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The attitude towards teaching is very short sighted. They push the training bursary of '£25k tax free', which is only for certain subjects and dependent upon you having a first/phd. But the bursaries generally are less but still good. But your first year of teaching you start at the bottom rung of the pay scale, this is £22,500 before tax everywhere but London. Suddenly the number of lessons you teach compared to your final training placement has doubled, with prep and marking you work a 60 hour week, and your take home pay is actually less. It's a shock, you will be working a good few years to take home £25k even in London. And this before all the BS starts that makes teaching hard work. Actually teaching a class is the easy bit.

No wonder so many don't make it past the first year or two before packing it in as a career. The government talk up how many join the profession, but not the number they haemorrhage because they focus only on attracting people and nothing on keeping them in. Some of the much vaunted academy chains are a disgrace for this, chewing through new teachers as fast as they arrive.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/13/schools-harris-academy-teachers-ofsted

This was from a a couple years ago, and should be scandalous. While the government talk up how wonderful these academy chains are, they are burning through young teachers so fast. Is a £20+ bursary well spent public money when they go through a meat grinder school and quit after just 1-2 years? And don't believe the BS excuses, I know people who have worked in these places and it's not pretty.

 Ketara wrote:

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

That's not teaching per se. Postgrads get paid to do things like supporting the lecturers in labs, or run through prepared answers from the workshops, or help out at open days, mark some set question work (that doesn't affect final marks) etc. It's basically more of the running around that the lecturers don't have time to do because of all the teaching they are doing. The postgrads have to show as part of their studies that they have also gained wider learning as part of the phd. Assisting in this way helps to meet some of these credits and also earns them some income at the same time. However they don't prepare lectures, seminars and actually 'teach'.

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.

I didn't make any estimate, you made it. All I noted was that generally speaking if a 'back of a cigarette packet' calculation and estimate is made it is usually too low by a factor of 2. It is a bizarre phenomena but it works in all areas.

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.

That's pretty much the life of a postdoc I'm afraid. But postdocs don't teach, they are hired to undertake research. Usually the lecturers apply for grants and they'll be awarded so much for a period of time (a lot which comes from the EU for the sciences). If they are successful they usually hire postdocs to do a lot of this research (and the phd students). After the money runs out the postdoc has to find other work.

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.

Best thing would be to would be get rid of the fees completely.

 Whirlwind wrote:

 Ketara wrote:

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

That's not teaching per se. Postgrads get paid to do things like supporting the lecturers in labs, or run through prepared answers from the workshops, or help out at open days, mark some set question work (that doesn't affect final marks) etc. It's basically more of the running around that the lecturers don't have time to do because of all the teaching they are doing. The postgrads have to show as part of their studies that they have also gained wider learning as part of the phd. Assisting in this way helps to meet some of these credits and also earns them some income at the same time. However they don't prepare lectures, seminars and actually 'teach'.

I'd disagree as to what qualifies as 'teaching' here, but that's a tangent for another day.

That's pretty much the life of a postdoc I'm afraid. But postdocs don't teach, they are hired to undertake research. Usually the lecturers apply for grants and they'll be awarded so much for a period of time (a lot which comes from the EU for the sciences). If they are successful they usually hire postdocs to do a lot of this research (and the phd students). After the money runs out the postdoc has to find other work.

According to you. The gentleman in question also taught (according to your strictly defined standard above), had his own office (nameplate on the door and everything), was listed on the website as full time academic staff, and so on. He wasn't a postdoc by any stretch of the imagination, you don't get many of them in their 60's.

Funnily enough, they're actually letting him keep the office for the forseeable future even though he's officially retiring now. He still wanders in two days a week at the moment he says, and has no plan on changing that.

Best thing would be to would be get rid of the fees completely.

Is that financially feasible whilst retaining a 'anyone can go' approach to University?

 Whirlwind wrote:

 Ketara wrote:

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

That's not teaching per se. Postgrads get paid to do things like supporting the lecturers in labs, or run through prepared answers from the workshops, or help out at open days, mark some set question work (that doesn't affect final marks) etc. It's basically more of the running around that the lecturers don't have time to do because of all the teaching they are doing. The postgrads have to show as part of their studies that they have also gained wider learning as part of the phd. Assisting in this way helps to meet some of these credits and also earns them some income at the same time. However they don't prepare lectures, seminars and actually 'teach'.

That's highly school and program dependent. Where I went to grad school, the graduate teaching assistants in my program were instructors of record for the first and second year courses. We prepared and taught courses on our own. While there are programs that only have graduate TAs supporting labs or discussion groups or workshops, or simply grading papers and tests, it is not unheard of or uncommon for graduate TAs to be teaching full first and second year courses (again, depending on the program in question).

 Whirlwind wrote:

That's pretty much the life of a postdoc I'm afraid. But postdocs don't teach, they are hired to undertake research. Usually the lecturers apply for grants and they'll be awarded so much for a period of time (a lot which comes from the EU for the sciences). If they are successful they usually hire postdocs to do a lot of this research (and the phd students). After the money runs out the postdoc has to find other work.

It's not just researchers, but entire departments, including adminarative and support staff can be hired on this basis. Universities in the UK are full of people on fixed term contracts.

 Hordini wrote:

That's highly school and program dependent. Where I went to grad school, the graduate teaching assistants in my program were instructors of record for the first and second year courses. We prepared and taught courses on our own. While there are programs that only have graduate TAs supporting labs or discussion groups or workshops, or simply grading papers and tests, it is not unheard of or uncommon for graduate TAs to be teaching full first and second year courses (again, depending on the program in question).

It's pretty standard these days sadly, to inhale as many PhD students as possible in order to cut down on how many full time staff you need. If you can then get a third to half of the full time staff on fixed term contracts, it lets you cuts costs as far as you can whilst retaining the ability to shed staff at will.

As there are now government subsidies towards PhD study, I suspect this phenomenon will only worsen. There's already four PhD students and two postdocs chasing every single permanent post created, in a decade, it'll be double that.

Ketara wrote:

Best thing would be to would be get rid of the fees completely.

Is that financially feasible whilst retaining a 'anyone can go' approach to University?

