University Fees

[steveo]

Sounds like the Uni's want the fees raised to £5000 from £3000 according to this mornings news. On 5Live they discussed the difference between England and Scotland, surely I didnt hear this properly.

Scottish uni's are free if you have lived in the country for more than 3 years, OR if you are from another EU Country. However, if you are from England or Wales, you have to pay.

So a Frenchman can got to a Scottish Uni free, but an Englishman has to pay. Absolutely ridiculous.

 

[Desert Shrimper]

To be fair though, no impressionable young Englishman should be encouraged to fraternise with the Scots.

 

[Berrichonne shrimper]

Best i send my kids to scoctish unis then.
English ones are free if you are oh so very very poor,daughters at cambridge and fees are paid for her, gawd bless the state system.But mr stevo you are right its not fair the way things are different between england and scotland,re-build that wall i say.

 

[steveo]

But mr stevo you are right its not fair the way things are different between england and scotland,re-build that wall i say.

Excellent idea. There must be hundreds of Poles available to start work almost straight away.

 

[MK Shrimper]

Best i send my kids to scoctish unis then.
English ones are free if you are oh so very very poor,daughters at cambridge and fees are paid for her, gawd bless the state system.But mr stevo you are right its not fair the way things are different between england and scotland,re-build that wall i say.

There's a broad generalisation to start the day. Oxford & Cambridge, poor, full of idiots....oh...

 

[Mad Cyril]

If a degree really does mean £X hundred K more over a working lifetime I wonder why the government don't tax graduates at a slightly higher rate to pay for the unversity system.

That way graduates pay for there education an amount proportional to the benefit they get out of it rather than a flat fee which many struggle to pay.

 

[Napster]

If a degree really does mean £X hundred K more over a working lifetime I wonder why the government don't tax graduates at a slightly higher rate to pay for the unversity system.

That way graduates pay for there education an amount proportional to the benefit they get out of it rather than a flat fee which many struggle to pay.

Not a bad idea, as it goes. But the debt incurred when students graduate should also be taken into consideration

 

[Napster]

To be fair though, no impressionable young Englishman should be encouraged to fraternise with the Scots.

I did, and it did me no harm. In fact, I got paid a grant to go there. In on year, I worked part-time, had a grant and a loan. I led the life of Riley.

 

[Slipperduke]

The system is so ****ed up. My generation were told that the only way to secure a future was to go to Uni and I've seen nothing to convince me that the mantra has changed in recent years. Everyone goes, clever or not.

University should reserved for the dedicated, hard-working intelligensia of the country, then there would be the money to look after them. Instead, people like me end up going and that helps no-one. I went with the specific intention of having sex with as many people as possible and drinking as much as possible. Passing my degree didn't even come into it. Many of the people on my course were borderline *******. Semi-posh kids who had never had a job and were doing this just to make sure they didn't have to bite the bullet for another three years at least. There was no independent thought, no imagination, just a lot of people ducking work.

New Labour's insistence that everyone should go to University has just encouraged everyone to get useless degrees in pointless subjects while squeezing money out of the taxpayer and denying the real thinkers the help that they need. You can't find a plumber or an electrician, but there's a hundred thousand unemployed graduates of Film Studies. If the system was squeezed, if the help went to those who needed it, you wouldn't have to charge 5k a course.

It bugs the **** out of me that there are genuinely talented kids out there who can't go because ten townies from Telford are scattered round the country spending three years playing XBox 360, drinking Grolsch and ignoring the growing pile of Dolphin Studies & Ceramics (BA/Hons) coursework piling up in the background.

 

[Perth Bambi]

If a degree really does mean £X hundred K more over a working lifetime I wonder why the government don't tax graduates at a slightly higher rate to pay for the unversity system.

That way graduates pay for there education an amount proportional to the benefit they get out of it rather than a flat fee which many struggle to pay.

I left a sales jobs on near 30k a year, went back to Uni and studied my masters in physiotherapy and now am qualified to do a job for 20k a year. What happens to me?

 

[MK Shrimper]

It bugs the **** out of me that there are genuinely talented kids out there who can't go because ten townies from Telford are scattered round the country spending three years playing XBox 360, drinking Grolsch and ignoring the growing pile of Dolphin Studies & Ceramics (BA/Hons) coursework piling up in the background.

I have to agree with that bit. The full-timers on my course last year were desperately stupid and it made me laugh when they expected to get a £30K job with a 2:2 or a 3rd.

This years bunch are a bit more clued up, but I still got a bit annoyed last night when I was stuck at Uni at 7pm doing basic stuff that they should have learnt in their first year, and I told the lecturer as such.

We're twinned with a Chinese University - these kids parents have to pay £8K a year for tutition, have part time jobs, are generally asleep during lectures (maybe because they're so easy?) but always score 80%+ for their assignments despite English being a second language!

