completely agree. there should be much more effort put into technical directions for kids to go down as opposed to just the "you should go to university" angle. one size does not fit all
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bluethrunthru
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what an absurd answer. So someone takes a degree then after say 5 or 10 years their progress is reviewed - if they are judged in an arbitrary manner not to have had a "good outcome" having gained that degree then it can be judged that a degree course 8 or 13 years ago was a poor quality degree?-
mosssideblue
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Brewster's millions
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Why would they need to wait 10 years before judging whether a good outcome has been produced by a degree course, particularly if the actual graduates are disappointed in the quality of teaching they’ve received?
Doesn’t work like that in the real world, I’m afraid.
And you still haven’t acknowledged the central issue which Sunak was addressing, namely the burden sub-standard degree courses place on the public finances, and the effectively arbitrary manner in which public expenditure is allocated across tertiary education.
bluethrunthru
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Ok my son got a first as did my daughter - both work in retail? A waste?
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If people go to University, take out student loans to do so and end up repaying them, then clearly they can do whatever they want in life and it’s nobody’s business what they do.
If however we have a situation where universities continue to offer low quality degree courses that don’t materially improve career prospects, and students end up dissatisfied with the teaching they’ve received, then personally I think that the burden this places on the public finances should be acknowledged.
The figures involved are huge. The stock of outstanding student loans has now passed £200bn, and the figure is projected to hit £460bn in another twenty years’ time. If the default rate on these loans is running at 30/40%, it places an enormous burden on tax payers.
Should we just ignore this cost, or actually try to raise standards so that the default rate declines? Is it fair to expect people who choose not to go to university to pick up the tab for a failure or refusal to tackle continued poor standards across universities?
The argument against tackling the issue appears to be the broader benefit a higher number of graduates offers, even if they do not move into highly paid jobs. But if taxpayers have to eventually pick up the tab for a c40% default rate on a loan book that is heading towards £500bn, then that’s going to impose an enormous burden on the public finances and expenditure in other areas will necessarily be lower as a result.
bluethrunthru
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They went to Uni - you know the results and you know where they are now. Was it a waste of time? Outcomes are there for you.
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40% default rate on a £500bn loan book with the public picking up the tab.
Not sustainable.
bluethrunthru
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No answer then? I'll fill in the blanks for the hard of understanding. Son got a first in TV / film and radio production. Started work on programmes like Victoria on ITV and did a couple of radio plays then Covid struck.
Daughter got a first in Musical Theatre and was about to start a great career having offers from theatres and cruise ships the Covid struck.
During hard times you have to use what Uni teaches you and the network you have built up. Both are now in retail management for High Street names on graduate recruitment programmes and doing well for themselves. Can you guess why neither are filling shelves? ( clue is in the name of the programme )
Rishi would have had their courses axed and they would probably be working in the chippy
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Why would their courses be axed when both your children are experiencing good outcomes from their degrees? The fact that they are both in graduate jobs and doing well for themselves would positively influence the outcome statistics for their respective degrees.
You seem to be under the impression that their degrees would only be judged to have resulted in positive outcomes if your children ended up working in musical theatre and TV / radio production. That’s a misconception.
The proposed reforms would seek to limit places in degree courses which have a high drop-out rate, and/or have a low proportion of students moving into graduate level jobs (in any industry). This clearly wouldn’t be the case with regard to the courses studied by your children.
bluethrunthru
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because for a while the outcomes were poor - how far down the line do we follow them to judge?
Read any report into the plan and follow several years of reporting - the degree's that they did were already ridiculed.
The arts have been all but abandoned by the Tories post Brexit - Glyndebourne and the like exempt because they are part of the summer circuit.
Finally drop out rates could be caused by the teaching not the course subject per se'. Also many graduate jobs are not well paying - archaeology degree holders are traditionally low paid to scrape away at a hole in the ground. They do it on a vocational level. And I repeat the high paying high skilled and high regarded jobs are not out there in abundance for graduates - the whole thing is about restricting the horizons of a lot of school leavers and bear in mind they don't want the plebs to be well educated because that gives them freedom or thought. They are already saying the quiet bit out loud in newspaper articles
Rishi Sunak vowed to get tough on unis as they're full of non-Tory voters
Rishi Sunak and his Government have changed student loan funding to cut the state’s contribution from 44p in the pound to 19p from September, leaving students to pay off their loans from when they earn £25,000 a year
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because for a while the outcomes were poor - how far down the line do we follow them to judge?
Read any report into the plan and follow several years of reporting - the degree's that they did were already ridiculed.
The arts have been all but abandoned by the Tories post Brexit - Glyndebourne and the like exempt because they are part of the summer circuit.
