University tuition fees are disgracefully high

ToneControl

I've said before that I think most Unis are completely ripping off students, you could get one-to-one tuition from a professional for similar hours to the lecture times, for the same yearly fees

(it's over £38 per hour for being in each lecture, by my calculations - 8 hours for 30 weeks)

There was a good Radio 4 piece on this today:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b090vd49#play
play from 2:33:45

guitarfishbay

Does your calculation include the lecturer's time in researching their lectures, seminars, and marking?  And costs of running facilities, pensions etc.

mart

You've said this before, and you've had it pointed out to you before that you're mistaken, working from a misguided notion of what universities do.

Speaking for my own department, our students receive around 340 contact hours per year, and they are also set about 70-80 pieces of formative assessment, which we mark and provide feedback on, and then they have 8 exams which we mark. those marks are also checked externally, and the whole programme of study assessed every few years to ensure it meets acceptable standards so that the students' achievements can be confirmed by a degree that employers understand and trust. Compare with someone who gets 1-1 tuition, and tries to get a job based on "I don't have any certificates, but I've had 1000 hours of private tuition".

And that's without getting into the broader support that helps them when they're struggling to remember why they should study, or when their parents have just divorced and they're struggling with everything, or any number of other scenarios. 

So doing your sums based on just 240 contact hours alone is way off the mark.

More importantly, I don't know of anyone able or willing to provide 1-1 tuition at university level beyond first year. Those with the necessary level of skills and expertise are more gainfully employed elsewhere and wouldn't want to bother doing tuition.

LuttiS

I think the problem with Uni's isn't just the extortionate fees.. ( and they are extortionate) 
It's that they are run as a "business" rather than an Educational institution.. 
I mean that as in it's for profit, senior management get the benefits, while staff/lecturers/students get fucked over. 

Lecturers imo get a very low income based on what they do, it's not just teaching planning that they do, it's all the research, papers, conferences that they are contracted to do too.

Take this article

I know its the Daily Mail, so take it as you will, but for he most part its true. Vice Chancellor chap gets ridiculous Salary, Benefits, Expenses etc, and 115 staff are in line for loosing their jobs. They are not hiring currently, if a lecturer leaves/looses job, they are not replaced and other lecturers are expected to add to their already considerable work load and cover those modules.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be about quality education anymore. 

Funkfingers

Present day university tuition fees are what the law allows the institutions to get away with.

Even if individual institutions could make cost savings and pass these on to students in the form of reduced tuition fees, there is no incentive to do so. To charge less would be interpreted in some minds as an admission of inferiority of the service provided.

In my opinion, the policy of successive governments to encourage ever increasing numbers of young persons to attend higher education courses is a tacit admission that there are insufficient jobs for them to do. Many of those who do emerge after three years with middling degrees will find themselves under-qualified for the better-remunerated jobs and over-qualified for the jobs that they probably could have begun three years previously.

The Daily Mail has already been mentioned. Their stock solution to all of this teenaged wasteland is conscription.

Fretwired

Too many people go to university who aren't fit for the rigours of academic life. Bring back polytechnics and fund further education colleges better. The number of universities should be cut and the student numbers - you shouldn't need a degree to become an accountant - that way we could return to the grant system that was in place when I studied.

joeyowen

I'm on my mobile so this is short reply. 

I'm a lecturer. If you look at work against salary. It isn't desirable. But I love my job. Unis and other providers are making redundancies every year. And there are courses we are dropping because we don't have the staff. We are also expected to invest in all the latest hardware and software, which you don't want to know the figure for the licences we need. And the amount of varied software we need is phenomenal. 

I'm happy to admit that entry requirements are perhaps lowering to help recover costs, but I'm open for any suggestions on how else to do it? 

Even our highest paid principles etc, are earning much less that private equivalent jobs. 

So, in short, where can we save money or how can we earn more? Tory government? Nope! 

Lestratcaster

I'm glad I finished studying the year before the fees went up. I did a 2 year degree at the Academy of Contemporary Music, cost me £3600 per year. Now its £9k per year or even more than that.

Fretwired

joeyowen said:

I'm on my mobile so this is short reply. 

