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Oh there's student loans - but previously you didn't have to borrow your way through higher education - and certainly not winding up with £30k of debt before you've even joined the workforce properly.

It's ridiculous, and frankly obscene.

Yes there are government backed loans, but not scholarships particularly (as far as I'm aware, I'm well past my student days). I also saw something the other week which suggested that we now have the highest average fees in the West (US was second, because although top US colleges charge a lot more, they also have a lot of state colleges that charge a lot less).

UK students (well, English certainly) are leaving university with ~£50,000 debt that attracts interest at commercial rates as I understand it.

I think the government originally hoped to create a market where local colleges would charge less to attract students, but they didn't; everyone just charges the maximum allowable.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh there's student loans - but previously you didn't have to borrow your way through higher education - and certainly not winding up with £30k of debt before you've even joined the workforce properly.

It's ridiculous, and frankly obscene.

You shouldn't have to do it now. Universities in the UK are in the middle of being investigated for cartelisation; just because you can charge a maximum of £9,000 does not mean every single degree should cost that. Not without substantial market rigging and co-operation between chancellors, anyway.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ex-minister-andrew-adonis-calls-in-watchdog-over-university-tuition-fees-cartel-kb06k8mcx

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh there's student loans - but previously you didn't have to borrow your way through higher education - and certainly not winding up with £30k of debt before you've even joined the workforce properly.

It's ridiculous, and frankly obscene.

To be honest I don't really see a problem with that. Maybe there's specific problems with the UK system, but the concept seems fine to me. £30k does seem a bit excessive though, my course (4 year engineering degree with honours) only cost me a bit over $30k AUD, which at the current exchange rate is only about £18k.

You only have to start paying it back when you're earning over a threshold amount.

Education isn't free, I don't really see why it needs to be a problem for society as a whole to pay the bill for individual students' higher education. Society as a whole I think should be trying to level the playing field between rich and poor students, which is what government supported places, scholarships and government loans offer.

 Jadenim wrote:
UK students (well, English certainly) are leaving university with ~£50,000 debt that attracts interest at commercial rates as I understand it.

If it's commercial rates then that's bad, in Australia the loans for students attract interest, but it's basically just accounting for inflation, not crazy commercial money lender leeching rates.

Personally I have never stressed about the money I owe the Australian government for my University course. My sister does, but that's largely because she dropped out three quarters of the way through, so she has the big loan but not the degree.

But I really don't think society as a whole should have to pay for students in full. Help them out so that poor students can get ahead in life, absolutely, but pay in full? Nah. People don't NEED to go to university, sometimes I think there's too much emphasis on going to university such that people just go there to do crap degrees that won't get them anywhere and don't learn anything along the way anyway.

"as I understand it" is a big problem that has been plaguing most discussions about English tuition fees. In the vast majority of the discussions I've been on, I've asked people about various specifics and, broadly speaking they stumble, unsure., Without real answers.

It's almost always some regurgitated headline from a tabloid, either left or right wing, depending on the person I'm talking to.

Edit: From my experience, for all practical purposes, a student loan is essentially a graduate tax. Lenders (EG mortgage providers) generally go "do you have a student loan?" "Yup" "fair enough". You pay nothing until you earn enough to start paying it back, at which point its means tested - when I started work I was paying £27 back per month. That raised to ~£110 when I got a promotion. You retire without paying it off? Fine, whatever, loans cancelled.

So I'm other words, for all intents and purposes its a graduate tax, paid depending on your level of income.

Finally, a source: https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/repaying-student-loans/amp#when-may-your-student-loan-be-written-off

Edit2: For clarity's sake, it's worth saying as far as my own numbers are involved, I was under a slightly different version of the system that was a hybrid of the old and new systems, please refer to the above link and the SLC website for specifics.

Also I'd like to stress that I'm not saying student loan issues aren't issues for people who have them, I'm more saying, "hey let's all Arthur and discuss points from positions of knowledge and facts."

It could very well be that the £360 per year at 25kis the make or break value in someone's livelihood or maybe my experience with loan providers isn't normal and some really *do* care about the level of student loans you have but at least in that case, we're all discussing from the same page.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh there's student loans - but previously you didn't have to borrow your way through higher education - and certainly not winding up with £30k of debt before you've even joined the workforce properly.