Finally drop out rates could be caused by the teaching not the course subject per se'. Also many graduate jobs are not well paying - archaeology degree holders are traditionally low paid to scrape away at a hole in the ground. They do it on a vocational level. And I repeat the high paying high skilled and high regarded jobs are not out there in abundance for graduates - the whole thing is about restricting the horizons of a lot of school leavers and bear in mind they don't want the plebs to be well educated because that gives them freedom or thought. They are already saying the quiet bit out loud in newspaper articles
Rishi Sunak vowed to get tough on unis as they're full of non-Tory voters
Rishi Sunak and his Government have changed student loan funding to cut the state’s contribution from 44p in the pound to 19p from September, leaving students to pay off their loans from when they earn £25,000 a yearwww.mirror.co.uk
It might not be easy to come up with proper criteria to judge good degree outcomes, but that shouldn’t mean that the issue is just ignored. The figures I posted earlier show exactly why the problem needs to be addressed. Ignoring the issue and maintaining the status quo isn’t an option in my opinion.
As for your point regarding drop out rates and poor teaching, I completely agree. That’s exactly why degree outcomes need to be scrutinised and controls placed on the worst performing universities. It’s not about removing certain subjects entirely from UK universities, it’s about removing the lowest quality offerings and forcing universities to improve standards.
Finally, I obviously don’t agree with your argument about restricting horizons. One of the key problems with the current set-up is that the government effectively has no control where the very significant expenditure related to student loans is directed, whether it offers good value, whether it improves the lives of students, and so on. Poor quality degrees can continue to be offered and the government has no choice but to bankroll a big chunk of it.
I would prefer to see the focus of that expenditure being determined by the government of the day, rather than effectively being forced upon it by universities. In theory it could allow for better secondary education, and more generous support for bright students from poorer backgrounds, which would make a meaningful difference to helping people get on in life.
bluethrunthru
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everything you refer to comes with a prices. This proposal is about cutting costs. Can you see how the Tory Govt vision is misaligned with what you would want?
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That’s where they want them working. Keep them down and prepared to pick the fields.
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But they've also created a system which incentivizes universities to run as a commercial operation rather than an academic one as governments pay less and less. The Tories have spent the last 10 years trying to make paying for university an individual responsibility. So it is then a bit rich for them to try and dictate and micromanage those individual decisions that people make. If the government wants to say 'these are our priorities, these are the courses we are willing to fund' then fine. But actually fund them then. Don't ask everyone to take out a loan and the criticise them for taking out a personal loan for a course that you personally don't think is valuable.
The whole concept of student loans is a funding con. You're basically funding people's degrees by promising them that taxpayers 40 years from now will pay for it when you can't pay it off. And it's this essential lie that has led to the problem of the government being forced to fund 'pointless' degrees, because you can't on the one hand claim that students are funding their own education through loans, and then on the other hand complain about the types of degrees you're having to fund. The irony, of course, is that because of the way the student loan system is set up, it's literally only the 'pointless' degrees that you will end up funding, because the ones that make decent money off their degree will pay it back in full personally.
The other issue with forcing universities to run as commercial operations is that you end up with all of the issues that it entails. My university (which I'm paying for myself) has had numerous strikes this year because apparently thousands of students paying 10 to 20 grand a year isn't enough to provide decent full-time, permanent contracts with a proper pension to some of the most qualified people in the world.
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I don’t necessarily disagree with you, and under the current system it’s about personal choice, as you say, with the government having no real control.
But I think it’s only fair to recognise that it was of course a Labour government that initially pushed the button on tuition fees and loans, even if the ball was already rolling in that direction when they took over back in 1997. And I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to suggest that the original decision may have been different if student loans had always impacted the public finances as they do currently (i.e. as soon as the loans are issued, and when a default occurs) rather than the original situation, where the taxpayer only picked up the bill in 30 and now 40 years’ time if the loan defaulted.
What’s the solution then? Governments have an incentive to limit low quality degrees in order to further reduce the expected default rate, as this reduces the immediate impact on borrowing. But will that really improve the situation? Perhaps a reduction in fee charged to students and the government making up the rest would be better, but this wouldn’t resolve the issue entirely and I can’t see Labour signing up for that to be honest.
Colour me shocked.
Did he say "new"?
Lack of doctors has caused waiting lists to go up. Fact.
Doctors leave for better pay and conditions elsewhere. Fact.
I'm With Stupid
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Well yeah, as I said, the whole thing was a fudge to kick the can down the road while allowing them to claim that they've massively expanded the number of students going to higher education. But let's not pretend it wasn't a policy that the Tories weren't fully behind and didn't expand massively at the first opportunity.
I don't know what the solution is. Perhaps actually fully funding something that is a net benefit to the economy for once with people paying it back by simply spending the rest of their life paying higher taxes from the better-paying jobs they get. Plenty of other countries seem to manage to pay for university-level education for their populations. And most of them managed to do it without having a huge funding boost from ripping off Chinese students. But what we have is a system in which every kid in the country is told that a degree is a great investment for their future, but the country itself doesn't consider it an investment worth making.