So apparently the Parliament some of you are under has decided that you need to spend $10,000 more to go school per year.

As an American student, I'm wondering on the point of view of you guys still in school or upcoming, and how thats going to be a deciding factor of your schooling.

Personally I see this as creating a much less educated class of people, expanding your lower class while promoting schools to use this new amount of cost as the base point to keep expanding. It also looks like on top of the fees they're cutting money the schools are getting which means more expensive school with lesser quality classes.

What do you guys think?

I had been wondering why a thread pertaining to this hadn't been started when British miscreants were rioting in the streets over the issue.

I've been watching BBC coverage on CSPAN2 about it. The debate on it is very interesting because of the points they keep bringing up. Such ones as how this plan assumes that people have to be 100% sure of the path and the work the want to do.

But you (more or less) did anyway. If you don't get A-levels you can't go into academics.

Because we were out rioting!

I'm pretty sure that most britassians are done with uni apart from myself, but Scotland has a seperate education system from the rest of the UK so this doesn't quite affect me that much. But yeah there's no way that I could afford those kind of fees; in fact I'd really struggle to afford the old fees at an English uni and I seriously doubt that my degree would even be worth £36k.

Oh well, behold the glories of a Conservative government.

I'd love to wade in on the issue, but I'm not in possession of all the facts. The figure of £9000 per year is a maximum and is in all probability only going to be charged by Oxford and Cambridge. I get the feeling that £6000 per year will be a more likely sum charged by a "top end but not Oxbridge" uni. This is twice the amount I paid per year, and is pretty damn scary.

My level of student debt ran in total to about £16,000 when you include accommodation on top of tution fees, and it's a bloody millstone round my neck. Izzy's parents are rich enough to have just paid hers off, but I'll be paying mine off for years at the current rate. I pay (before tax admittedly) about £100 per month. Neglecting the small interest rate (which was sold to us as ZERO interest, but that's for another time) that's 160 months, or 13.3 years.

The thing that irks me is politicians saying "It's not a debt!" insinuating that mortgage brokers (banks, typically) won't take it into account which is absolute horse****. When I applied for my mortgage, the bank looked at my payslip (paycheck) and annualised the £100/month to £1200/year and subtracted it from my salary (which was the baseline for calculating how much I could borrow).

There is no doubt that this move will put off people from higher education - Izzy has already bumped into a former pupil "the brightest one I ever taught" and he has already allowed this extra money to change his mind from studying Architecture because it's a 7 year course and the debt could reach £63,000 (theoretically).

The other question is "do we need to discourage some from higher education?" which may sound shocking, but the previous government encouraged people who didn't need degrees to borrow tens of thousands of pounds to get one for the sake of Britain's standing in the world. Tony Blair wanted 50% of young people to have degrees, which is ****ing stupid imo. The thing is these fees will discourage poorer kids who SHOULD go to uni, and not dissuade the stupid but rich ones whose parents will fund them anyway.

Ok, I should really get back to work <_<

Yeah, that's the point I was going to make, Martyn. The idea of having 50% of the populace go to uni when clearly 50% of the jobs in society do not require a degree-level education is seriously idiotic. How else have we gone from having free higher education to this, if not because of serious oversubscription?

I'll be paying off my student debt for decades, but I lived at home so mine was only £12k. The only redeeming thing is that it's a much lower rate than any other debt we could take on - so I will focus much more on paying off a mortgage, for instance. But yeah, it should be interest free. And that's just the maintenance, we should not be paying tuition fees.

Actually, I'm in a seriously lucky position that my mum was able to pay off my post-grad loan (thanks to a retirement payout), since that is basically just a commercial loan that you don't pay the interest on when you're studying. I'd be paying a total of about £350 a month on student debt if it weren't for that. Jesus.

It sucks... but honestly? This wouldn't have dissuaded me from going to University. If you've got the intellect to be there and you can get the money from someone, then you have every right to go.

Of course, I got in, got through and got out by the skin of my teeth because I'm stupid, so...

There are several issues here.

Demonstrations, while I agree with marching, the rioting and general criminal damage is taking it too far. There's drawing attention and public sympathy to your cause but by rioting and smashing stuff turns people off and actually takes focus away from the issue at hand.

As for the policy, the whole point is to save the government money but will it? Possibly short term.

Firstly, graduates, statistically speaking, get higher paying jobs and therefore pay more income tax.