It's ridiculous, and frankly obscene.

To be honest I don't really see a problem with that. Maybe there's specific problems with the UK system, but the concept seems fine to me. £30k does seem a bit excessive though, my course (4 year engineering degree with honours) only cost me a bit over $30k AUD, which at the current exchange rate is only about £18k.

You only have to start paying it back when you're earning over a threshold amount.

Education isn't free, I don't really see why it needs to be a problem for society as a whole to pay the bill for individual students' higher education. Society as a whole I think should be trying to level the playing field between rich and poor students, which is what government supported places, scholarships and government loans offer.

 Jadenim wrote:
UK students (well, English certainly) are leaving university with ~£50,000 debt that attracts interest at commercial rates as I understand it.

If it's commercial rates then that's bad, in Australia the loans for students attract interest, but it's basically just accounting for inflation, not crazy commercial money lender leeching rates.

Personally I have never stressed about the money I owe the Australian government for my University course. My sister does, but that's largely because she dropped out three quarters of the way through, so she has the big loan but not the degree.

But I really don't think society as a whole should have to pay for students in full. Help them out so that poor students can get ahead in life, absolutely, but pay in full? Nah. People don't NEED to go to university, sometimes I think there's too much emphasis on going to university such that people just go there to do crap degrees that won't get them anywhere and don't learn anything along the way anyway.

The only hurdle to higher education should be academic ability. That's how you encourage social mobility.

Way it is now, too many are put off by the fees. And that's a waste of the nation's collective talent.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
£30k does seem a bit excessive though, my course (4 year engineering degree with honours) only cost me a bit over $30k AUD, which at the current exchange rate is only about £18k.

It's worth pointing out that $30k is only part of the cost of your degree. The government does subsidise the university education system in Australia in addition to the HECS system (that the loan system AllSeeingSkink was talking about above). I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but it does represent a significant proportion of the cost of each degree.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Education isn't free, I don't really see why it needs to be a problem for society as a whole to pay the bill for individual students' higher education. Society as a whole I think should be trying to level the playing field between rich and poor students, which is what government supported places, scholarships and government loans offer.

Thing is though, that 'Society' wants educated people, particularly highly educated ones. It needs (for instance) engineers to design it's buildings/infrastructure/technology, doctors to provide medical care, scientists to develop & research new ideas, etc etc. To put it another way; Society has a vested interest in the educated, and government subsidisation is merely a reflection of that.

Society wants a lot of things. It just never wants to pay for any of them

 Pendix wrote:

It's worth pointing out that $30k is only part of the cost of your degree.

That depends on the degree. If you're a standard humanities (history, english, philosophy, etc) or social sciences (anthropology, sociology, etc) student, the cost of the running the degree course is not expensive. Assuming you're running a standard degree program at a mid-tier University ? You're making a killing.

Let's take History at the University of Leicester as an example. They have about forty academics sitting snug there. Many of them will be on less than great contracts, but for arguments sake, let's say all forty are sitting snug on the £40,000 average salary for academics. That's a salary bill of 1.6 million pounds. They have about eight adminstrative support staff, who will make around £25,000 apiece on average, tacking on another £200,000.

Tack on £50,000 for Library book purchases/journal access (it would actually be about half that, but let's be generous). Rent is free because they own the buildings, but electricity/water/net bills will cost something, as will a proportion of University running costs (janitors, bursaries, etcetc). Altogether, there's no way we're looking at running costs above about two million pounds for their running a reasonably solid academic history department.

Now the income. Leicester averages about 800 history undergrads a year. 800 students paying £9,000 apiece is......a little over seven million pounds! Whew! That's the sort of profit margin that people like Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson dream of. In other words, trebles all round in the University Chancellor's office!

.....or as they like to say, the sector is under heavy pressure, and they need permission to raise University fees further. After all, don't you peasants understand that the loans are just replacing government funding that they lost? They NEED that money!

As there is a bit of Millenial conversation in here, I have a local news story for you all.