From what I remember yes. In Germany you don't pay anything (or much, don't know how it's now) for public universities/technical colleges and you get paid in apprenticeships (but not much). You get all kinds of student discounts (like for for you monthly public transportation ticket, movies, and whatever else) and if you are in financial need there's BAföG (english wikipedia), and after you are finished with your studies you have to pay back half of it but can also defer payment (and, I think, the debt can even be completely removed if you don't find a job within a certain timeframe). It's not much, the linked site says 735€ maximum at the moment. And you can have a part time job while studying (I think it was 20 hours per week maximum or you lose your status as a student so it doesn't get abused). You'll probably live at home or in a dorm and get some help from your parents but you also don't end up with thousands of € in debt just for getting a degree.

From my days (early 00s) and what I read about it the combination of "unpaid" University and BAföG ends up positive for society because people tend to get better jobs and end up paying more taxes and even if you don't consider a better educated workforce a plus it's at least financially at about ±0 (I think it was a bit positive, it's managed by government so they are not out to make the big bucks here).

You need to pass a certain level of education if you want to go to university, the requirements for technically colleges are a bit lower (and so on). But if you finish with a lower qualification then you have access to additional studies to earn the missing parts. If I remember correctly somebody who gets a Hauptschulabschluss (the lowest level of certificate that allows you to enrol in a vocational school) and want to enter University you end up one year later than your age group but have vocational education in a trade and a Meister title (master craftsman) which allows you to train apprentices (like you were a few years ago) and I think it was—but is not anymore—needed to operate your own company in that trade.

The big upside is that colleges and universities don't switch into this worldview where the students are customers. When you see college comparisons some tend to also include points for quality of life features and other types of handholding in their ratings (and german universities tend to end up with about zero points in those categories). You need to be self-reliant and able to manage your own life without somebody looking after you.

Mario wrote:

Ketara wrote:

Best thing would be to would be get rid of the fees completely.

Is that financially feasible whilst retaining a 'anyone can go' approach to University?

From what I remember yes. In Germany you don't pay anything (or much, don't know how it's now) for public universities/technical colleges and you get paid in apprenticeships (but not much)..

Please do correct me if I'm wrong, but don't German institutions function on much more of a 'long finger' model though? I recall reading an article on it a while back. Few seminars, very large lecture halls crammed full of students for every lecturer, less funding for being on a degree course than corresponding loans in Britain, less assessed work and more emphasis on a few key pieces, etc, etc.

In other words, generally a lot less contact time and a lot more insisting that students are 'self-reliant' as you put it. Which reduces costs considerably, and means the system requires far less funding to function.

Consequently, the answer you've given is more of a 'Yes, you can fund free University degrees for anyone, so long as you're prepared to accept that the degree courses will be run very differently to how they are as of the moment'. An entirely valid answer, but I don't think the educational system here would be willing to adapt to it. Whilst the Oxbridge system isn't exactly replicated in most places (most institutions don't have the cash), there's a general belief in Britain that the contact time is of prime importance.

Myself, I'm half and half on that point. I think it's extremely valuable, but the students need to be willing to engage with it. When they're just slumping in not having done the reading, they're wasting everybody's time. When four or five have done the reading and reached different conclusions though (and are loud enough to voice it), the exchange is very educational for all involved. I never really experienced it until I hit postgrad level at MA (when most of the slackers had been weeded out), but it was absolutely grand when I did finally encounter it.


EDIT:- Looks like I remembered correctly. An interesting read on the style here:-
http://www.seanmwilliams.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Exporting-the-German-Seminar-A-Polemic-SMW-2011.pdf

US seminars are far smaller, and have on the whole remained far more effective, than their German counterparts. In Germany, seminar sizes range on average from around 25 students to 60; during my year in Germany, I participated in a seminar of 90 students and that was not unusual for a mainstream humanities subject(German literature). This difference in size between the US and Germany has led to a significant difference in one particular seminar practice; and it is a difference that has become institutionalized in Germany...........

Most, if not all seminar series now permit or require –if only out of necessity due to excessive numbers of seminar participants –group presentations instead of individual ones. This form of collective work is called the Gruppenreferat.

The task of the Gruppenreferat is for the students to collectively engage with a topic and present their knowledge to their
peers; in reality, the demand is for intellectual consent. This goal of the Gruppenreferat is phrased most explicitly in a 2008 German student survival guide to giving seminar presentations, written by Tim-Christian Bartsch and Berndt Rex. They stress that the Gruppenreferat should be one harmonious presentation to which multiple students contribute. The authors offer four steps to success, but despite their emphasis on student research, they at no point advise questioning of the material –unless the student is questing whether he or she has understood it correctly,

nfe wrote:
That said, you're reading a lot into posts that aren't written. It seems like a pretty hefty dose of confirmation bias. I didn't claim anyone voted specifically to keep anyone else down. Rather that people voted to remove particular opportunities from others after they'd reaped the benefits. More a case of 'I'm alright, Jack' than 'feth you, Jack'. More 'well, it's not going to hurt me if party X treble tuition fees' than 'can't wait till these trebled tuition fees bury kids in debt!'. Millennials don't think they're Cedric Sneer with a dad explicitly trying to ruin their lives. They just wish they'd stop getting told that they're lazy, preening snowflakes with 30-second attention spans because they can't buy buy a suburban three-bed by 30.

Even that's loading the question. The actual issue that led to increasing uni fees was 'how are we going to pay for this massive expansion of the tertiary sector?' Govt pours more money in to university education than ever before, but if the money is doubled while the student count trebles, then you still need even more money.

Now in the past it was okay to steadily ramp up student count year on year and pay for it out of growing government revenues because the economy was growing on average at 4% or thereabouts. Now we're hoping to somehow get back to 3% at some point in the future, and in the medium term pretty proud when growth is 2.something. With flat revenues and ever increasing university numbers, the money has to come from somewhere. Govt priorities were tested, and instead of cutting something else or raising taxes, the decision was made to pass some of the cost on to students.

Whether that was short sighted or wrong is a reasonable debate, but it was never really about 'oh that won't hurt me because I've already got my free degree'. If that was truly the motivation they just would have slashed the number of enrollments.

Nor is the solution of passing greater costs on to the student isn't actually that unfair in itself. After all, if the lawyer or doctor is going to command a greater income from his education, why should it be just down to society to pay for it? However, pushing so many more people through uni had a second impact beyond the greater cost of the uni sector - it also depressed the incomes of people with those degrees. With so many more white collar people with degrees, the prestige of that degree declined and no longer commanded a greater income. In many places it's now the minimum for a starting position.

