Student riots

[Spudlet]

Incidentaly student fees are not rising because unis are getting more money/facilities, fees are rising AND budgets are being slashed. The unis will end up with less money and poorer facilities and the students will be paying more for it.

Yup, you only start paying loans back after you earn a certain amount, I will probably never be able to pay mine off fully, however it still isn't pleasant having a 20 grand debt hanging over you because you were told the only way to get a job beyond shelf stacking was a degree. Have to have a degree to get a job - the message I was given by everyone at school.

Oh and a lot of the anger comes from the fact that most of the people making the changes and saying 'suck it up' payed very little for their degrees and finished with little or no debt.

Hmmmm.... can't say I think of mine as 'hanging over me'. It costs me about £2 a day, give or take - a lot less than my daily Starbucks habit cost me when I lived in London...

Personally, I am willing to invest that amount in my education - but then I did my degree because I wanted to study what I studied to a high level, not because I thought it would get me a job. Although it did that too.

 

[martlin]

a government should not be working its way out of debt. the people should and how do we expect them to do that when they cant afford to go to university to be able to compete in the global market which is so important for us to get out of the recession?
Seeing as you are supposed to pay your student loan after you have been to uni, I can't see how you will be unable to afford going to uni any more or less than now
i understand why they let foriegn students in (sorry if i wasnt clear) i meant that if our education system wasnt worth using why do foriegn students use it?
I suspect there is much more for Chinese in going to UK universities than good education
i think there are more improtant cuts to make first!
why do we subsidise scottish students free university places, so scottland dont have to pay for them at all?
scottland have free perscriptions as well, is that fair? when we give scottland tax payers money?
The Jocks do own all the oil, though, so I would say - fair game
we are paying for a war we cant afford?
Agree with you here, I think we should bring the troops home
nucelar missle defence? when only a few countrys have them, and they will be out of date by the time they are finished
Sitting on the fence here, it does keep some jobs going, though - somebody needs to build the missiles
new prisions when the prision system isnt working and is only driving up crime rates? a prision costs 60 million to build btw where as a primary school costs 1.4 million to build?
I can't see what we can do about the cost difference, it is easier to contain primary school children than prisoners
and why do we have to help ireland and the euro, just because europe say so when we cant afford it?
I wouldn't think that bailing out Ireland is an altruistic move , I think we can't afford not to

when you look at all the mistakes the government is makeing how can raising tuition fees be right when they are relatively cheap compared to all these costs
I'm not sure current government IS making many mistakes at the moment, you can't dismiss every cut with the line that it is small in comparison... as they say ''Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves''.

i dont understand why a govenment that didnt get voted in can decide that we have 5 years to pay back a loan it took us 200 years to create
Technically, Tories have the most votes, so they have been voted in, they invited LibDems, who clearly LOST the elections, so it is only fair that Cleggy's free unis are chucked out

Crickey, that's nearly an essay I've written

 

[Kat]

I'm also running out of sympathy with the students. They don't even seem to be listening to the proposals.

1. I don't believe for a minute the proposed changes will make a significant difference to the numbers going to uni. Everyone said when they first introduced tuition fees (that had to be paid up front) that poor students wouldn't be able to go and that numbers would decrease. I was a student at that time and apart from a one year blip the first year fees were introduced (due to record numbers going the year before to avoid the fees, so students not taking gap years etc) the numbers of students continued to increase rapidly. Those who could not afford to pay their fees simply got a loan which they may or may not pay back in future, several of my friends who started uni in 1998 have not paid a penny of their fees loan back.

2. Those who really are driven to succeed will find a way however high fees are. We currently have foreign students in our universities who do not get subsidised places and have to pay the full cost of their degree (in fact their fees help pay for domestic students too). Many of these students come from poorer countries and for many of them their fees are in excess of a year's average salary in their home country per year! They manage to fund this, if working class teenagers really want to become doctors they will find a way if they are bright enough.

3. We have too many graduates. People keep mentioning law as a "proper" degree, but there is a massive over supply of law graduates, it is a relatively cheap course for universities to run, and in high demand because it is perceived as being academically rigorous and "useful" leading to a job. In reality at the law firm I work at we have law graduates doing the photocopying because the universities are churning them out in such vast quantities. I'm sure many other degrees/professions are much the same.

4. If students do not want to pay tuition fees there is one easy solution, radically cut the number of university places. Lets see what they think of that, I think the riots might dwarf the ones we have just seen. If a degree costs £100k in total (random round number not accurate), and the government has a limited pot of money to spend on education it makes sense that a budget of £1m could either fully subsidise 10 students, or pay 50% for 20 students or 10% for 100 students. If the students can't understand that they probably don't deserve to be at uni. We do not have limitless money.

5. There are other options, many jobs have non-graduate routes, even law. Even if there isn't a non-graduate option you could get an entry level job and work until your employer agrees to fund you to get the degree - it would be better for the country if industry funded a higher percentage of degrees. Perhaps there should be tax incentives to encourage business to do this rather than recruiting graduates. Shift the bottle neck so that we don't have hundreds of unemployed graduates - it is in no ones interest for the state to pick up the tab for degrees gained that were never any use.

6. Students need to realise that they are not paying up front, it will not put people off uni. If they expect to earn a decent wage after graduation they will be able to pay off their fees with ease and why shouldn't they. If they don't expect to earn a decent wage after graduation then they should question whether they should go to uni or at least whether the tax payer should pay for it.


My only gripe with the system is that those earning less than £21k don't pay anything back and it is all wiped after 30 years. So those who go to uni simply to fill three years of their life with no long term plan will not be put off. I also think that anyone moving abroad should have to pay off in full, we shouldn't be subsidising degrees that are going to be taken abroad.

 

[MooMoo]

What is with all the "they don't deserve" and "they're all this that and the other"? People need to look beyond this crap, because there are a lot of students out there who are just as annoyed by the rioting. We're the ones you don't see because we've picked up the novel idea of, you know, actually studying! We're being tarred with the same brush.

Some of us are working hard for this. I hate being told I don't deserve to be at uni, or funding because I'm one of those (a majority at my uni actually) who didn't walk out of lectures and protest.

They set up a stand thing in one of our cafe areas, and handed out a tonne of fliers. Then when they went to go protest at 11:00 yesterday only about 30 went.

Most of them are socialist/anarchist types shouting "we want this, we want that, we want it now" - about pretty much everything not just education - with no intelligent idea's as to where the government would get money to pay from them. I don't class "tax the rich" as an idea btw.