It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
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.
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.
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.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
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!
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.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
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.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
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.
(I could be way out though as my memory is not what it was, er based on my recollection of what it was.)
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/jun/15/uk-student-loan-debt-soars-to-more-than-100bn
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
And your also right about Torys.. Brexit has basically fucked over her career..
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!)
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
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.
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??