So the result has been a double whammy. Uni students get bigger debt loads, and lower paying jobs.

That sucks, no doubt. I don't think anyone is defending the status quo. But the status quo is best understood as a flawed response to a challenging set of circumstances outside of anyone's control, not a case of 'screw you I've got mine'.

Housing is similar in a lot of ways.


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 Pendix wrote:
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.

I used to work in budgeting at an Australian uni, so I know this. The Commonwealth puts in about three dollars for every dollar the student puts in. When you then factor in Commonwealth funds for non-student activity (research etc), and contributions from state govts, you can stretch that up to 4:1.


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 Ketara wrote:
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.

No. Humanities courses run at huge losses everywhere. Student to teacher numbers are horrible, and there's bugger all research money to offset the small class sizes.

Commerce makes stupid money everywhere. Law makes stupid money if it's a prestige course, but otherwise makes okay money. Education is the other cash cow, it's a dirty secret but there is a big reason the uni sector has pushed to make teaching a graduate course - $. In all these cases the teacher ratios are good, and there's no material costs. Commerce also has some insanely lucrative research work.

Science and engineering is typically somewhere between 'break even' and 'losing all the money in God's earth', depending on how tight the programs are managed,

Most of the rest, fine arts, architecture etc, they can be profitable or not, but they're too small to make any real difference to the uni's bottom line.


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 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.

Umm, collective action over pay and conditions isn't a millenial thing. In fact such action is less common than it's been in the last hundred years.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ketara wrote:
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.

Most grant funded gear is research specific, maybe some phd kids will get use of it but that's it. The capital requirements of undergrads are paid for entirely by general student revenue. Thinking back on the projects I helped secure funding for while I was at uni, not one included gear they'd let an undergraduate anywhere near.

And yeah, every faculty thinks they subsidise the rest. Most of them are wrong. Humanities is the wrongestest.

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.

Unis expand because it isn't possible to break even per student without economies of scale. Unis have to expand to maintain their market share, or become relatively boutique & high cost, something the govt system does not make viable. Expand or perish.

Seriously, go look at some uni annual reports. They're not booking the mad surpluses you claim.

 sebster wrote:
That sucks, no doubt. I don't think anyone is defending the status quo.

Well, maybe not anyone here in this thread, but certainly in the media and politics. I mean, that's what the whole 'avocado toast' and 'Millennials are just lazy' stuff is; a deflection of the younger generations problems in defence of the status quo.

 sebster wrote:
I used to work in budgeting at an Australian uni, so I know this. The Commonwealth puts in about three dollars for every dollar the student puts in. When you then factor in Commonwealth funds for non-student activity (research etc), and contributions from state govts, you can stretch that up to 4:1.

Wow, I knew it was a lot, I didn't realise it was quite that much.

 Whirlwind wrote:

 Ketara wrote:

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

That's not teaching per se. Postgrads get paid to do things like supporting the lecturers in labs, or run through prepared answers from the workshops, or help out at open days, mark some set question work (that doesn't affect final marks) etc. It's basically more of the running around that the lecturers don't have time to do because of all the teaching they are doing. The postgrads have to show as part of their studies that they have also gained wider learning as part of the phd. Assisting in this way helps to meet some of these credits and also earns them some income at the same time. However they don't prepare lectures, seminars and actually 'teach'.

There are a couple things in the thread I want to come back to, but since I can respond to this swiftly:

Me, and almost all of my PhD candidate colleagues, write and prepare seminars, mark graded essays and exams (that effect final marks and progression from year-year), and, outside of the UK, actually write and do the majority of teaching on entire courses.

I wouldn't describe myself as a 'teacher', but I ewouldn't describe any lecturers as teachers either. For me, that's quite a specific and very distinct thing that people do in schools and some levels of further education.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 sebster wrote:

nfe wrote:
That said, you're reading a lot into posts that aren't written. It seems like a pretty hefty dose of confirmation bias. I didn't claim anyone voted specifically to keep anyone else down. Rather that people voted to remove particular opportunities from others after they'd reaped the benefits. More a case of 'I'm alright, Jack' than 'feth you, Jack'. More 'well, it's not going to hurt me if party X treble tuition fees' than 'can't wait till these trebled tuition fees bury kids in debt!'. Millennials don't think they're Cedric Sneer with a dad explicitly trying to ruin their lives. They just wish they'd stop getting told that they're lazy, preening snowflakes with 30-second attention spans because they can't buy buy a suburban three-bed by 30.

Even that's loading the question. The actual issue that led to increasing uni fees was 'how are we going to pay for this massive expansion of the tertiary sector?' Govt pours more money in to university education than ever before, but if the money is doubled while the student count trebles, then you still need even more money.

If we're talking about the UK (and I am), the introduction of tuition fees was specifically intended to allow an increase student numbers. It was not a reponse to it. The trebling was in order to sustain that growth (again, because most voters and virtrually all parliamentarians are still of a generation that think going to university should be the target of every child), not respond to it.

 sebster wrote:

No. Humanities courses run at huge losses everywhere. Student to teacher numbers are horrible, and there's bugger all research money to offset the small class sizes.

Everywhere? That's quite the general statement. You'll forgive me if I take that as 'within my experience at a small subsector of Universities in a specific geographic locale'.

I'm quite happy to concede that I may well be wrong with regards to the capital requirements of STEM courses or their grants (never been in a STEM department after all), but I literally just threw out the student to lecturer numbers in history at one middling institution above. Unless you're literally going to unveil an extra £5 million odd quid in departmental expenditure there from somewhere, the department is subsidising other courses, either directly, or by paying for a far higher proportion of University general infrastructure. 800 undergrads plus whatever postgrad students they have versus 40 academics is a pretty good set of numbers.

That's one member of full time staff for every 20 students, each of which is coughing up £9,000 in fees. Considering just 4-5 of them cover that academic's salary, the remainder is rather a lot of money to not even succeed in covering departmental running costs (which is what you're claiming by saying they run at a loss).

Research money doesn't pay for classes. Research grants are awarded with a budget for costs proposed by the person applying, it pays for the staffing and resources needed for the research. There may be money left over, or resources and equipment that can be used by others subsequently.