 

[please delete my account]

I left a sales jobs on near 30k a year, went back to Uni and studied my masters in physiotherapy and now am qualified to do a job for 20k a year. What happens to me?

I suggest you supplement your earnings by serving up weed and blow to the local community, or selling your arse on street corners at night...

Hope this helps

 

[Perth Bambi]

I suggest you supplement your earnings by serving up weed and blow to the local community, or selling your arse on street corners at night...

Hope this helps

Could you suggest a good corner?

 

[EastStandBlue]

I'm in my third year now, and it's even visible for me that the current crop of "freshers" are so blatantly the bottom of the barrel it's untrue. For instance, there's a particular module on our course regarding Public Administration, Government and Council and the like so that we're clued up enough to report on mundane stories about Tax...

Simple enough, it's a fair amount of stuff to remember but you'll probably need it at one point in your journalism career, and you'll definitely need it to pass the year. All of my year passed, mainly because we did the work... This years class were so bemused by the module that they started a protest, in the form of a Facebook group of course, about the module being designed to fail you.

That said, you shouldn't be charging £5k a year for this, as there's absolutely no way you can warrant charging that based on what i've seen. I'm £18k in debt, with tuition fees, maintenance loans etc, and i've looked at powerpoint presentations for 3 years, learning the bulk of journalism in my first year with a great deal of independent study.

 

[Pubey]

I'm teaching some 1st year maths/economics here, and without wanting to diss all my students, a significant amount are mongs. the rest range from average to bright with one or two very bright students. the problem is that the attitude of many of them is that they don't want to anything (at the most the bare minimum) and that drags down the standards of lectures/tutorials/workshops. try to pick up the pace and you get complaints that you're going too fast. more than ever, graduates are going to really struggle to get into jobs, the blasé attitudes of many students is frightning, they just don't seem to realise that they aren't going to walk into some £25k job in the city.

the other thing that worries me is the crop of (mainly international students) doing our Masters course that I teach on, their english is poor and their first degrees often aren't particularly relevant. they come here to get the sheffield health badge of honour, but our masters courses are so watered down because we have to pass the vast majority, that it really isn't worth the thousands of pounds.

To use economic terms, Degrees and Masters are signals of a persons productivity, and so they are 'purchased' to signal them as suitable for higher paid and higher skilled jobs, even though in the majority of cases the actual skills you learn on your degree bare very little relevance to your job... they just want to employ someone who is bright and a fast learner and having a degree is supposed to show that you are this. gone are the days when university was for the brightest students, and so the signal of a degree and a Masters has really been weakened.

 

[Mad Cyril]

We're twinned with a Chinese University - these kids parents have to pay £8K a year for tutition, have part time jobs, are generally asleep during lectures (maybe because they're so easy?) but always score 80%+ for their assignments despite English being a second language!

What are they like after a five draw and a couple of tins of super strength lager though?

Remember, university is about social as well as academic development.

 

[Mick]

It bugs the **** out of me that there are genuinely talented kids out there who can't go because ten townies from Telford are scattered round the country spending three years playing XBox 360, drinking Grolsch and ignoring the growing pile of Dolphin Studies & Ceramics (BA/Hons) coursework piling up in the background.

It is absolutely ridiculous to suggest you can get a BA/Hons degree in Dolphin Studies & Ceramics.



Everyone knows that's a BSc course.

 

[MK Shrimper]

What are they like after a five draw and a couple of tins of super strength lager though?

Remember, university is about social as well as academic development.

They're a very nice, pleasant bunch on the whole. Some in a class of mine even brought me in some "proper" chinese cooking. At least they don't walk about with their stupid baggy jeans around their knees and with stupid hair and their stupid hippedy-hop music!

Bah!

 

[Slipperduke]

more than ever, graduates are going to really struggle to get into jobs, the blasé attitudes of many students is frightning, they just don't seem to realise that they aren't going to walk into some £25k job in the city..

Without getting into a 'kids today' kind of rant, I've been hearing a lot of this recently and not just in journalism. Maybe it's the fault of fifteen years of relative prosperity? As a 31 year old, I was a Thatcher kid. All you'd hear about on the news was unemployment. Maybe it just hasn't been an issue for a while?

That said, it should make it easier for people like East Stand Blue who actually seem to work their nads off. Assuming you can elbow the detritus out of the way, exasperated employers should be quick to spot any actual talent.

 

[MK Shrimper]

Without getting into a 'kids today' kind of rant, I've been hearing a lot of this recently and not just in journalism. Maybe it's the fault of fifteen years of relative prosperity? As a 31 year old, I was a Thatcher kid. All you'd hear about on the news was unemployment. Maybe it just hasn't been an issue for a while?

That said, it should make it easier for people like East Stand Blue who actually seem to work their nads off. Assuming you can elbow the detritus out of the way, exasperated employers should be quick to spot any actual talent.

Always wondered why you preferred the name Carol. :stunned: