer than it should, and not because you're lazy. You're meant to be thinking about the whole world from several different points of view. You're meant to be expanding your mind like a hippy, but without drugs, and with coherency. Condensing arts degrees (don't know about science) to less than 3 years would wring the last vestiges of worth out of the whole damn process - you would truly turn the whole University system into a factory for lawyers, deadbeats and politicians. No serious student would get anything out of it, and you'd kill off much of the potential for cultural growth.

I remember buying The Tempest, missing one seminar because of flu and finding that when i went back, the tempest "had been done" and Id missed it. In two and a half hours. Agree with henstoat.

You touch here on a difficult problem, Henstoat. As a liberal who believes in education, I am in accord with you on the potential of education (and indeed life) to be about more than being a useful productive member of society and that a degree education can be about more than vocational work. However, we come to what I am deciding to call the Curly Watts issue - if education is funded through taxpayers rather than by the recipient then Curly Watts can go and get his astronomy degree and enjoy himself, then become a dustman, that's his right. But his fellow workers will have contributed to his having had three years of mind-broadening experience while they were working and he has contributed not one jot to their lives. I'm not at all sure what the answer is to the university problem, in general I favour it being funded through general taxation, since any form of graduate tax tends to result in education being for the well-off rather than the intellectually able; but in a country with loads of people on benefits, pensioners living longer than ever and half the people between 18-22 in university education, I'm not sure how sustainable this is. My point chiefly is that those who really want to go to university to study should be able to do so, free of financial constraints and crippling debt, no matter how esoteric their area of study; but that the government should not be throwing around 50% targets. I do think that there are a significant number of people who go to university because it seems like the right thing to do, rather than because they have any burning desire to be educated. To be fair to Labour, although I'm hoping they get a good kicking when the vote comes, the more you debate this issue the more you realise how impossible it is to come up with a solution. Speaking as a member of society, I believe that education ought to be free to the able and committed - but as a taxpayer there is a part of me that says why should I pay for someone to go to university and either (a) become a doctor etc and earn more money than me as a result of my assistance, or (b) learn a great deal but not put that learning to good use by taking on a job. That's the tension that is difficult to reconcile in any solution. I will have to be willing to accept that is just me from the outside, but while Liana's Tempest in 2 1/2 hours is palpably ridiculous, Henstoat's horror at having to read three books in a term doesn't seem to me that demanding. Having not done it, I will just bow out gracefully.

"Henstoat's horror at having to read three books in a term doesn't seem to me that demanding." Um. Except I was using that as an example of how to skirt through the course without taking anything out of it. My 'horror' would be at the idea of *anyone* (taxpayers or students,) paying for such laziness. I have to admit I don't exactly plough through books myself, but I take a long, long time over the ones I do read, and I then read a lot of articles about them as well. My experiences are very similar to Liana's - we had two weeks worth of Chaucer seminars (4 hours) to work through the whole of 'Troilus & Criseyde', and that was after they doubled the amount of time devoted to it. I've missed the odd entire text, and towards the end of a unit I (and most other literature students here,) end up hardly bothering with the last few texts because you have to devote most of your time to a close study and essay write-up of one. As I said, how much of an effort this is depends on your attitude towards it. As you quite rightly....wailed, Andrew, the more you consider the problem, the more its core complexity reveals itself. Top-up fees have never seemed such a bad idea to me, if I understand them correctly: at no initial cost, the student picks a course which he later pays for. In choosing, he has to consider whether the employment benefits are worth the overall cost - so the University's really have to sell the course. You pick a big, fat expensive one if you're pretty sure you can turn it into a high-paying job. The problems are immediately apparent, however: the scheme assumes that the only factor in the quality of a course is how much money you can expect to earn afterwards. Renowned courses for limited numbers, such as UEA's creative writing one, would cost more because of the kudos, but don't offer greater employment opportunities than an average literature degree - so you'd have to be either very rich, or a sado-masochist, to apply for them. The problem is also that no blanket payment scheme is fair to all individuals. It's not fair that a doctor should pay for his own training, only to earn a crap NHS salary for his work when he'll be saving the lives of people who've never given him anything. But on the other hand, Andrew's blood-curdling howls at the idea of paying for an aimless lout to drink beer and copy his older brother's essays for three years is also worth noting.