In fact some staff who bring in a lot of research contracts don't do any teaching at all! This is why some people get all the glory for research and win more grants improving the prestige of the uni and never do any lecturing, while others end up doing a lot of lecturing and never have time to build their research career. And once you're not regularly participating in research it becomes harder to win research grants. Despite doing the bread and butter of uni work by teaching hundreds of students, they don't get much recognition from the uni because they aren't a big name researcher - those people who do nothing for students below PhD and who will flounce off to another uni taking their grants with them unless they are treated like royalty.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

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.

Not as straightforward as that. The courses that lead to better paying jobs are pretty rapidly changing, governments and inductry are appalling at communicating what is actually needed to prospective students, and students are terrible at predicting at 16-17 what they'll actually enjoy doing in four years time (I think almost no one should go to university straight from school, but try telling that to the generations pushing their kids about how vital to success university is...).

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.

Averages are extremely unhelpful here. It's true, but severely skewed by certain professions that require vocational degrees.

It's certainly over subscribed relative to the number of jobs in the field, but A) assuming that's a problem is a bad 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.

Top 10%. Ha! I was the top archaeology graduate from the University of Glasgow in at least a decade and top six in the college of arts for my graduating year and when I finish my PhD I'll still have a very slim chance of working in academia (though working somewhere in the field would be easy enough - it would be at the same wage as people who only just passed an undergraduate. We do try and communicate the chances to people but for the most part, teenagers are pretty confident that if they just plug away at university they'll get where they want to get - again, I'd suggest this is largely down to being told that every day by school and parents for 17 years...

That said, as I say, I don't care that the majority of people I teach will never work in the field. They're just they're to learn some stuff and hopefully find it interesting and that's what university is for.

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.

Well I'd argue all expansion of knowledge is a benefit to society, but clearly only a minute number of researchers ever achieve something that the general public would be aware of in any way. But so what?

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'm sure every single one of us would say the same, at all levels, but how do people find out if they're going to be passionate about a field until they start getting wired into it? They vast majority of people in our department doing PhDs did not start off as archaeologists at univeristy. Most of them took at as a third subject in first year at university. On the other hand, tons of the people that come into our department full of beans end up finishing with single honours in history or classics or whatever.

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.

I'd rather plough money into both. And we used to and there was no reason for that to change.

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.

I do have concerns about university being too expensive for some peoplewho are capable - and I live in Scotland! No question about social factors being another major hurdle though. My wife works in trying to get kids from bad backgrounds (serious family issues as well as seriously underperforming schools) and it's a bleak, bleak future for most of them.

If you mean teachers at lower levels, high school, primary school, etc, yeah I think they're definitely underpaid.

Should have been clearer. If I say teacher I always mean those in primaries and secondaries, or those teaching equivalent qualifications in colleges. I don't think of what we do in universities as teaching, really. I suppose it is, but it's very different to what I think of when I say 'teacher'.

nfe wrote:

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.

Averages are extremely unhelpful here. It's true, but severely skewed by certain professions that require vocational degrees.

Not just that, but not many people with degrees were ever going to end up at the lower end of the scale. Most people with degrees were going to earn more anyway. Even without going to university they are unlikely to be people that end up in unskilled (or even semi skilled) jobs. For many it is less that university = better job and more intelligence = better job AND intelligence makes you more likely to go to university. Or this was the case until university became a requisite for many non graduate jobs, in which case it's not university letting you earn more, but not going making you earn less.

Ketara: It depends, I studied computer science and the first more generic lectures (linear algebra, analysis, basic statistics, CS1/2/3) were all in the big lecture halls (often in the auditorium maximum) because your start with many students but the secondary lectures and "workshops" with graduate students/teaching assistants were held in smaller rooms and here it depends on what you choose (the bigger ones were 20 to a maximum of 30 while the more obscure ones could be fewer than 10 students, it depends on what you choose and how the students were divided).

Even in the big halls you can talk to the professor (good acoustics!) if you have a question but you usually get the discussion in the smaller secondary lectures that are related to the big ones (this is where you get the "homework" too) and also while doing the problem sets for next week while talking with other students. It's kinda a hub and spoke model where the big lectures are just that: somebody lecturing in front of a few huge blackboards while the discussion and contact with teaching staff happens around that (and they all have office hours if you want to discuss things) and you can easily get in contact with other students to work things out.

My seminars were smaller and we had individual presentations and could always talk with the graduate student (in person, phone, mail,…) about parts where we got stuck, ask for general presentation tips, and everything else. There was just a difference between lectures (big, a lot of people, impersonal) and seminars (small, fewer people, more intimate, direct contact), and then all the extracurricular contact/discussion/office hours with students, assistants, and professors. It just depends on how much contact you want. If somebody wanted to do on their own they could (a few lectures didn't even have mandatory participation and you could download the material and just take the test(s) to pass) and if they wanted to work more with the help of the people working there (or other students) then they could do that too.

The whole group presentations vs individual ones probably just depends on how many students there are and it probably weights heavily towards the first and second semester (here weeding out starts early and not at MA level). The article you quoted is from an at the time undergraduate linguist (so I can't directly compare that) who apparently spent one year here (you can't extrapolated from that to all universities) and the Hauptseminar he mentions were for me under the old system (Diplom and not BA/MA) not exactly Master level (the Diplom was kinda the equivalent of BA+MA but not exactly) but just a seminar after the first two years (in the first two years—called Grundstudium—we had a Proseminar) and even then it doesn't compare to his experience. It may be that it's completely different for linguists (or that things have changed since I was at university) but that just reads like somebody had a bad seminar leader and assumed it's the same everywhere, for all subjects, and in all semesters.

We had at our university for the same lecture (like linear algebra 1 and 2 in the first two semesters) different lecturers each year and they structured the lectures differently (order of things), different reading material (same fundamental stuff just different handouts/books/downloads), they graded differently (how many tests and weighting of those), and sometimes attendance was compulsory (other times not) for technically the same lecture. I don't think that that one experience (from one person) can be used to generalise about all german universities.

Mario wrote:
Ketara: It depends, I studied computer science and the first more generic lectures ......

Thanks for the input. Always interesting to hear different perspectives!