I live in a small town of 8,500 people in rural Iowa. A brand new Dollar Tree store just opened. All the employees are new to Dollar Tree, and went through orientation and initial training together. There were about 24 prospective employees at this orientation. 8 of them were high school aged kids looking for part-time work.

Apparently in these situations, the Dollar Tree playbook states that all new employees will start at $7.50 per hour on a one-month probationary employment. At the end of the month they gauge your abilities, friendliness, dedication to work, etc. and will give EVERYONE raises so they make from $8.50 to $12 per hour. That actually sounds pretty fair to me.

Once this "probationary pay" got mentioned ALL the kids got up and said they were leaving unless the probationary pay was raised to $10 per hour.

When I was in high school I quite my 7.50 job because the money earned wasn't remotely worth the time lost. You can only work 4-5 hours a day max, and you're probably only looking at 20-24 hours realistically. $140 before taxes isn't going to be worth it for the lost time for most kids I imagine. I've seen plenty of articles talk about how younger people don't want to work in school. Bull. Younger people don't want to work for nothing. No one does.

As an adult, I'd still leave (and have) because 7.50 is unlivable and when you have bills to pay waiting a month just get a $1 raise is worthless. There's a reason every dollar store I've ever entered is heavily staffed by SS recipients I suspect The promise of a raise after one month is made by almost every employer I've ever encountered looking for hourly employees. Wal-Mart says it'll give you a .25 to 3.50 raise after six months. Of course a range is given for a reason and that's because the high number is bait. I've never seen anyone get it. On the other hand I think $10 is pretty reasonable a request. What is this, 1966? Oh wait! In 1966 minimum wage was $10!

Though I'd point out in the year 2017, The Millenials aren't really in high school anymore except by the broadest year brackets

Well, this is Iowa. Earning 7.50 an hour here is like earning $15 per hour in California.

 Ketara wrote:

 Pendix wrote:

It's worth pointing out that $30k is only part of the cost of your degree.

That depends on the degree.

Qualify my statement with: "in Australia". I don't want to speak to the working of the UK system (or indeed any other country's system) as I'm totally unfamiliar with them.

Unless Iowa is that much cheaper than Kansas I doubt it. I doubt $15 is enough to cover your expenses in Southern Cali either. Northern Cali maybe

 Pendix wrote:

 Ketara wrote:

 Pendix wrote:

It's worth pointing out that $30k is only part of the cost of your degree.

That depends on the degree.

Qualify my statement with: "in Australia". I don't want to speak to the working of the UK system (or indeed any other country's system) as I'm totally unfamiliar with them.

So long as your academics aren't earning somewhere in the region of £160,000 a year each, the universities out there will be in exactly the same position as the UK ones if they're charging the Australian dollar equivalent of £9,000 plus for a basic degree.

The common argument is that us lot over in humanities are subsidising the people on other degrees, and that's where the excess capital goes. But frankly? Most large scale expensive scientific equipment is paid for from external funding grants on specific projects, not the Uni itself splashing out.

There's a reason why Western Universities the world over are raking it in hand over fist, opening fresh campuses every five minutes whilst simultaneously removing all job security for their staff and gambling with their pension investments. Higher Education has become nothing more than a standard facet of the capitalistic juggernaut that is the Western economy. If Universities were FTSE listed companies, they'd be doing great.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh there's student loans - but previously you didn't have to borrow your way through higher education - and certainly not winding up with £30k of debt before you've even joined the workforce properly.

It's ridiculous, and frankly obscene.

To be honest I don't really see a problem with that. Maybe there's specific problems with the UK system, but the concept seems fine to me. £30k does seem a bit excessive though, my course (4 year engineering degree with honours) only cost me a bit over $30k AUD, which at the current exchange rate is only about £18k.

You only have to start paying it back when you're earning over a threshold amount.

Education isn't free, I don't really see why it needs to be a problem for society as a whole to pay the bill for individual students' higher education. Society as a whole I think should be trying to level the playing field between rich and poor students, which is what government supported places, scholarships and government loans offer.

 Jadenim wrote:
UK students (well, English certainly) are leaving university with ~£50,000 debt that attracts interest at commercial rates as I understand it.

If it's commercial rates then that's bad, in Australia the loans for students attract interest, but it's basically just accounting for inflation, not crazy commercial money lender leeching rates.