I'm a lecturer. If you look at work against salary. It isn't desirable. But I love my job. Unis and other providers are making redundancies every year. And there are courses we are dropping because we don't have the staff. We are also expected to invest in all the latest hardware and software, which you don't want to know the figure for the licences we need. And the amount of varied software we need is phenomenal. 

I'm happy to admit that entry requirements are perhaps lowering to help recover costs, but I'm open for any suggestions on how else to do it? 

Even our highest paid principles etc, are earning much less that private equivalent jobs. 

So, in short, where can we save money or how can we earn more? Tory government? Nope! 

My dad was a lecturer in the 1960s to the 1980's .. the pay wasn't that great then either. The holidays were good and the pension was worth it. He retired at 60 and then worked part-time as they couldn't find an economics lecturer of his calibre.

At the end of the day it's money - the government needs to stop wasting it on useless IT systems and MoD contracts. In the last 20 years over £150 billion has been pissed up the wall in failed projects and spending overruns.

Snap

Fretwired said:

Too many people go to university who aren't fit for the rigours of academic life.

Based on what though? From what I can see, the fees make kids consider more if going to uni is the right thing to do, and if it is, it makes them think about the value of the course and subsequent degree. My daughter gets A level results this week, and quite a lot of her friends/year group are not going to uni, or are taking a year out to work and think what they want to do. And that's at an academic high performing school.

Fretwired

Snap said:

Fretwired said:

Too many people go to university who aren't fit for the rigours of academic life.

Based on what though? From what I can see, the fees make kids consider more if going to uni is the right thing to do, and if it is, it makes them think about the value of the course and subsequent degree. My daughter gets A level results this week, and quite a lot of her friends/year group are not going to uni, or are taking a year out to work and think what they want to do. And that's at an academic high performing school.

Based on the drop out rate before year two - around 7 per cent.

But so few pay the money back. My nephew's emigrated to Oz with his wife. He never paid his loan back in full. The government is just building up a huge debt that will never be repaid.

CabbageCat

Fretwired said:

Snap said:

Fretwired said:

Too many people go to university who aren't fit for the rigours of academic life.

Based on what though? From what I can see, the fees make kids consider more if going to uni is the right thing to do, and if it is, it makes them think about the value of the course and subsequent degree. My daughter gets A level results this week, and quite a lot of her friends/year group are not going to uni, or are taking a year out to work and think what they want to do. And that's at an academic high performing school.

Based on the drop out rate before year two - around 7 per cent.

But so few pay the money back. My nephew's emigrated to Oz with his wife. He never paid his loan back in full. The government is just building up a huge debt that will never be repaid.

The debt presumably is repaid, just by the taxpayer not the person who borrowed it. I assume that there is less money per student in the university system now than there used to be (judging by the cost-cutting in recent years), it's just funded more by the people who use the system now and less by those who don't.

Veganic

I think fees for my course in 1990 were 600 pounds per term so 1800 a year. An online inflation calculator puts that about 3000 a year.

(I could be way out though as my memory is not what it was, er based on my recollection of what it was.)

crunchman

CabbageCat said:

Fretwired said:

Snap said:

Fretwired said:

Too many people go to university who aren't fit for the rigours of academic life.

Based on what though? From what I can see, the fees make kids consider more if going to uni is the right thing to do, and if it is, it makes them think about the value of the course and subsequent degree. My daughter gets A level results this week, and quite a lot of her friends/year group are not going to uni, or are taking a year out to work and think what they want to do. And that's at an academic high performing school.

Based on the drop out rate before year two - around 7 per cent.

But so few pay the money back. My nephew's emigrated to Oz with his wife. He never paid his loan back in full. The government is just building up a huge debt that will never be repaid.

The debt presumably is repaid, just by the taxpayer not the person who borrowed it. I assume that there is less money per student in the university system now than there used to be (judging by the cost-cutting in recent years), it's just funded more by the people who use the system now and less by those who don't.

There is a black hole in the finances at the moment.  Depending on when the student loan was taken out, the debt is written off after 25 or 30 years.

There is a lot of debt that won't be repaid, and everyone knows it won't be repaid, but because it's not due yet the government is hiding its head in the sand.

Tuition fees were introduced in 1998, so that was when student loans started to get a lot bigger, but most who started in 1998 wouldn't have graduated until 2001, so it's really only going to start biting government finances in a big way after 2026.  May and Hammond don't care about what happens in 2026, so nothing is done.