For the record though, that article I linked above was not where I first read those sorts of views, I read another similar article a few years ago, which covered the theme of 'larger lectures, less staff and support/activities outside of them'. Doing a brief search reveals other experiences from people who've done both systems which also align with it to varying extents, for example here:-

http://solongusa.blogspot.com/2015/06/comparison-of-american-and-german.html

As I mentioned above, most courses at German universities are graded solely on final exams and no other criteria. It is completely possible to never attend the classes at all and still pass with flying colors, as long as you study what you need to know on your own. Some courses have a practical component, such as a portfolio or a research paper that may take the place of the exam, but the general model is one exam, one grade....

....In Germany, I have only one professor (out of six) who even bothered to learn the students' names at the beginning of the semester. Other professors know a few of their students' names, but most likely because they have interacted outside of the classroom at some point.....

...At German universities, the staff is minimal, basically just enough to keep the university from shutting down. I have already had more than my fair share of troubles with this lack of administration, including trying to deal with a registrar's office that only allows students to come in two days a week for a few hours.

To here:-
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/10/10/germany_college_is_free_there_even_for_foreign_students_why.html

First of all, the concept of “campus life” differs widely between our two countries. German universities consist almost entirely of classroom buildings and libraries—no palatial gyms with rock walls and water parks; no team sports facilities (unless you count the fencing fraternities I will never understand); no billion-dollar student unions with flat-screen TVs and first-run movie theaters. And forget the resort-style dormitories. What few dorms exist are minimalistic, to put it kindly—but that’s largely irrelevant anyway, as many German students still live at home with their parents, or in independent apartment shares, none of which foster the kind of insular, summer-camp-esque experience Americans associate closely with college life (and its hefty price tag). It’s quite common for German students simply to commute in for class, then leave.

To here:-
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/blogs/why-do-german-students-choose-study-uk

The crucial factors are tuition quality and the staff-to-student ratio, which many Germans who have spent time studying in the UK say is excellent. With an average ratio of 1:66, German universities have a hard time standing their ground in this regard against rivals in the UK.

For comparison, Bishop Grosseteste University in England, considered one of the “worst” universities with respect to its staff per student number, has an average ratio of 1:25, a point Kristin stresses as well: “I really like the close teaching relationship between students and academic staff, as well as the often in-depth debates with fellow students in seminars,” she says.

“In the UK, staff and students usually interact on a more equal and respectful level than in Germany, and in my experience UK professors are a lot more approachable than their German colleagues.”

Many of these article are very praiseworthy of the German system, so I don't think they're exaggerating for negative effect. It could potentially be that some courses get better (or worse) treatment perhaps? I found the average ratio of one academic staff member to sixty six students quite illuminating though, with that sort of discrepancy, one would assume it would be difficult to have sufficient full-time staff to lead any substantial number of seminars. Do you find that PhD students completely take up the teaching shortfall over there? If so, that could account for the difference, over here they make up a goodly chunk of that sort of work, but far from all of it. About 65% of my seminars as an undergrad were taken by full-time staff.

I know this is a spot OT, but since a lot of people seem interested in the HE topic, it might be worth exploring as a tangent as to whether or not free higher education for all is a reasonable thing for millennials to expect.

 Ketara wrote:

Mario wrote:
Ketara: It depends, I studied computer science and the first more generic lectures ......

Thanks for the input. Always interesting to hear different perspectives!

For the record though, that article I linked above was not where I first read those sorts of views, I read another similar article a few years ago, which covered the theme of 'larger lectures, less staff and support/activities outside of them'. Doing a brief search reveals other experiences from people who've done both systems which also align with it to varying extents, for example here:-

 Pendix wrote:
Well, maybe not anyone here in this thread, but certainly in the media and politics. I mean, that's what the whole 'avocado toast' and 'Millennials are just lazy' stuff is; a deflection of the younger generations problems in defence of the status quo.

Yeah, that's fair enough.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

nfe wrote:
If we're talking about the UK (and I am), the introduction of tuition fees was specifically intended to allow an increase student numbers. It was not a reponse to it. The trebling was in order to sustain that growth (again, because most voters and virtrually all parliamentarians are still of a generation that think going to university should be the target of every child), not respond to it.

That's all much of a muchness. "How do we continue to expand the sector without pouring in more money we don't have?" is the question, and the answer was "push some of the cost on to the students". You seem to have assumed I was saying the sector expansion was passive, it wasn't, and it doesn't seem to matter either way.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ketara wrote:
Everywhere? That's quite the general statement. You'll forgive me if I take that as 'within my experience at a small subsector of Universities in a specific geographic locale'.

I'm quite happy to concede that I may well be wrong with regards to the capital requirements of STEM courses or their grants (never been in a STEM department after all), but I literally just threw out the student to lecturer numbers in history at one middling institution above. Unless you're literally going to unveil an extra £5 million odd quid in departmental expenditure there from somewhere, the department is subsidising other courses, either directly, or by paying for a far higher proportion of University general infrastructure. 800 undergrads plus whatever postgrad students they have versus 40 academics is a pretty good set of numbers.

Part of the job we did was international comparisons, including inter-faculty comparisons. Humanities depts everywhere losing money was one of those accepted things. In fact I can remember more than one occasion where people made fun of the lack of insight in a submission or report by pointing out the report made the point that humanities lost money.

It was an actual part of uni financial reform efforts to save money by cutting humanities, but not so much that you risked your Shanghai Ranking.

That's one member of full time staff for every 20 students, each of which is coughing up £9,000 in fees. Considering just 4-5 of them cover that academic's salary, the remainder is rather a lot of money to not even succeed in covering departmental running costs (which is what you're claiming by saying they run at a loss).

Academic salaries are not the only cost of a university, not by a long way. There's support staff, services and club support, grounds & facilities etc. Corporate administration staff is huge - I worked at a uni with a much lower admin staff % than average and I think we could have cut half the staff and not lost anything.

 Hordini wrote:

 Whirlwind wrote:

 Ketara wrote:

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

That's not teaching per se. Postgrads get paid to do things like supporting the lecturers in labs, or run through prepared answers from the workshops, or help out at open days, mark some set question work (that doesn't affect final marks) etc. It's basically more of the running around that the lecturers don't have time to do because of all the teaching they are doing. The postgrads have to show as part of their studies that they have also gained wider learning as part of the phd. Assisting in this way helps to meet some of these credits and also earns them some income at the same time. However they don't prepare lectures, seminars and actually 'teach'.

