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Is the University bubble about to burst?


BearyBear

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21 hours ago, spygirl said:

Dole, well UC, is ~£70/week.

Cost of a student in HE is much higher.

You might have had a point with FE education.

1. When has any government decisions been based purely on raw financial considerations?

2. Three years x £9250=£27750, divide this by three years =£178pw. Two and a half UC but a) you don't have to declare stat, b) you are keeping whole of sum in UK economic system via uni employment (as against some of UC leaking via consumerism of product produce overseas), c) student may even get a job at end and so start paying taxes, and d) see 1. above.

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3 hours ago, MrXxxx said:

Mmmmm fair point, but some students will be pulling out at the last moment, and unis will still have spare capacity to fill. Despite what the OfS suggests, with many unis facing serious financial circumstances, (and the government unwilling to help) VCs will have no choice but to lower their standards to get as many `bums on seats`, and will use a variety of techniques to circumvent the UCAS system.

'standards' is a fairly loosely defined term for unis at the best of times and I expect clearing is going to be an absolute crap-shoot given that students are accepted or rejected based on their applications and not predicted grades. Take a bunch of poor to middling unis looking to fill bums on seats and potential students looking for unis, standards is going to end up being 'does student have pulse'.

Although I've had no experience of unis lowering fees to undergrads, I wouldn't be surprised if that starts to occur as well. After all, getting 90% of fees is a lot better than 100% of nothing.  

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6 hours ago, gaztastic said:

'standards' is a fairly loosely defined term for unis at the best of times and I expect clearing is going to be an absolute crap-shoot given that students are accepted or rejected based on their applications and not predicted grades. Take a bunch of poor to middling unis looking to fill bums on seats and potential students looking for unis, standards is going to end up being 'does student have pulse'.

Although I've had no experience of unis lowering fees to undergrads, I wouldn't be surprised if that starts to occur as well. After all, getting 90% of fees is a lot better than 100% of nothing.  

Agree, `a race to the bottom`, and not just fees!

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sancho panza
11 hours ago, gaztastic said:

'standards' is a fairly loosely defined term for unis at the best of times and I expect clearing is going to be an absolute crap-shoot given that students are accepted or rejected based on their applications and not predicted grades. Take a bunch of poor to middling unis looking to fill bums on seats and potential students looking for unis, standards is going to end up being 'does student have pulse'.

Although I've had no experience of unis lowering fees to undergrads, I wouldn't be surprised if that starts to occur as well. After all, getting 90% of fees is a lot better than 100% of nothing.  

I hope we start to see the rates dropping.WHy should Ias someone who's doing effectively a final year of a degree get to do it for £2800 when others are paying £9250.

Defo going ti=o be a race to the bottom for applicants with a pulse.No toehr way out if there;s a 10% drop ni applicants

 

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sancho panza
5 hours ago, MrXxxx said:

Agree, `a race to the bottom`, and not just fees!

I suspect standards will drop even more.The people on my course are all health professionals, and there's beena  lot of moaning about the quality of it,even for £2800:-)

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9 hours ago, sancho panza said:

I suspect standards will drop even more.The people on my course are all health professionals, and there's beena  lot of moaning about the quality of it,even for £2800:-)

Yet compare these rates to professional training (approx £500-1000 per day) and they seem cheap...in fact at the current rate of £9250 an undergraduate pays £30 per hour for their training...cheap when you consider a cinema ticket is between £10-15 per hour, and that's without the popcorn! :-)

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sancho panza

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/25/universities-are-pressing-the-self-destruct-button/

You’re 18. Your final year at school came to an abrupt end back in March. You missed out on last lessons and farewell parties with friends and teachers. The exams you had been working towards were cancelled. The summer plans you made – a festival in June, a holiday with your mates in July, a job working in a local bar – have all been abandoned. Then you learn that the university you’ve secured a place at will be running online lectures for the whole of the next academic year. Now you wonder whether the one thing you’ve been looking forward to – leaving home and going to university – will ever actually happen.