Personally I have never stressed about the money I owe the Australian government for my University course. My sister does, but that's largely because she dropped out three quarters of the way through, so she has the big loan but not the degree.

But I really don't think society as a whole should have to pay for students in full. Help them out so that poor students can get ahead in life, absolutely, but pay in full? Nah. People don't NEED to go to university, sometimes I think there's too much emphasis on going to university such that people just go there to do crap degrees that won't get them anywhere and don't learn anything along the way anyway.

The only hurdle to higher education should be academic ability. That's how you encourage social mobility.

And low interest performance based loans are exactly how that's achieved.

I absolutely could not afford to pay for my higher education, so the government loaned me the money and then I could. The only obstacle I had to overcome is that I had to get good enough marks in my high school to get that government supported place.

Way it is now, too many are put off by the fees. And that's a waste of the nation's collective talent.

That's only really a problem if the interest rates on the student loans are too high.

If someone is stupid enough to think "oh geeze, I'll go work at KFC full time for £15k a year instead of going to University which will lead to a £100k/year job because I don't want to have to pay back £30k" well then I'd suggest they aren't that high on the list of the nation's talented people that we'd be scared to lose

Pendix wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
£30k does seem a bit excessive though, my course (4 year engineering degree with honours) only cost me a bit over $30k AUD, which at the current exchange rate is only about £18k.

It's worth pointing out that $30k is only part of the cost of your degree. The government does subsidise the university education system in Australia in addition to the HECS system (that the loan system AllSeeingSkink was talking about above). I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but it does represent a significant proportion of the cost of each degree.

True, I probably should have mentioned that but I didn't want things getting too complicated I actually assumed the UK system was similar because £30k sounded low for a full fee paying place.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Education isn't free, I don't really see why it needs to be a problem for society as a whole to pay the bill for individual students' higher education. Society as a whole I think should be trying to level the playing field between rich and poor students, which is what government supported places, scholarships and government loans offer.

Thing is though, that 'Society' wants educated people, particularly highly educated ones. It needs (for instance) engineers to design it's buildings/infrastructure/technology, doctors to provide medical care, scientists to develop & research new ideas, etc etc. To put it another way; Society has a vested interest in the educated, and government subsidisation is merely a reflection of that.

 cuda1179 wrote:
Once this "probationary pay" got mentioned ALL the kids got up and said they were leaving unless the probationary pay was raised to $10 per hour.

That tracks. They're the ones who need the jobs the least, all things considered.

Also, by some of the arbitrary lines in the sand used to define a generation for whatever purposes best fit the definer's needs, the Millennials well possibly have all graduated high school by now.

Okay, so what is the Generation after Millennials called?

 cuda1179 wrote:
Okay, so what is the Generation after Millennials called?

Do we have to wait until the 70's and 80's generation gets old enough to get cranky with the post-millennial generation so they can come up with a new term to make blanket complaints about them?

 cuda1179 wrote:
Okay, so what is the Generation after Millennials called?

Gen Z, aka Centennials.

While some end dates for Gen Y go into the 2000s, the end date of 1996/1997 is the standard end date for the cohort (with far more consistency in my experience than the start date). Probably because demographers can actually draw a quite not so arbitrary line between Gen Z and Gen Y, defining one as "coming of age in the New Millennium" (hence the name) and "grew up in the new century" (again hence the name).

I'm actually sitting here wondering why Gen X was ever called Gen X in the first place XD I'm not entirely clear on the origin of the name.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
If someone is stupid enough to think "oh geeze, I'll go work at KFC full time for £15k a year instead of going to University which will lead to a £100k/year job because I don't want to have to pay back £30k" well then I'd suggest they aren't that high on the list of the nation's talented people that we'd be scared to lose

Some of them are probably thinking 'I've seen dozens of people I know get degrees and end up working in a call centre for a pound above minimum wage, so I might as well get on with my minimum wage job and miss the £30k in fees and the £15k in living expenses loans'.

Additionally, you're making the classic fallacy that university is meant to get you a job. It isn't. It's meant to educate you. Society wants better educated people, not just people to do particular jobs.