That's highly school and program dependent. Where I went to grad school, the graduate teaching assistants in my program were instructors of record for the first and second year courses. We prepared and taught courses on our own. While there are programs that only have graduate TAs supporting labs or discussion groups or workshops, or simply grading papers and tests, it is not unheard of or uncommon for graduate TAs to be teaching full first and second year courses (again, depending on the program in question).

To be clear I was referencing Leicester's policy not anyone else's as it was the point of discussion.

 Whirlwind wrote:

 Hordini wrote:

 Whirlwind wrote:

 Ketara wrote:

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

That's not teaching per se. Postgrads get paid to do things like supporting the lecturers in labs, or run through prepared answers from the workshops, or help out at open days, mark some set question work (that doesn't affect final marks) etc. It's basically more of the running around that the lecturers don't have time to do because of all the teaching they are doing. The postgrads have to show as part of their studies that they have also gained wider learning as part of the phd. Assisting in this way helps to meet some of these credits and also earns them some income at the same time. However they don't prepare lectures, seminars and actually 'teach'.

That's highly school and program dependent. Where I went to grad school, the graduate teaching assistants in my program were instructors of record for the first and second year courses. We prepared and taught courses on our own. While there are programs that only have graduate TAs supporting labs or discussion groups or workshops, or simply grading papers and tests, it is not unheard of or uncommon for graduate TAs to be teaching full first and second year courses (again, depending on the program in question).

To be clear I was referencing Leicester's policy not anyone else's as it was the point of discussion.

There are PhD candidates I know personally teaching classes and grading essays (not sure about exams) at Leicester - a couple might have finished actually, but within the last couple of years. Unless they're all lying when we moan about marking in the pub at conferences but I can't imagine why they would.

Bran Dawri wrote:
I think it's also that, for the exact science anyway, many of the early year classes overlap. ....So, for example, during your first two years, you'd be in huge lecture classes (100+) with students from other disciplines for a good 80% of your subjects. Study classes where you worked out problems based on the theory were smaller (and generally given by a post-grad)....
Once past that initial common ground, classes would naturally shrink...

That's interesting. When I did my undergrad, there was the opportunity to take one or two smaller 'wild modules' a year from other departments (I seized the opportunity to do some archaeology and photography), but otherwise everything was kept purely within your department. If what you've described is the norm, it could help to account for larger lecture sizes in a number of disciplines and the corresponding smaller need for full-time academic staff. Food for thought indeed.

sebster wrote:
Part of the job we did was international comparisons, including inter-faculty comparisons. Humanities depts everywhere losing money was one of those accepted things. In fact I can remember more than one occasion where people made fun of the lack of insight in a submission or report by pointing out the report made the point that humanities lost money....Academic salaries are not the only cost of a university, not by a long way. There's support staff, services and club support, grounds & facilities etc. Corporate administration staff is huge - I worked at a uni with a much lower admin staff % than average and I think we could have cut half the staff and not lost anything.

With all due respect, your argument thus far sums up to 'I worked in a University that had an expensive humanities department, and tried to gauge what other universities did'. Which is fine, and I'm not trying to put down your personal empirical experience of things. But it's difficult enough to compare institutions within the same country (Oxford's finances and departmental layout will be very different to Bolton's). Trying to extrapolate from your one example in Australia across the entire global Higher Education sector is an order of a magnitude higher, and I wouldn't even begin to dream of making large scale generalisations on that basis without considerable data to back it up. Purely within this thread alone, we have the example of the German Universities, who very clearly have a statistical bent towards less staff, and maintain cheaper courses.

What I can extrapolate from the current publicly available data, is that within the UK specifically, at reasonably well performing and financially secure institutions (I looked around at several others), the funds acquired from doing undergrad history degrees substantially outweighs the staffing costs (both academic and administrative). Even given the less obvious expenses (booze for visiting academics, pension contributions, the odd conference held, stationary supplies, etc),and an appropriate proportion of fixed costs (cleaners, registry staff, SU budget allocations, etc), history degrees (and therefore, it is likely most humanities degrees) do not appear to be in the red. Far from it.

When you start talking about things like 'support staff, grounds and facilities', those are fixed costs shared with every other course in the University. Not departmental. The same goes for 'club support', your local SU branches here in the UK handle that end of things, and just get a small budget set by the institution as a whole. The 'History' student society has absolutely nothing to do with the 'History' department, officially. You can't finger the history department specifically because IT's budget is too tight to hire another person due to the history department only generating three times what it cost to run the course instead of three and a half times. Expenditures like those are shared across the institution as whole.

As long as the department is bringing in enough moolah to pay the departmental costs and make a reasonable/proportionate contribution to general running costs? It's in the green. And right now, using Leicester as the example, their history department must be sitting very, very nicely in the green, to the tune of a good few million. After all, if the department that literally needs a few empty seminar rooms and a stack of books in the library can't meet its costs plus a little extra, then the STEM laboratories with their much higher equipment costs must be so far in the red they're practically black!


So. Given that the Uni Of Leicester history undergrad course is generating 7.2 million, staffing costs are likely at the 2 million mark using nation wide averages, and we're knocking off another 3 million for tax, incidental departmental costs, Whirlwind's unexpected overrun, and a reasonable contribution towards fixed costs? You've very specifically stated that 'All humanities courses run at huge losses everywhere'. You now need to indicate where precisely it is, that the History department specifically (so no pointing to the SU or power bill or something) could be shedding at least another 3 million a year.

I'm happy to be proven wrong here, if you can highlight some giant black hole of expenditure I've missed that would be specific to the History Department (that's the criteria you yourself effectively set in your statement), I want to hear about it. It'll help the general discussion along as to whether or not uni education should be free.

 Ketara wrote:

Bran Dawri wrote:
I think it's also that, for the exact science anyway, many of the early year classes overlap. ....So, for example, during your first two years, you'd be in huge lecture classes (100+) with students from other disciplines for a good 80% of your subjects. Study classes where you worked out problems based on the theory were smaller (and generally given by a post-grad)....
Once past that initial common ground, classes would naturally shrink...

That's interesting. When I did my undergrad, there was the opportunity to take one or two smaller 'wild modules' a year from other departments (I seized the opportunity to do some archaeology and photography), but otherwise everything was kept purely within your department. If what you've described is the norm, it could help to account for larger lecture sizes in a number of disciplines and the corresponding smaller need for full-time academic staff. Food for thought indeed.