Fretwired

CabbageCat said:

Fretwired said:

Snap said:

Fretwired said:

Too many people go to university who aren't fit for the rigours of academic life.

Based on what though? From what I can see, the fees make kids consider more if going to uni is the right thing to do, and if it is, it makes them think about the value of the course and subsequent degree. My daughter gets A level results this week, and quite a lot of her friends/year group are not going to uni, or are taking a year out to work and think what they want to do. And that's at an academic high performing school.

Based on the drop out rate before year two - around 7 per cent.

But so few pay the money back. My nephew's emigrated to Oz with his wife. He never paid his loan back in full. The government is just building up a huge debt that will never be repaid.

The debt presumably is repaid, just by the taxpayer not the person who borrowed it. I assume that there is less money per student in the university system now than there used to be (judging by the cost-cutting in recent years), it's just funded more by the people who use the system now and less by those who don't.

No it's not repaid - money from existing students keeps the repayments going, but the debt is just growing - £100 billion now and up to £200 billion in six years. There's a big black hole in that figure of loans that will never be repaid.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jun/15/uk-student-loan-debt-soars-to-more-than-100bn

LuttiS

joeyowen said:

I'm on my mobile so this is short reply. 

I'm a lecturer. If you look at work against salary. It isn't desirable. But I love my job. Unis and other providers are making redundancies every year. And there are courses we are dropping because we don't have the staff. We are also expected to invest in all the latest hardware and software, which you don't want to know the figure for the licences we need. And the amount of varied software we need is phenomenal. 

 

My wife in similar situation, but academics is what she loves, work vs salary it's not desirable. 
And your also right about Torys.. Brexit has basically fucked over her career..

Ravenous

Veganic said:

I think fees for my course in 1990 were 600 pounds per term so 1800 a year. An online inflation calculator puts that about 3000 a year.

(I could be way out though as my memory is not what it was, er based on my recollection of what it was.)

When I started as an undergrad in the mid-80s the fees were around £500 (per year I think) but these were paid for us by the government, or one of the agencies or something.

The university itself must have had some other sources of money though. And of course they charged foreign students something like £4K per year, as they came from families who could afford it.

We got a grant, or had to raise money from our folks, for our food & accommodation and that was it. (People on specific courses might have had to lay out the odd small fee here or there, but I never had that.)

I pity the kids today. (Don't tell them I said that though!)

Fretwired

Ravenous said:

I pity the kids today. (Don't tell them I said that though!)

It's scandalous ... leaving uni with a debt up to £40K ...

Sporky

ToneControl said:

(it's over £38 per hour for being in each lecture, by my calculations - 8 hours for 30 weeks)

What degree did you base your calculations on?

My degree had about 30 hours of lectures a week, plus 4 hours of labs, plus assignments and typically an hour or so with your assigned tutor as well.

ESBlonde

And the universities are making losses? No not a chance, they also have investments all over bringing in huge sums. Ever wonderred why Britains biggest container terminal was called Trinity terminal? It's owned by the university of the same name and has nothing to do with education.

ToneControl

guitarfishbay said:

Does your calculation include the lecturer's time in researching their lectures, seminars, and marking?  And costs of running facilities, pensions etc.

Average tutor rate at University level is £41 per hour, yes that includes everything
https://www.journalism.co.uk/press-releases/private-tuition-fees-new-data-on-uk-tutor-rates/s66/a604769/

If someone tried to sell me an 8 hour commercial training course , where I was sending some of my staff to a lecture theatre, for a day effectively, the costs are:

http://www.apt.ac/apt-open-courses.html
£175 a day, £425 for 3 days, £1375 for 10 days

https://www.tcstraining.co.uk/prices-it-training-southampton.htm
Prices from £145 per delegate 

So looking at those courses, it looks as if £140 a day is easily available including lecture room, prep, pensions, everything

Whereas 8 hours (i.e. one week of lectures for many uni courses) costs £308, yet the class sizes will often be larger


A college near me gets Liverpool Uni lecturers in to do 2 hour lectures. It costs £9 for a seat

So why does a seat on a degree course cost £38 per hour, £77 for 2 hours??