All those things you mentioned are high or at least decently paying jobs and prospective students shouldn't be put off from taking out a small low-interest loan in order to go in to those fields.

The system works exactly the way it's supposed to****, you want to go in to higher education but don't have the money? Awesome, go do it and pay us back with all the money you'll earn from the degree! You aren't going to earn money after getting the degree? Err.... maybe you shouldn't bother going in to higher education then

You're making the same fallacy here.

The number of psychology students who do the degree and get nothing useful out of it is scary, people should absolutely be dissuaded from wasting government money doing degrees they have no use for.

Define 'use for'. In a way that doesn't involve 'to get a job'.

Not that psychology itself is useless, and I only used psych as an example because for whatever reason I know a lot of people who have done psych (both those who went on to leverage their degree and those that continue to work in low level retail years after getting their degrees ) But the number of people doing it is disproportionately large to the number of people who should be doing it.

It's certainly over subscribed relative to the number of jobs in the field, but A) assuming that's a problem is a band thing is fallacious as discussed above, and B) how do you adjust that anyway?

I think sometimes we forget people don't NEED to go to University.

Definitely. But this is a pretty key issue in conversations about generational tensions: millennials being told that they need to go to university to stand any chance of getting anywhere in life, only for hge numbers of them to discover it made no difference to their chances whatsoever.

Additionally, people who want to, and are capable, should be able to.

If you do have a passion and are going in to a field that society deems useful, awesome, you'll be able to get a job that pays enough money to pay off the loan quickly.

Most of society deems most of the traditional academic subjects useful. Most of them will never get you a job outside of academia. So will teach, and never pay their loans back (in the UK, in the US teachers are paid even worse, no idea about Australia).

Definitely. But this is a pretty key issue in conversations about generational tensions: millennials being told that they need to go to university to stand any chance of getting anywhere in life, only for hge numbers of them to discover it made no difference to their chances whatsoever.

The problem is not that it made no difference, but that it has now become a requirement for jobs that were previously non graduate jobs. So go to university and get a job, and pay, that would previously been a non graduate job, or leave school at 18 with a-levels and struggle to get anything other than a dead end job.

Even then employers continue to not understand what university is for. They complain time and again about people not coming out of university ready for work. That is not the point in university, that is the job of the employer.

 Ketara wrote:


Let's take History at the University of Leicester as an example. They have about forty academics sitting snug there. Many of them will be on less than great contracts, but for arguments sake, let's say all forty are sitting snug on the £40,000 average salary for academics. That's a salary bill of 1.6 million pounds. They have about eight adminstrative support staff, who will make around £25,000 apiece on average, tacking on another £200,000.

Tack on £50,000 for Library book purchases/journal access (it would actually be about half that, but let's be generous). Rent is free because they own the buildings, but electricity/water/net bills will cost something, as will a proportion of University running costs (janitors, bursaries, etcetc). Altogether, there's no way we're looking at running costs above about two million pounds for their running a reasonably solid academic history department.

Now the income. Leicester averages about 800 history undergrads a year. 800 students paying £9,000 apiece is......a little over seven million pounds! Whew! That's the sort of profit margin that people like Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson dream of. In other words, trebles all round in the University Chancellor's office!

There's likely a bit of underestimation here because of missing costs. As a rule of thumb doubling the estimated costs to give a figure that is likely to be closer to the true value, for example the wage cost quoted only relates to what staff are paid directly - actual costs to any organisation is usually 25 to 33% higher than this because of national insurance contributions, pension contributions etc. Also there are many hidden costs that aren't directly attributable to a student. So UCAS open day costs, student welfare staff, Student union, security staff, not to mention the army of administrators in the background.

However the general principle that costs in humanities is less expensive than the £9000 is generally correct (just not as extreme as stated). However a lot of this goes to pay for the shortfall in STEM subjects. These costs are nearer to £13,500 to £14,000 per student (and probably more for medicine) because of the lab costs and so on. In essence for every student that takes a STEM subject the university makes a loss -the joke being that if a university wanted to save money just close all its STEM departments. In essence then students of the humanities support STEM students.

 Steve steveson wrote:

Definitely. But this is a pretty key issue in conversations about generational tensions: millennials being told that they need to go to university to stand any chance of getting anywhere in life, only for hge numbers of them to discover it made no difference to their chances whatsoever.

The problem is not that it made no difference, but that it has now become a requirement for jobs that were previously non graduate jobs.

So go to university and get a job, and pay, that would previously been a non graduate job, or leave school at 18 with a-levels and struggle to get anything other than a dead end job.

Which is exactly what I meant, yeah. It didn't open up a new world of work. It allowed them to do the jobs their parents told them would be their limit without university.

Even then employers continue to not understand what university is for. They complain time and again about people not coming out of university ready for work. That is not the point in university, that is the job of the employer.

A definite problem. Also the case between every level of education. High school teachers barely know what anything from primary means. Colleges are bewlidered by high school qualifications. Universities don't know what college qualifications are. Employers don't know what any degree really entails unless they require a vocational qualification, and they'll certainly not know the distinctions between a BA/BA (Hons), MA/MPhil/MRes/MLitt etc.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh there's student loans - but previously you didn't have to borrow your way through higher education - and certainly not winding up with £30k of debt before you've even joined the workforce properly.

It's ridiculous, and frankly obscene.

To be honest I don't really see a problem with that. Maybe there's specific problems with the UK system, but the concept seems fine to me. £30k does seem a bit excessive though, my course (4 year engineering degree with honours) only cost me a bit over $30k AUD, which at the current exchange rate is only about £18k.

You only have to start paying it back when you're earning over a threshold amount.

Education isn't free, I don't really see why it needs to be a problem for society as a whole to pay the bill for individual students' higher education. Society as a whole I think should be trying to level the playing field between rich and poor students, which is what government supported places, scholarships and government loans offer.

However the student does pay twice. What is being missed is that the "average" graduate will earn approximately £12000 per year during their working life compared to a non-graduate worker. So take 45 years, that's a total of approximately £540,000 which assuming an overall tax of 30% (tax + NI) is £162,000 of extra tax that student pays. That more than makes up for the £30,000 paid in student fees with plenty to spare (for example it's 20 years of state pension). This is also before we consider that extra £380k likely goes into the economy somewhere so helping support businesses and the such like. The more graduate students the better on this basis. This is before you consider that they are likely healthier, less likely to require benefits and generally be a much lighter cost on the state overall during their lifetime. Compare their costs to pensioners, there is no recoup of the £6000 per annum spent on their pensions and yet this can last 20-30 years. Paying the fees for students is by comparison to pensions a bargain for the country. The only reason pensioners get away with this is that they vote in large numbers whereas historically younger people don't. Hence it is easier to hit this part of society even where it makes no sense to do so. If the voting proportions were the other way round you can guarantee students would still get the paid fees.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 cuda1179 wrote:
Okay, so what is the Generation after Millennials called?

The Lost and The Damned.... or

Slaves to Darkness?

 Whirlwind wrote:

There's likely a bit of underestimation here because of missing costs.

You'll note I said you could quite easily put aside £200,000 towards general University running costs. Not only that, but I'm assuming quite generously in favour of the most expensive possible option in several cases ( for example, a lot of 'academic contracts' are now fixed term and a hell of a lot lower in cost accordingly) and ignoring the income generated by postgraduate students and research grants. All of which would cut costs/boost income considerably further to counteract things like pension contributions.

That all being said, it was never meant to be more than a rough figure in the ballpark. Different Universities will have different overall costs and incomes, it's virtually impossible to break it down if you try and look at them all collectively. Some establishments own their buildings, others have to pay rent. Some have vast student housing estates generating profit to draw off of, some do not. Some have far higher postgrad populations (King's has 40%, for example), others just churn and burn the BA's.So you might find that there's plenty of extra income from elsewhere to make up establishment costs, or very little depending on where you're looking.

Consequently, It's why I specified Leicester, they're secure, but not overly wealthy, and generally sit quite nicely in the middle in most regards. It illustrates (roughly) the expenditure and outgoings involved in running a basic undergrad humanities course.