At the ancient Scottish universities, most students (everyone outside of vocational degrees and some degree tracks in the hard sciences pretty much) do three distinct subjects in the first two years. Some people do quite closely related ones (I was archaeology, classics, and religious studies in first year, for instance, then those three plus Classical Hebrew in second year; archaeology, history, and Celtic Civilisation is particularly common) but you do get some really scatter gun ones. Our first year lectures are massive because of the number of historians, classicists, etc, that pick up archaeology as a third subject, plus we run a course in first year called Archaeology of Scotland that always gets a million exchange students that are really studying business or maths or whatever.

Sorry, edited for being long and confusing.

 LordofHats wrote:
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.

It was a shot by the Baby Boomers who didn't know what to make of that generation. 'X' was like, 'fill in the blank'. It wasn't a compliment.

There's been a lot of excellent discussion in this thread. Probably one of the better threads I've found on Dakka, and I appreciate the honesty on here.

For my own story, I struggled with life for a long time. I was a troublemaker as a kid, took forever to figure out what I wanted to do in life, and therefore, lacked focus the first time I was in college, and eventually dropped out.

I spent some time in the 'real world' learning the value of the dollar, and what I was worth without an education and so I moved to a new city and took another shot at college, and surprisingly, discovered programming and loved it. The last thing I ever expected to be as a kid was a software developer.

But just as I graduated in 2000, the DotCom bust happened. I was fortunate to have two amazing internships on developer teams for a Fortune 100 company my last two years in college, but kept missing out on jobs because more experienced unemployed programmers were willing to work for my starting salary in a recession. After being really frustrated and going into debt, I walked into a developer manager's office for a nearby team I really wanted to be on, and abruptly asked, "What do I have to do to get on this team?"

He sat there a little stunned, then replied, "I'll see about opening a req." (aka Request for Hire). I swear it went down just like that.

A few weeks later I had my dream job. I worked my ass off at that job learning all I could taking on projects beyond my skill set. And while doing so, I paid off my debt and saved money.

I also set out to buy a house, but at the time (pre-housing bust) as some of you might remember, was crazy expensive. I would ride my bike through neighborhoods imagining owning certain homes (with some JUST out of my price range), and eventually bid on one that my Dad said "would be a good starter home". I found the counter offer offensive and said screw him. A few months later, the economy started falling apart.

As I watched the greatest redistribution of wealth I will probably ever see (hopefully), there were for-sale signs in front of almost every home in all these neighborhoods that I used to go through. It was unreal. And here I was, with cash saved up. I learned right there and then that cash is king. Yes, credit is important, but in times of uncertainty its cash that everyone wants. So I took my time (like 3 years), and after searching for 'THE ONE' I found an awesome house in great condition (which was hard to do at the time) with a pool, big backyard, three car garage, more rooms than I know what to do with, and in a great neighborhood that I can't imagine ever going down hill, all at a ridiculous interest rate. I couldn't afford this same house if I tried to buy it at today's prices, and considering what my girlfriend is paying for a brand new two bedroom apartment, this investment is well worth it.

I think about the Great Recession almost every day, as well as the first one I went through when I graduated college, and it effects a lot of decisions that I make. And I was lucky, I was only unemployed for about 2-3 months during that time period. I have known people who lost their houses, others who had great careers but got laid off, and eventually gave up looking for work and now struggle to get a job because of the big gap in their work history. None of that happened to me. As a matter of fact, you could say I excelled in that time period. I had money saved, I made sure I worked even if I didn't like the job, and was able to buy low on what is usually the biggest purchase of our lives.

I am jumping all over the place here, but I do want to say this: I can't imagine the stress of buying a home today. And for those who have yet to buy, understand this (and it was told to me repeatedly over and over again before I did buy, but it really didn't sink in until well after):

Buying a home takes a lot of money, and a lot of responsibility.

That cannot be emphasized enough until you own one and understand. And my house is in great shape, but a lot of things need to be fixed, maintained, etc etc. From painting to cutting the grass, everything has a dollar sign attached to it. EVERYTHING. The price of a home goes way way beyond what the mortgage is. So when you go to buy one, be sure you love it, cause if you don't, you will hate owning it. And make sure you have a lot of cash saved up, because you'll be buying a lot for it.

And for the record, I love my home,

There are many more successful than I am, and I am more successful than others. I think looking back at how I got here, and realize it took a mix of not just hard work, but luck too. Everyone is going to need a mix of both, What you typically can't control is luck, but you can control your work ethic. Successful people didn't become successful saying "I can't do that." As a matter of fact, it was usually them trying to prove the opposite. If you are in a situation where you have limited means and feel like you have limited options, remember that a lot of immigrants come into this country with little more than a suitcase and somehow put their children through college. That doesn't happen by sitting around and telling yourself that it can't be done. You just have to get off your ass and find a way to make it happen. And I am not saying you are lazy, but you definitely lack the motivation. It can be hard at times. Life typically is. You HAVE TO KEEP TRYING. And you don't have to own a big house or drive fancy cars to be happy either. You might be surprised how little you actually need to be happy.

I also invite everyone to check this site out: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/, and more importantly, the forum https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/. You'll find people who have managed to save $5000 being congratulated and encouraged by those who have saved over a million. Its not necessarily about being frugal, although that certainly helps, but also about learning to be financially independent so you don't feel like you are a slave to the system. Every dollar you own is like a little trooper working for you. How you use those troopers will have a huge effect on you. I can only read so much in that forum before it blows my brain up. Some really amazing stuff on there.

I have found these influential too:

http://www.theminimalists.com/ (The Minimalists)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1613092/ (Happy)

Both have been videos on Netflix. And if you think you have it bad:

http://livingonone.org/livingonone/ (Living on One Dollar a Day)

Its amazing how high our standards are in western society that we are able to debate on a war-gaming forum about how tough life is, where in many parts of the world, people don't even have clean drinking water.

I think about that everyday.

KTG17 wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
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.

It was a shot by the Baby Boomers who didn't know what to make of that generation. 'X' was like, 'fill in the blank'. It wasn't a compliment.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

KTG17 wrote:
everything has a dollar sign attached to it.

