The British government plan to increase University tuition fees in England to £9,250 per year from 2017. Thereafter, fees will increase by the rate of inflation in subsequent years. This represents a 2.8% increase and if that continued would mean fees rising above £10,000 (over $14,000) in the next few years. Other increases will be linked to evidence of high quality teaching, which will be decided by a new mechanism called the “teaching excellence framework”. A government spokeswoman said: “The teaching excellence framework will allow universities to maintain fees in line with inflation only if they meet a quality bar, as set out in the recent Higher Education White Paper.”
As you can imagine, this dumb idea has met fierce political resistance. How do you rate a university on its teaching? Do you poll the customers? In which case teachers must be tempted to lower standards and inflate grades. By graduation rates and levels of degree attained? We already have degree inflation, something that potentially misleads potential employers, lowers the value of university education, and lets students think they have had a good education when they (possibly) haven’t. Will there be a government inspector sitting in the room critiquing the approach of the teacher? A good teacher challenges a student, makes them think, is tough on them, trying to get the best out of them. This is not always appreciated by those students mostly intent on partying and boozing.
Conservatives everywhere are trying to apply the techniques of running a business to higher education. Efficiency, efficiency! You can imagine the business consultants crawling over the Modern History department of Oxford University. The fact is that once you charge for university you change the incentives. Because of the fees and the likely debt, the preoccupation is “can I get a job at the end of it”. This leads to emphasis on training, not education for a lifetime. Training should be something undertaken after, not during, time at university. (Exhibit A: Business Studies as a first degree is a bogus moneyspinner. It recalls the old adage “If you can’t do it you teach it”).
Unrelated statistic (or is it?): 27% of undergraduates say they have a mental health problem: 34% of female students have mental health problems, compared with 19% of male students. (YouGov/BBC)
Further education should be a National Investment and the actual teaching bit of it should be at the taxpayer’s expense. We had it right in that respect years ago; it was just too elitist in the old days.
As a small postcript, maintenance grants for the poorest university students have been scrapped. In previous years, students from families with incomes of £25,000 or less received £3,387 for living costs. However, the grants have now been replaced with loans. When he announced the cut last year, George Osborne, that departed mouthpiece of the rich elite, said it was unfair to ask tax-payers to fund people who, he claimed, were “likely to earn a lot more than them”. Will the new Prime Minister be as good as her word, reverse this change and help poor students?
First of all, how can an increase according to inflation be 2.8? Last time I checked, CPI was 1%. So that’s a lie.
You’re right about universities being run as a business. Here in Exeter, the university lets in far too many people, to make as much money as possible. This has resulted in all sorts of problems: a shortage of housing and rent increases, local feeling as if their town is becoming overwhelmed, pressures on transport and other public services, overcrowded facilities and quite frankly, there are people here who aren’t cleaver enough to be here really. The government should reimpose a cap on student numbers to end the madness- preferably a cap far stricter than the one we previously had. That should include a specific cap on non EU students, who are being used as a cash cow due to the fact that the universities can charge them what they like.
As for mental health, I think you’re on to something. The vast majority of people I know at university with mental health problems are women. Now every circumstance is different, but there are some commonalities: badly behaved men, an unsupportive environment that expects people to help themselves, ignorance of mental health issues amongst the wider community, the stress of university life (which unfortunately I think women cannot cope with as well). Its worth noting that most people who attend university in the UK are women, who make up sizable majorities in all of the Russell Group universities expect Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Women do better at GCSEs and A levels than men. Part of it perhaps is that women are naturally more hardworking and conscientious. The expectation of success makes them more anxious than is does to men- all of my most hardworking friends are women.