From the moment coronavirus was first identified, universities raised the alarm about the financial crisis about to hit higher education. Deserted campuses and cancelled graduation ceremonies meant an immediate loss of revenue. Profit-generating conferences and summer schools have been jettisoned. International students, with their lucrative fees, may stay away, and there are concerns that many UK students – each carrying a £9,250 cheque – may also defer entry.

When it comes to a national bailout for the higher-education sector, sympathy has been in short supply. Universities are seen by many in government and beyond as luring students on to courses that bear little relation to the needs of the economy, and leaving individuals burdened with huge amounts of debt they may never be able to repay, all while inculcating a politically unhelpful left-wing bias. Hospitals, care homes, furloughed workers and the self-employed may all deserve government largesse: universities do not.

The financial problems facing higher education might be making headlines now, but they did not emerge with the onset of coronavirus. For almost two decades, universities have been encouraged to operate as businesses competing with each other for student customers and research grants. As a result, highly paid managers have become far more concerned with unveiling shiny new buildings, rewriting mission statements and moving up league tables than focusing on anything so mundane as quality teaching and research.

The upshot is that academics now comprise a minority of university staff; students are bribed with unconditional places to ensure their custom; once at university they spend less time in classes and lectures, as well as less time engaged in private study, yet grade inflation is rampant. Meanwhile, every aspect of university life – from research to teaching to student satisfaction – is monitored, tracked, measured and ranked. In the competition for market share, there have been winners and losers. Some lower-ranking universities have struggled to recruit students, while other once successful institutions have gambled on expensive building projects – and lost.

Talk now is of universities merging, courses being cut, staff being made redundant, and even, potentially, some institutions folding altogether. Government funds are likely to come with strings attached: this could mean not just mergers and closures but also a loss of institutional autonomy and, potentially, decimation of the arts and humanities in favour of a relentless focus on the needs of the economy. The unhindered pursuit and passing on of disciplinary knowledge has long been reduced to just another item on an academic’s wishlist – the danger now is that it will be erased entirely.

If universities want to avoid being held over a bailout barrel, they desperately need to provide their own justification for receiving public funds that must focus on what they do best. Pubs and leisure centres can provide young adults with satisfaction. Counsellors and trained professionals are best placed to deal with mental-health problems. Apprenticeships, training programmes and learning on the job are the best ways to become employable. But only universities can provide an intellectual environment that pushes students beyond their comfort zone, and forces them to engage with new ideas and to learn more about the world and their place in it than they ever imagined possible. It is this intellectual mission, made real through teaching and research, that gives universities their unique purpose. For young adults, moving away from home, making new friends, joining clubs and societies – and, yes, drinking too much and having sex with people you never want to see again – are an intrinsic part of growing up and gaining intellectual and moral independence.

Of course, one way to demonstrate a need to fund higher education is for universities to get back to business as usual. But Cambridge University has announced that lectures will be conducted online for the whole of the next academic year. Manchester has committed to online lectures for the first term. Some universities are planning to delay the start of the academic year, and others will cancel year-abroad programmes. Some suggest only science students will be welcome on campus at first, with other disciplines offering more online than face-to-face teaching. These plans are ridiculously out of proportion to the threat coronavirus poses to young adults.

Proposals to move lectures online and shift to virtual years abroad show that universities are being run by people with no understanding of what higher education is for. Going to university is not the same as purchasing a Netflix subscription, and attending a lecture is about far more than watching a screen in your bedroom. Students know this – that’s why one in five are now reported to be thinking of deferring their place. Prospective students have already had to deal with cancelled plans and messed-up gap years. Let’s not deny them freshers’ week, living away from home, lectures, libraries, new friendships and tutorials. Let’s use the current crisis to reassert all that’s important about university – not degrade higher education even further.