Dollar, or time. You can't spend your weekends binge watching Supernatural if you have a yard to maintain.

There are many more successful than I am, and I am more successful than others. I think looking back at how I got here, and realize it took a mix of not just hard work, but luck too. Everyone is going to need a mix of both, What you typically can't control is luck, but you can control your work ethic. Successful people didn't become successful saying "I can't do that." As a matter of fact, it was usually them trying to prove the opposite. If you are in a situation where you have limited means and feel like you have limited options, remember that a lot of immigrants come into this country with little more than a suitcase and somehow put their children through college. That doesn't happen by sitting around and telling yourself that it can't be done. You just have to get off your ass and find a way to make it happen. And I am not saying you are lazy, but you definitely lack the motivation. It can be hard at times. Life typically is. You HAVE TO KEEP TRYING. And you don't have to own a big house or drive fancy cars to be happy either. You might be surprised how little you actually need to be happy.

Very true. I am where I am through a combination of good luck, making and maintaining personal connections, and "finding my niche". In my case, my niche is construction.

I also invite everyone to check this site out: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/, and more importantly, the forum https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/. You'll find people who have managed to save $5000 being congratulated and encouraged by those who have saved over a million. Its not necessarily about being frugal, although that certainly helps, but also about learning to be financially independent so you don't feel like you are a slave to the system. Every dollar you own is like a little trooper working for you. How you use those troopers will have a huge effect on you. I can only read so much in that forum before it blows my brain up. Some really amazing stuff on there.

I have found these influential too:

http://www.theminimalists.com/ (The Minimalists)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1613092/ (Happy)

Both have been videos on Netflix. And if you think you have it bad:

http://livingonone.org/livingonone/ (Living on One Dollar a Day)

Thanks for these tips.

Its amazing how high our standards are in western society that we are able to debate on a war-gaming forum about how tough life is, where in many parts of the world, people don't even have clean drinking water.

I think about that everyday.

It's important to remember the luck involved, just being born to a first world country. A friend of mine did a trip through India, and the biggest "not in Kansas anymore" moment for her was the existence of human roadkill. A dead person on the side of the highway, and no one gave a gak about it at all.

 feeder wrote:

It's important to remember the luck involved, just being born to a first world country. A friend of mine did a trip through India, and the biggest "not in Kansas anymore" moment for her was the existence of human roadkill. A dead person on the side of the highway, and no one gave a gak about it at all.

It's funny you should mention India. I was in Mumbai for work for a week and a half a few years ago, and in Hong Kong this year for vacation (I used to live there as a kid), and both gave great insights to what humanity is going to look like as the populations increase.

You think you have it rough? You should look into what a 700 square foot apartment goes for in Hong Kong (one I read about just went for just under million dollars). Got lucky with a nice view? You'll probably lose it when they build another building a few meters from your window. But even still, Hong Kong/Kowloon is pretty clean for a large Asian city, until that is, the smog rolls in when the wind blows from the north, and all that pollution comes in. Literally made my eyes water.

I didn't see any dead bodies in Mumbai, but I saw a lot of people pissing and crapping on the side of the road, as well, public toilets are practically non-existent. And if there are any, I would just assume burning the facility to the ground by now. I saw one from the road and was grossed out. And seeing the slums (https://www.google.com/search?q=mumbai+slums&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiOntHn3LbVAhUGWz4KHZWyDD0Q_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=946) in person is another experience. Millions of people live in those conditions. Entire economies, made of the trash of the higher classes, exist there. You'll see a lot of blue tarp in the pictures. I don't know where they get them from, but you'll see that blue tarp in every slum no matter where its at. And I saw plenty examples of how these slums take over an area. You'll see a trail of evidence, from a concrete two story house (basically a single room on top of the other), followed by some single story concrete ones, then followed by some made of sheet metal or other materials, followed by some with frames and tarps, then next some tent like homes, followed by a newly arrived family who has nothing but a pan to cook their evening naan in, and have just claimed their spot. Eventually they too will pull some bricks out from somewhere and build up some walls around them, right on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, cows roam freely in the streets with traffic going around them.

And the rich you ask? How to they live? Well, they build up. I present the Antilia Tower: https://www.google.com/search?q=Antilia+Mumbai&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjfgN-D3bbVAhUGej4KHfIAC-8Q_AUIBygC&biw=1920&bih=946. The richest man in Mumbai, who also comes from the lowest caste (let that be a lesson to some of you), has built his own building with some 400 staff to run it. And, its surrounded by slums. And all the rich in Mumbai loves what this guy has done, and are starting to build their own. Very Necromunda-like, isnt it?

So that's why I said what I did in that post above. Whatever your struggles are, trust me, there are nothing like most of what the rest of the world deals with. There are lots of opportunities here. You might not have your own BUILDING to live in, but you'll definitely avoid the slum.


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 feeder wrote:

KTG17 wrote:

http://livingonone.org/livingonone/ (Living on One Dollar a Day)

Thanks for these tips.
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Oh, on that Living on a Dollar doc, at first I thought the kids were a bunch of privileged douchebags playing poor people for a few weeks, but it was the stories of the people they met that really made an impact on me. Like the guy who has the best job in the village is a janitor, and another kid who has to work in the fields because his dad couldn't afford his books for school, which costs. . . $25. So quite often when I buy something, I think about that, and if what I am buy is really worth it.

Seriously? We are down to "think your self lucky you don't live in a slum"?.

Maybe not, but lack of decent housing and security of tenancy if having a serious impact on people's physical and mental health in the UK. We have a serious housing problem which is disproportionately effecting the young. And this is not a matter of national poverty. There is no need for it if we built enough houses and sorted out the massive number of small time buy to let landlords (who are almost all of one generation). What happens in poor countries or places with very limited land is irrelevant. The relevant fact is that housing costs have gone up for years and years on the back of speculation, and from that the baby boomers have hugely benefited, both through house value increase and through relaxation of legislation around renting and buy to let mortgagees, where as the under 40s have seen housing costs go up and up whilst home ownership goes down and down. None of the reasons for this are real. They are purely governance and legal.

 Steve steveson wrote:
Seriously? We are down to "think your self lucky you don't live in a slum"?.

Well, don't you?

In some part, yes.

And its hard to feel bad for people who are doing better than 80% of the rest of the people on the planet.