I suspect that, despite the prospect of massive debt, more and more people will continue to strive towards a place at university. It's become a sort of holy grail - people really do believe that a degree will guarantee them an interesting, lucrative career. I studied Eng Lit in the early 90s (when student loans came in, but before compulsory tuition fees). It helped me to grow up a bit, and I also got to read extensively. It wasn't the time of my life though, and it hasn't made me rich (yet). Blair has gone back on his word but I don't think he had much choice in the matter. The tide has been turning against free education since the Thatcher years. [%sig%]

This is a slightly obscure one but: My problem with top-up fees as opposed to a straight graduate tax is that, with top-up fees, a person earning serious money (£200,000 per year or whatever) will be able to pay off their fees in a year or two and will then pay nothing for the rest of their life, while someone earning £20,000 will be paying a percentage of their earnings in fees for about 20 years. Surely a system where all graduates had to pay a certain percentage (to be determined in a progressive way) would be fairer.

My guess is David, that anyone walking into a £200K job is also likely to get a golden handshake whereby their fees are paid off. Come to think of it, weren't the LEAs offering to do something similar?

The only graduate I know of who got a 200k job was Bill and Hilary Clinton's daughter and I don't think fees would have been an issue. I disagree totally with a Scaled graduate tax depending on earnings as its just another way of penalising those who are successfull.... but really I am opposed to a graduate tax full stop. Education is possibly the only thing I believe everyone is entitled to free, because without it, it is impossible to escape poverty. With it...in this country at least everyone is free to live their potential... as I said if we awarded fewer places to the top students and vocational courses and on job training to more people we would have enough money for all (with a small grant as well). The number of places should drop by about 35% and places allocated on ability, talent and dedication so that it is the best students not those from wealthiest backgrounds who go. I think A levels are not a good way of assessing...after all if Camilla Snot-Murphy Pudley Sidebottom average brains, prosaic persona, was sent to a private school where study rooms etc were provided and she works her frilly hockey knickers off studying she will do better than Sharon "scarface" Smith genius IQ, urban poet, who goes to the local comp where her peers and her parents do not encourage study. I think early psychometric tests should be used to identify the key players of tomorrow.... Sorry Bobble, even though I don't vote tory any more I still can't accept the penalise you more the more you earn mentality!

But aren't Mr & Mrs Snot-Murphy Pudley Sidebottom likely to be paying heaps more in tax and therefore will contribute towards Sharon "scarface" Smith's further education?

good point well made

"I think early psychometric tests should be used to identify the key players of tomorrow...." Disturbingly close to that film 'Gattaca', where people are given jobs depending on their genes.

...but their contribution cannot buy their own daughter a lively mind. I suppose what I am saying is we should pay taxes for our kids right to get the best education of which they are capable and best suited. The government funded places should be for the brightest kids (regardless of economic or social status) because they are the ones who can strengthen the Economy in future years. Of course if those who don't get in want to pay the entireity of their fees themselves they can...

yep it does sound a bit eugenicsy but too much talent is wasted. Take Tommy Law the 12 year foul-mouthed thug who terrorised his estate but had a mensa IQ of over 150. Do you not think his enourmous potential should have been spotted and nurtured early on. Part of his disregard for school was that the work didn't challenge him enough

And now they'll give you £1000 a year if you do physics. That would have been useful.

... i mean he could probably spell and I can't and went to uni!!!

I'd need several thousand before I'd even consider it. A week, that is.

Physics, or selling your virginity?