The thought then occurs. Why is it the job for cheaper degrees to subsidise more expensive ones? So long as the loans system is covering the initial cost so anyone who wants to study can, why are some students effectively walking away with three times the debt so that other students walk away with a third as much? You can say 'Ah, that's for the good of society', but when I take out a commercial loan, nobody expects me to officially borrow three times the amount I need so I can give the excess away to charity. Why is it considered the norm here?

 Ketara wrote:

 Whirlwind wrote:

There's likely a bit of underestimation here because of missing costs.

You'll note I said you could quite easily put aside £200,000 towards general University running costs. Not only that, but I'm assuming quite generously in favour of the most expensive possible option in several cases ( for example, a lot of 'academic contracts' are now fixed term and a hell of a lot lower in cost accordingly) and ignoring the income generated by postgraduate students and research grants. All of which would cut costs/boost income considerably further to counteract things like pension contributions.

I just think you are underestimating the background costs. As I said previously it is usually best to take the estimate and double it is as usually that is much closer to the actual figure. As a species we are notorious for underestimating costs whether that is revenue or capital works. And for Leicester specifically research grants can't really be counted. The Uni take a percentage of the grant (about 10%) and the rest is then left with the person awarded the grant. This usually also allows them to be 'bought' out of the teaching obligations for the term of the grant. Postgrads (excluding taught masters) also fall under the research aspects rather than the teaching budget. Leicester also has very strict rules about who can teach (effectively postgrads and postdocs can't); you have to be a permanent member of staff to be allowed to teach.

The thought then occurs. Why is it the job for cheaper degrees to subsidise more expensive ones? So long as the loans system is covering the initial cost so anyone who wants to study can, why are some students effectively walking away with three times the debt so that other students walk away with a third as much? You can say 'Ah, that's for the good of society', but when I take out a commercial loan, nobody expects me to officially borrow three times the amount I need so I can give the excess away to charity. Why is it considered the norm here?

I suppose because if fees were at costs (so lets say humanities was £5k and STEM £15k) per annum, then you are likely to end up with less STEM graduates and more students of the humanities, that would generate a shortfall of skilled scientists, technicians, engineers and so on limiting growth of the high tech (and valuable to UK PLC) industries. Secondly it is likely to encourage those that do get these degrees to move abroad. A recently qualified doctor on these fees would have a student fee bill of £105,000 (£15k *7) and that's before you consider living costs. For these students the best way to avoid the bill would be to leave the UK until they are 67 and then return (maybe). This is the same thing that happened with the nursing grants, the UK government withdrew them and there was a 25% drop in applications. However as I've noted previously I don't really believe there is a justification for charging any students fees when over their lifetime, on average, they are going to bring in more tax than the cost to train them. they effectively get charged three times, once in tax, once in the fees, and once in the interest (noting that 2.5% over 25 years effectively doubles the debt).

Except once you hit 30 years.... The whole debt goes poof and is written off.

The Student Loans Company wrote:When will loans be cancelled?

Any outstanding balance will be written cancelled:

30 years after you become eligible to repay
if you become disabled and permanently unable to work
if you die

Source: http://media.slc.co.uk/repayment/qsg/how-do-i-repay.html

 Whirlwind wrote:
[

I just think you are underestimating the background costs. ...Leicester also has very strict rules about who can teach (effectively postgrads and postdocs can't); you have to be a permanent member of staff to be allowed to teach.

http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/finance/information-for-staff/financial-reporting/gtascheme

I think you're overexaggerating the costs personally. It's also irrelevant to the greater point being made; we can (if you like) assume the course cost literally double the estimate being given above and it would still only equal half the amount made purely through the income from undergrad fees only.

With regards to grants, terms can vary substantially; I was speaking to a gentleman the other day who's about to be made redundant despite being full time employed staff; due to the fact that he was only hired because the funds to pay his salary were made available through a grant. Therefore once the funds had run out, the University in question simply didn't want to keep him on.

