Are UK Universities a drag on our economy?

olly300

borntobefree wrote: »

She's at Cardiff but must have had links with Nottingham. I think Robin Hood studies must be fascinating but we do need a national debate as to whether we want to fund this stuff.

We probably aren't funding this stuff as UK citizens it's probably paid for commercially or by a European fund. The fact that undergraduates get taught this is so the professor doesn't have to a lot of time preparing teaching material for the lectures that they are contractually obliged to give.

I have actually had lectures by professors and senior lecturers who didn't have any powerpoint slides or other material with them. I wasn't surprised to find after the first one, that their current area of research was related to the series of lectures they were giving.

The poor and boring lectures always seemed to be lectures given by people whose research wasn't linked to the lecture topic in anyway.

treliac

Despite the govt's protests to the contrary, there are fears that high levels of debt will affect the chances of graduates to obtain mortgages and maybe other credit in the future.

I am also wondering about the discrimination implied by suggesting students from poorer households will get a certain percentage of their costs paid for them. Since these debts belong to students and not their parents, how can this be fair? How many parents, even if they are slightly better earners, will be able to contribute to their children's student debts in a way that would justify the advantages gained by state subsidised students?

PaulW1965

My friend's daughter was lucky enough to get into Oxford to study History (she went to a state high school). She started in October this year. She has 3 hours of lectures per week and 1 tutor session. :eek:

No wonder you have to be clever to get into Oxford, you are effectively educating yourself!

What is worse is that all the students around my friend's daughter are permanently drunk! This is at Oxford!!!!! I was shocked. Maybe if the students actually had something to do this wouldn't be the case.

PaulW1965

Dirk_Rambo wrote: »

my aunties cousins best freind went to universeity. right waist of time that was. shes bean on the rock and roll ever since

Another distant friend's son has just graduated from Oxford (after having a small fortune spent on his secondary education) with a degree in history. He is also on the rock and roll.
A lot of my friend's kid's who graduated this year are yet to get a proper job. Many of them are working in bars and as waiters/waitresses

lostinrates

PaulW1965 wrote: »

My friend's daughter was lucky enough to get into Oxford to study History (she went to a state high school). She started in October this year. She has 3 hours of lectures per week and 1 tutor session. :eek:

No wonder you have to be clever to get into Oxford, you are effectively educating yourself!

What is worse is that all the students around my friend's daughter are permanently drunk! This is at Oxford!!!!! I was shocked. Maybe if the students actually had something to do this wouldn't be the case.

Part of the point of university is to do just that: learn how to educate yourself. That is part of what makes it a progression from school. IIRC the rule of thumb is for each hour in the lecture theatre (where you are not taught but rather receive lectures) there should be 5-8 hours research on references and reading around the lecture.

3 hours in a first year seems very, very low though. A friend of mine is a history lecturer at Oxford so I will ask if this is usual.


edit: before calling DH who read A&A, so not wildly removed from history says he had five lectures a week as a first year, only some were an hour. Two hours of tutorials plus various weekly seminars and workshops. It will be interesting to speak to Chum and see how this compares.

Hank_Rearden

having had the benefit of both a London Uni (before fees) and an Oxford education (which I paid for), I can vouch for the fact that they are chalk and cheese in terms of effort, particularly in the humanities/arts.

Lectures at Oxford aren't compulsory, and you can obviously pick and choose which to attend. But the workload of maybe 10 books to read (and I don't mean novels), plus 2 or 3 essays, EACH WEEK, is genuinely intense. Lectures help - often serving as a way of increasing knowledge of the source materials - but there really is no spoon feeding. And those one-to-one tutorials will very definitely find you out.

I remember a widespread, but not entirely sincere, jealousy amongst students talking to friends at other uni's who had to write 1 essay a term.

pinkteapot

PaulW1965 wrote: »

My friend's daughter was lucky enough to get into Oxford to study History (she went to a state high school). She started in October this year. She has 3 hours of lectures per week and 1 tutor session. :eek:

No wonder you have to be clever to get into Oxford, you are effectively educating yourself!

What is worse is that all the students around my friend's daughter are permanently drunk! This is at Oxford!!!!! I was shocked. Maybe if the students actually had something to do this wouldn't be the case.

She will be writing one essay per week, which will be debated in the session with the tutor. For that essay, she will have a reading list consisting of many articles and books. The amount of study she will actually be doing will amount to around 35 hours a week, including the taught sessions. The tutors will soon work it out if she is skipping the reading.

I studied Economics and Management at Oxford and had around 4 hours of lectures a week and 2 tutorials. Two 2,000 word essays a week for three years, each with a reading list of 15-20 journal articles or book chapters. For the historians the reading is more extensive with whole books on the list each week.

The best part is, none of those essays you write counts for anything as the whole degree is assessed on final exams.

Science subjects have more 'taught' time as there is a lot of lab work. For the arts, it teaches you to research a subject, write an intelligent argument about it and be able to debate and defend your points in a tutorial setting. My brain has never had such a good work-out as during my three years spent there.

WhiteHorse

misskool wrote: »

No discrimination for home students at all. The govt caps places they will subsidize and fines any university that registers more than their quota.

Read the post again - we're talking history here.

Discrimination is a fact (the Daily Telegraph has exposed this scandal more than once). Staff at the several universities that I have attended made no bones about it, either.

Universities make more money out of overseas students, so prefer them. It's a simple business decision.

olly300

WhiteHorse wrote: »

Read the post again - we're talking history here.

Discrimination is a fact (the Daily Telegraph has exposed this scandal more than once). Staff at the several universities that I have attended made no bones about it, either.

Universities make more money out of overseas students, so prefer them. It's a simple business decision.

It depends on where some of the money for researching and teaching comes from.

I know on my postgraduate course, while they had to have a minimum number of foreign students to run the course, they actually had more applying than they allowed on to the course even though they passed the English tests.

There as with Home and EU students they were taking people on until the course start date.

A year later the department had problems with their EU funding and the year after that they were openly advertising in relevant journals for Home and EU students to apply to do the courses saying they would be eligible for grants.

Plus university departments always work knowing that they will chuck out x students a year or at a certain time in the course. However they know it's better to chuck out self-funding foreign students later than Home students. Also they are always keen to ensure that ones sponsored by foreign governments aren't chucked out.

useless

JP78 wrote: »

As a researcher at a university I can assure you that none of the tuition fees go towards my work! Research work is separately funded through the research councils, charities or industry. In science it's an expensive business due to the equipment and materials required, I'm employed on a research grant with four other staff and our 5 year budget is in the region of £3.5 million. The research councils annual budget is something like £3 billion.

For teaching a science course can easily exceed the figures quoted. When I did my chemistry degree in the late 90s an undergrad course was budgeted at ~£14k per annum. The bulk of this cost was due to the lab costs. My institution was losing around £6k for every Home/EU student on the course. This gap was mostly filled by the £18-£20K being charged to foreign students (the fact that the government are capping the numbers of these students adds further strain).

I can imagine for arts or social science subjects £9k per year will easily cover the cost per student, this is probably part of the logic of dropping all government funding for such courses and only funding science and engineering. I suspect rightly or wrongly, some unis will use the excess from this to fund the deficit from more expensive courses.

Don't forget the costs of running a practice-based arts course - cost of materials, technicians, studio spaces, foundrys, equipment for glass/metalwork etc etc!

I think costs for courses follows a horse shoe shape - sciences at one end are expensive, creative arts at the other end are expensive- and all the essay and lecture based courses are more reasonable in terms of costs in the middle.