Physics dear. Why, you going to make a bid? *flutters eyelashes*

I should imagine there's a fair amount of physics involved in losing ones virginity. I must try it sometime.

Have the three why's men been to Skegness?

I beg your pardon?

Oh dear Flashy, you're gonna get the pointed hat if you ain't careful.

Well I AM the medical student that Blair doesn't want the dustman to pay for. And when I graduate in 6 years time I will be at least £30 000 in debt (heaven forbid if top up fees occur, I'm at Oxford so that would be another £15000 if they were introduced next year). thats a huge debt to saddle me with before I even start my career, imagine having a mortgage on top of that! And doctor's dont get paid hugely, I appreciate it is well paid, but I will work very long hours for it, and get paid nowhere near what I could earn if I followed some of my Oxbridge peers in to management etc etc. Personally, I DO think that the dustman should pay for me to attend med school, because I believe that I am valuable to the country. I work very hard, and have had to work very hard all of my life to get into medical school. I have to finance 6 years of living costs as it is, 10 years ago I would have had a grant and started my working life debt free. Everyone is going on about Britain getting futher into debt, well simply I have no choice. Someone has to finance higher education, and when I qualify and start earning, then I will not begrudge financing people's educations - especially not those that will safe my life, educate my children etc etc. Many of my peers have managed to get funding through sponsorship. Ironically, the length of my course makes it the most expensive first degree, and yet the only avenue open to me for sponsorship is the Armed Forces. Teachers and nurses all get grants and incentives, I do not. Medicine is a hugely competitive course to get into, nationwide there are far more applicants than places, the vast majority of those candidates will have at least 3 As at A level (oh and don't get me started on 'how easy A levels are' - I didn't have any choice but to take them and please don't undermine my achievement) The lack of doctors is due to a lack of places, as the government is unwilling to fund them. And they are unwilling to fund me. It's expensive and unfair. I shouldn't be forced into debt in this way, and I should not have to pay in order to become a doctor. There must be another way to fund university education, rather than crippling students with debt. University is exceptionally expensive as it is.

Oh Dear! I see an Oxbridge professor says up to 38% of students are wasting their time on Uni courses! Whatever can he mean?

Yeah, Missi, but 'economy' seems the only objective way to measure the success of 'society' (Andrew's post indicates the difficulty of judging contributions to society any other way,) so I made the substitution. I wasn't saying your idea was wrong per se, but that it could easily be hijacked.

And you did.

Nicely linking two threads: Student Sells Her Viginity Online An 18-year-old lesbian teenager is trying to auction her virginity to fund her uni studies. She reckons she had over 6000 hits and been offered 10K before ebay pulled it.

Just be thankful you DON'T live in the US. You'd have a debt of $500,000+ by the time you finished med school. Even the cost of 4 undergrad years can be $40k PER YEAR! Granted, many doctors in the US make much more money than in the UK, but it's not all roses. US doctors have to pay huge malpractice insurance fees, over $100,000/year in the case of surgeons. And the ones who work for HMOs probably earn about the same as a British doctor. Nothing's perfect, but overall, you are all extremely fortunate to live in a country that offers its citizens so much. At least you get SOMETHING for your taxes. I get zero.

Thats roughly a £20,000 a year debt then Justyn? Well thats about right when you look at the salary differential against insurance fees etc. So many of our doctors and nurses go off when theyve finished to work in America anyway. Our doctors may not have to pay insurance fees (lets see how long THAT lasts) but the majority of the drs in the States have their malpractise insurance paid *for* them by their hospitals or clinics that they work for. Sara is going to earn a fairly good wage, but if she goes into the NHS, it will pan out at something like £3.00 an hour when you look at the hours she will work for that salary, should she go into a hospital. All that, and she has to pay for it. No, Im sorry, its WRONG.

...and at a guess, Id say a portion of your taxes are going towards the education of young Milos and Milena, so that they can leave Poland when they graduate and come work here, because all our Doctors have left and gone to work in the States for the money!