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1 hour ago, sancho panza said:

 

The financial problems facing higher education might be making headlines now, but they did not emerge with the onset of coronavirus. For almost two decades, universities have been encouraged to operate as businesses competing with each other for student customers and research grants. As a result, highly paid managers have become far more concerned with unveiling shiny new buildings, rewriting mission statements and moving up league tables than focusing on anything so mundane as quality teaching and research.

 

Just like a business .... yeah right.

All the business I work are very careful on splashing out on capital spend such as buildings.

And they are very aware of how much each bum on a seat costs.

The HE sector is not behaving like a business. They are behaving like a loon with a credit card.

 

 

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On 24/05/2020 at 19:02, Darude said:

Have you ever met anybody in the final year of their PhD or 6-12 months after finishing? Usually their ego is on the floor by that point, it's not a fun thing to go through.

It was honestly the worst work related experience of my life, by a wide margin. If Id have known what that last year was going to be like in advance Im not sure Id have started it. 

Ive always thought that the true value of a PhD is that it teaches you to be completely unshakeable by normal work related shit ever again.*

*Only works for the people who went through that, of course, not the ones who were gifted an easy ride for whatever reason.

On 24/05/2020 at 20:28, One percent said:

The after is incredibly anticlimactic. I sailed through my viva, gien a month to correct a couple of speelings. I distinctly remember thinking, well what the fuck now?  o.O

I was the opposite. I was 'thank fuck thats over'. It was akin to what Id imagine the aliens removing their anal probe feels like.

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One percent
26 minutes ago, Melchett said:

 

I was the opposite. I was 'thank fuck thats over'. It was akin to what Id imagine the aliens removing their anal probe feels like.

There was that too, along with the thought that I would never read another academic book or paper again.  I didnt for at least a year. xD

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Talking Monkey
31 minutes ago, Melchett said:

It was honestly the worst work related experience of my life, by a wide margin. If Id have known what that last year was going to be like in advance Im not sure Id have started it. 

Ive always thought that the true value of a PhD is that it teaches you to be completely unshakeable by normal work related shit ever again.*

*Only works for the people who went through that, of course, not the ones who were gifted an easy ride for whatever reason.

I was the opposite. I was 'thank fuck thats over'. It was akin to what Id imagine the aliens removing their anal probe feels like.

Could you elaborate on why it was so shit. If it is so bad there must be a huge drop out rate

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The Idiocrat
1 hour ago, spygirl said:

Just like a business .... yeah right.

All the business I work are very careful on splashing out on capital spend such as buildings.

And they are very aware of how much each bum on a seat costs.

The HE sector is not behaving like a business. They are behaving like a loon with a credit card.

 

 

Indeed. Most businesses compete on price, and unis seem to have a single, universal price.

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38 minutes ago, Talking Monkey said:

Could you elaborate on why it was so shit. If it is so bad there must be a huge drop out rate

From chatting, its shit compared to finals as the finishing off stuff lasts a years.

I doubt it's as hard as doing  difficult FT job when you are firefighting multiple issues and are really stretched.

 

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1 hour ago, The Idiocrat said:

Indeed. Most businesses compete on price, and unis seem to have a single, universal price.

When top up fees were introduced ministers expected there to be competition on price but almost every course at every university charged the maximum allowed. Maybe the fact that every student can get the same size loan has something to do with it. A bit like the relationship between house prices and easy mortgage credit, people borrow to the max and spend every penny so the price of a degree/house rises to absorb the credit available.

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Don Coglione
2 hours ago, One percent said:

There was that too, along with the thought that I would never read another academic book or paper again.  I didnt for at least a year. xD

There's a big difference between hairdressing and chemistry...

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2 hours ago, Talking Monkey said:

Could you elaborate on why it was so shit. If it is so bad there must be a huge drop out rate

There is a huge dropout rate.