I suppose because if fees were at costs (so lets say humanities was £5k and STEM £15k) per annum, then you are likely to end up with less STEM graduates and more students of the humanities,

As I said above though (and I'm aware you're not necessarily advocating this opinion, just mentioning it), we don't hold the 'welfare of society' into the equation when we start taking out commercial loans. Is it really fair to overburden young people with three times as much personal debt in order to attempt some vague, nebulous social engineering in career placement? Because personally? I can't say I think it is.

nfe wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
If someone is stupid enough to think "oh geeze, I'll go work at KFC full time for £15k a year instead of going to University which will lead to a £100k/year job because I don't want to have to pay back £30k" well then I'd suggest they aren't that high on the list of the nation's talented people that we'd be scared to lose

Some of them are probably thinking 'I've seen dozens of people I know get degrees and end up working in a call centre for a pound above minimum wage, so I might as well get on with my minimum wage job and miss the £30k in fees and the £15k in living expenses loans'.

So students should pay attention to not doing courses that aren't going to advance themselves.

Additionally, you're making the classic fallacy that university is meant to get you a job. It isn't. It's meant to educate you. Society wants better educated people, not just people to do particular jobs.

It's not just "get you a job", it's "advance your ability to get paid well".

On average, college graduates earn more than those with a high school education.

You're making the same fallacy here.

It's not a fallacy, it's demonstrable fact that people with degrees on average earn more money.

Define 'use for'. In a way that doesn't involve 'to get a job'.

There are plenty of ways that you can have a use for something that doesn't involve getting a job in that field, but if you've done, for example, an engineering degree and then turn around and work in retail for 5 years before having kids and becoming a stay at home parent, you do not have a use for the engineering degree you got.

It's certainly over subscribed relative to the number of jobs in the field, but A) assuming that's a problem is a band thing is fallacious as discussed above, and B) how do you adjust that anyway?

How do you adjust for that? Emphasise the fact that for certain degrees the market for the skill set is tiny. Then make people pay their own fees. Tada, you've reduced the number of people going in to that field.

One of my mates recently told me that if he could give realistic advice to his new students it'd be "don't go in to psych unless you're really passionate about it, if you're not in the top 10% then you're wasting your time". He's a psych researcher who finds it depressing how many people are wasting their time, his time and whoever's paying for it's money. Of course it's the 90% that pay tuition fees to give him a pay cheque in the first place, and I accept there's areas like that where government support is probably a better idea than universities just suckering kids in to degrees that aren't going to help them.

The number of people who push the boundaries in a given field such that it's a benefit to society as a whole is small compared to the total number of people who have high level degrees in those fields. Even in technical fields like science and engineering where I teach graduate level courses I'd rather have half as many students that are twice as passionate (using current levels as a baseline) than twice as many students who don't give a feth and are just doing it because it's free and someone told them they need to do a degree.

I certainly don't want my taxes going to some kid who's doing higher education in a field they have no passion for and are not going to leverage later in life. I'd much rather my taxes going to better education at lower levels like high school and primary school.

Definitely. But this is a pretty key issue in conversations about generational tensions: millennials being told that they need to go to university to stand any chance of getting anywhere in life, only for hge numbers of them to discover it made no difference to their chances whatsoever.

Additionally, people who want to, and are capable, should be able to.

Definitely. I think things are slowly changing in that trades are being pushed more. As the booms of prosperity are starting to die down I think people are starting to see the value in trades vs higher education.

In Australia at least, I don't really have any concern that people who are capable are being denied for financial reasons. I'm kept awake more by the thought that people who are capable are being denied for social reasons than financial ones. The smart cookies who get pulled down by going to a bad school in a bad area and end up having their dreams beaten out of them by their social circumstances.

Most of society deems most of the traditional academic subjects useful. Most of them will never get you a job outside of academia. So will teach, and never pay their loans back (in the UK, in the US teachers are paid even worse, no idea about Australia).

High level academia has a slow start but in the end doesn't pay too badly.

If you mean teachers at lower levels, high school, primary school, etc, yeah I think they're definitely underpaid. I tend to think the solution there isn't to hand out free university but rather recognise the value such people play in society and so pay them more. That way they're more encouraged to do a university degree with the plan of teaching even if it means they'll have a loan to pay off at the end.

I also admit there's some degrees that are useful to society as a whole but have limited prospects for getting a better wage down the line, for the most part I'm happy with those being seen as a luxury item for people who enjoy those fields (compared to at the moment where it's just kids doing it because someone told them they need to do a degree of some sort).