Secondly, because there are so many graduates there are many high tech businesses in the UK. For instance, we have more people employed in Formula 1 (and i believe the motor racing industry in general) than any other country... partly historic reasons but mainly because we have people here with the technical ability. Move those jobs out the country and you lose money on income tax and have more people in the country fighting for fewer jobs.

Finally, a lot of people discover what they want to do when they go to university. Such people would otherwise end up in a menial job (paying very little tax) or even on the dole (costing the government money).


The whole thing seems stupid to me. Glad I finished with a comparatively small debt.

This is true, but it's also indicative of the UK having poor pre-university education. I went to a pretty good secondary school, and looking back I kind of feel that we were never taught how to think critically or actually learn. People who just had the knack for essays, art, music etc continued to be good at them. Not once did I witness someone becoming good at something as a result of teacher intervention. School was nothing more than a curriculum and exams, university was similar.

I agree completey, school was pretty pointless for me too.



Pretty much sums it up for me.

But I know a lot of people who went to university because they didn't know what else to do. Whether or not university for these people is beneficial is probably open to debate, but isn't it better than them ending up on the dole and at least some kind of practical skill.

This is a direct result of league tables. From very early in the curriculum you're learning how to pass the exam and not what you're meant to be learning.

I was lucky enough to witness a few teachers who really made a difference to myself and to some others though.

I have to agree. Quality of what is taught is always to the slowest student which doesnt push students to go past that

most unis wont be charging much more than 5.5 k, but right now i'm still paying 3k a year for a uni that sucks. I love my games art course, but 4 years ago... or 5... or 6... i started a course in astrophysics at a good uni taught by a celebrity physics (Jim al khalili) for only ONE THOUSAND.

So i reckon even 3k is a joke. Morpheus, Sami, in finland is doing a 5 year course and it only costs a couple of hundred a year if i remember rightly.

I hope however, that the increase in fees to attend uni, will disuade top students from going to Oxbridge class unis into lower quality unis (ie, top 30-40). This will then filter down to the worst universities resulting a better grade of person attending even glorified "polytechnics". At Solent uni, they're a bunch of dumb asses.

What i do despise however, is the Conservative governments general objective. Yes Labour/Brown forked it up, but i was hoping for more from chubby faced Cameron. Sadly not. The fact is, all politicians are C words, and they serve ONLY themselves.

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I'm lmao.

Welcome to our world, Britain

Also

I don't think the resulting decrease in attendance will be a bad thing, but it'd be far better if they were selective along lines other than monetary.

This is what I was trying to say, only way more succinct.

Your world is overpriced by a fairly large margin.

I haven't really liked the idea of tuition fees since the Scots were allowed a say in what we paid despite (as Boco said earlier) them not paying as much. But I lost a whole lot of sympathy with the people against the rise after all the rioting over the past couple of weeks. It honestly made me quite glad I wasn't associated with a student body anymore; it was actually quite embarassing. My old work place (the Liverpool Guild of Students) had to close because a large number of students "stormed" it. What kind of moron decides to overrun the one place they could have guaranteed support from?

It is worth noting though (since it's not been said yet) that you don't start paying back the fees now until you earn over £21k a year, and it's still on a sliding scale as far as I'm aware. For me, having just graduated this summer, the threshold is £15k. I do think it makes a fair amount of sense this way because £20k+ as a salary is (to me) indicative of a pretty good career and, thus, the success of your education. A lot of the people you see giving interviews seem to be under the impression that they need to pay for their education up front out of their own pocket.

Also, I hate seeing floppy-haired, scarf-wearing, Withnail-wannabes on TV whingeing about being "oppressed" by the government.

'sokay. Most of us are overpaid by a fairly large margin too.

That's the way it should work in theory, but it won't turn out that way. A bachelor's degree is a Nash equilibrium strategy: people will keep getting degrees they won't use, at schools with prestige they don't need, because it makes them more competitive to employers.

According to the OP the cap on fees will be $14500, which (I presume) is what Oxford would charge. Harvard charges $34000, and Oxford's a better school.

The UK's got a long way to go.

I disagree for various specific and non-specific reasons.

What I forgot to mention is that that doesn't include me.

As another Brit who has been through the Uni system I've got to agree with some of the comments posted. The whole idea of 50% of the UK population having a degree is/was a stupid idea, for starters 50% of the jobs don't need it and a good portion of the degrees people have been going to Uni for have been a complete and utter waste of time and have utterly no use.