And it’s shit because you have no money, no power, no guarantee of a successful outcome, everyone treats you like shit, the senior academics have  the power to end your career if you don’t (sometimes not just metaphorically) suck their cock... everything you can imagine that is the worst thing about work and study combined, all at once. For months, maybe a year or two. 

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Oh, and the drop out thing: you can’t just resign and get another job like a normal career situation. You do that you’ve burnt your bridges in the career you’ve spent the last 6-7 years working for, no qualification, no chance of ever working in a related field again. Do you want fries with that?

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2 hours ago, spygirl said:

From chatting, its shit compared to finals as the finishing off stuff lasts a years.

I doubt it's as hard as doing  difficult FT job when you are firefighting multiple issues and are really stretched.

 

Well, 30 years and maybe a dozen jobs later and I’ve never encountered anything as hard even  in a difficult FT job. Not even the same ball park.

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One percent
34 minutes ago, Knickerless Turgid said:

There's a big difference between hairdressing and chemistry...

Not really. I had a few hours of chemistry on my hairdressing course. :)

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1 hour ago, Darude said:

When top up fees were introduced ministers expected there to be competition on price but almost every course at every university charged the maximum allowed. Maybe the fact that every student can get the same size loan has something to do with it. A bit like the relationship between house prices and easy mortgage credit, people borrow to the max and spend every penny so the price of a degree/house rises to absorb the credit available.

And... rather than compete to get the  most employable, high earning degrees,  most piled into pointless, stackem high degrees.

Where was the innovation?l

Why not 1 year from a local 6th firm? Then 2 years at Uni then 3 years parttime/remotestudy? Keep non earning ti e as low as possible? 

There be no need for all the extra Unis. Youd get more existing  infrastructure.

Having 18yo pile into debt for learning where they are only present for 30 weeks out 52 us fucking nuts.

1 hour ago, Melchett said:

Well, 30 years and maybe a dozen jobs later and I’ve never encountered anything as hard even  in a difficult FT job. Not even the same ball park.

Well...

I did do a Master and was offered phd funding, which I turned down.

From my time with phds in academia, followed by working with some, the ones i worked with found academia the easier option.

 

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5 minutes ago, spygirl said:

And... rather than compete to get the  most employable, high earning degrees,  most piled into pointless, stackem high degrees.

Where was the innovation?l

Why not 1 year from a local 6th firm? Then 2 years at Uni then 3 years parttime/remotestudy? Keep non earning ti e as low as possible? 

There be no need for all the extra Unis. Youd get more existing  infrastructure.

Having 18yo pile into debt for learning where they are only present for 30 weeks out 52 us fucking nuts.

Given the typical university course is 90 weeks (9x 10 week terms) it should be possible to complete an undergraduate degree in 2 years full time.

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Don Coglione
13 minutes ago, spygirl said:

And... rather than compete to get the  most employable, high earning degrees,  most piled into pointless, stackem high degrees.

Where was the innovation?l

Why not 1 year from a local 6th firm? Then 2 years at Uni then 3 years parttime/remotestudy? Keep non earning ti e as low as possible? 

There be no need for all the extra Unis. Youd get more existing  infrastructure.

Having 18yo pile into debt for learning where they are only present for 30 weeks out 52 us fucking nuts.

Well...

I did do a Master and was offered phd funding, which I turned down.

From my time with phds in academia, followed by working with some, the ones i worked with found academia the easier option.

 

Fuck me, I doubt it was in English!

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One percent
7 minutes ago, Darude said:

Given the typical university course is 90 weeks (9x 10 week terms) it should be possible to complete an undergraduate degree in 2 years full time.

The argument is, and i partly agree, is that the student needs the time to perculate and process ideas. What i don't agree with is calling five hours lecture time a full time course. 

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One percent
5 minutes ago, spygirl said:

Maths.

My view fwiw, is that the mind leans either towards maths or writing. You clearly prove my assumption. :)

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