Polish doctors earn about £400/month or some such idiotic amount. There are strikes and work slowsdowns here all the time in protest. I don't think any of my tax money is paying for Polish medical education. The odd thing is that even Candadian doctors go to the US to earn more money, and the differential is not very much between Canada and the US. The American health care system is too horrible to contemplate. No one in their right mind would try to justify it. In fact, one of the major reasons I can't go back is the cost of healthcare. For me to buy health insurance would probably cost at least $1000/month, and even then, there's no assurance that the company would actually pay a claim. It's truly awful.

who pays for university students in poland then?

Interestingly I have just spoken to one of my friends at Durham University (seen as an excellent uni in the UK, on a par with Oxbridge) who is so bored on her course, due to the tiny amount of work she has to do - 4 essays a term (I have that a WEEK sometimes!) that she is looking for a part time job. She isn't at a 'mickey mouse uni doing a mickey mouse degree', but at a Russell group doing a respected, competitive Philosophy course. This seems totally ridiculous to me, when there are plenty of science students working 9-5 in lectures and labs, and then still have reading, essays and tutorial work on top of that! How can there be such discrepancies between arts and science degrees? (And don't say that arts students have to do more reading, trust me as a medical student, I have huge amounts of essay prep work to do as well as my lecture/lab load). How can universities justify such astronomical debt when students get 5 hours of contact time a week? And is it worth it? And on the topic of insurance, during my first week at med school Iwas signed up by the Medical Protection Society and Medical Defence Union for free student membership (both societies sent representatives to the medical school). It certainly isn't free as soon as I graduate. We are constantly reminded of the increasing amount of litigation in the UK, this isnt simply a US phenomenon.

Liana, good question. It certainly is not the US government, that much I know. All education here used to be 'free,' but now I think students are expected to contribute something. There are some private MBA programs which are strictly for-pay, and they are expensive.

yes.. same in Cz. The students family contributes, but it is very much a token payment - something like £30 a year. Apart from that, the government, or the taxpayer pays for it. Its not ideal... but contrary to here, hardly anyone actually goes to University. People do apprenticeships, like they used to do in the UK, but that may be (in fact almost certainly is) an indicator of the poverty that still exists there. but the taxpayer does pay... and that means the student pays too eventually.

An enterprising lass. She'll go far...

It was always my sense that a lot of people go to university here, but that's probably because I live in the capitol city. I asked a guy I was tutoring if they have to write essays to get into college. He said no, it all depends on your grades, end of story. Most of the for-pay schools here are awful, the worst being the American School. Oh dear, and it costs $15,000/year for grade school (1-7) and more for high school! Mostly it's corporate big wigs who send their kids there because the company is paying, but some wealthy locals send their kids as well as a status symbol. The education itself is garbage. There are also two accredited British schools and one French, all at about 1/3 or less of the cost and much better academically. I'm not sure about German. There are a ton of MBA and Executive MBA programs, but they are rip-offs for the most part, being run by third tier US and Canadian universities. Those degrees are worthless outside Poland.

Dont you find it yourself when you are a doctor, paying infinitely more tax than the dustman? Grr dont get me started on this again.

That's what I had assumed. Blair was again, cynically I think, turning something that you can think through logically into something emotive. "So you don't agree with me, then you must hate dustmen and want to make them really poor, you big selfish you." It's another clever swerve, I think, another way of reframing the arguement to redefine the terms that someone is allowed to argue on. Another thing is, if you expecting people to pay back this cost later, what is going to make move into the public sector? Why would you risk a big debt if the job you will get out of it will not pay it back in a month of sundays? Also, we have no promise that things won't change in another few years time to something else. Blair was squirming when it was pointed out that he was elected on a manifesto for this term that stated that they would not introduce top up fees and that they would legislate against them. He said that this was true, but as the manifesto only related to this term, he was not going back on his word in introducing top up fees in the next parliment, if labour were re-elected.