That being said, the idea that people have the option to go should always exist.

I'm still mulling over the increase and what effect it will have and whether it would have altered my decision to go to University when I was 18, if I'm honest, I'd probably say it would have at the very least made me think VERY hard about skipping my Masters.

Like Martyn and Maeve, I'm sitting with a student debt of about £16k, that would be £36k with these new rules (I've already seen the staff emails saying they will be charging £9k, one of the "perks" of being a PhD student) because I did a BSc+Masters...that's just the basic tuition fees, with living costs on top you'll be looking at I'd guess a student debt of £45k...that's just harsh.

With the cuts to University funding because of the budget cuts across the whole country something needed to be done,....oh I should point out that Universities were getting funding cuts before the budget, they just got worse because of the general state of the economy, research cuts too are bad, ~30% cut in PhD positions and ~20-40% cut in post docs. They were mulling £6k tuition fees before the financial crisis.

The Universities needed more funding, it wasn't going to come from the government and so to continue with the path laid out over the past 8 years or so of labour government the only other option was an increase in fees....or a complete revamp of the number of University places and courses.

Ah well....we'll just have to see how it pans out, from the initial University interviews for next year’s intake the new fee's don't appear to have had an effect, there is a 130% increase in applications for physics at my uni compared to this time last year, which if you're interested Maeve is about 257 applications now...nuts compared to our year of about 40, the number of 1st years is about 100 this year...

Aaawwww, crap didn't even mention the riots...just idiotic behaviour from both sides imo, Police shouldn't have used these "kettle" tactics and the students should have behaved A LOT better, but I get the feeling there were groups in there who had no intention of doing so and who had no affiliation to any student body.

257 applications? Is that for undergrad?

WOW! That is quite a change. I highly doubt I'd have made it on to the course if there'd been that kind of competition. Is that just the QM physics course becoming more popular, or a general increase in student population?

257 is just for undergrad physics courses, which cover Physics, Theoretical Physics, Astrophysics and Physics with Particle Physics. The uni isn't big by any means, probably on the small-ish side and I know Universities like Manchester, Birmingham, UCL have around 300-400 applications/first years, if not more. Its just 257 is a MAJOR increase over what used to come in only 3-4 years ago.

It's hard to say Maeve were the demand has come from, if you remember the year after us had really low numbers, something like 20 in the first year, but from then on it's just got bigger and bigger.

The department is activiely trying to get more students as it means more funding and college probably looked at our staff:student ratio (which was one of the best in the country) and thought there was room for more, they treat it all as a business after all.

Problem is, I don't think we could take that many students, I popped down to first year labs this year (the lab has been totally refurbished btw) after being a demonstrator last year with ~100...it was busy then, this year with ~150 it was nigh on full.

With the increased applications we have also raised the entry requirements so I'm guessing it just means that they will be able to pick the best instead of filling 70% from applications and the rest from clearing. I say best as I remember a few folks in our year with all A's at A-level who dropped out by the end of the first year, where as some with lesser grades went on to finish...myself included but generally our drop out rate was one of the lowest in the country.

Maybe it's slightly off topic all the above info (mostly all for maeve)...but it could show a couple of things,

- Maybe more students are choosing the "core" subjects again, which in my opinion is only a good thing, although I'd need info on what other application numbers are in other subjects.

- Physics has in general lagged behind in increasing numbers as more people went to University, maybe it's finally catching up? Lots of physics in the news recently with the LHC, planet hunting, etc...

- I'm not sure when the new fee's come into play, maybe students are trying to get in before they come into place and skipping gap years?

It could be that people are looking for a degree that's recession-proof, instead of plain interest in the natural sciences. Physics gives people an excuse for staying in school longer, for part of which they would be paid a stipend. And even if they don't make it into grad school they'll still be more employable than almost everybody else.

Same is true of Engineering. People see it as a degree that leads to a job, rather than doing a Media Studies degree that leads to working in a shop.

to be fair, I wasn't really qualified to do anything with my physics degree. But I'd imagine if I was up against someone with a media studies degree, ceteris paribus, I should be considered more employable.

As it was, I had to do a masters to actually get a job

I'm curious though, with a physics degree, would that job be teaching or what industry? Or jobs "in general"?

Physics majors are immensely employable in any job that requires a lot of math, including software development. They're employable, but that doesn't mean they get to use their degree for anything.

Engineers and grad students are the only people who really get to.

And art history majors.

...ummmmm.....