MSE News: 'Lower tuition fees can cost students more'

2sides2everystory

The thread title is indeed: "MSE News: 'Lower tuition fees can cost students more'"

It implies universities are touting for your business but MSE has identified that in actual fact it is yet another instance of the universities behaving like greedy corporates and taking back with one hand what they are apparently re-distributing with the other.

It is no different to any other greedy corporate behaviour whether it is assisted by political idealised government ministers like the suggested donation of NHS data or the daily fooling of your brains when you visit a major supermarket trying to make sense of the misleading shelf label offers and weights and measures trickery. You should expect it in all walks of life now and you are being encouraged right into it by HE insiders and Tories.

I defied my father and went to university without obvious damage to myself.

I have not gone as far as my father did in trying to influence my kids - they know they have my full support no matter what they decide, but our current generation of kids (soon to be the next intake of undergraduates in the massive new experiment which apparently thousands skipped deferment to avoid in last year's UCAS system) in fact face a very bleak employment market indeed not a burgeoning one like I did, and on top of that the new lot will be yoked to an unfair and undefined tax with unknown longer-term prognosis. IT might be described as a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds being sold the biggest investment many of them will ever make when their attitude to risk is "cautious" to "normal" or maybe 3 to 5 out of 10 on some typical meaningless Financial Service company scale when it will later on be described by those that sold it as "always adventurous" and "completely voluntarily entered into with no external bias or duress exerted". Hmmm ... do we believe that?

As a counter to that argument, it is disgraceful to assert that kids from poor backgrounds might go to university and then never have to pay a penny back.

Listen kids - I reckon there is no point going to university at all unless you know that you will start work pretty straightforwardly as soon as you leave university and find yourself paying this new 9% surtax from Day One of your post-graduate career. No point at all.

All you will have done is sold your soul down the river and ended up with some never never type debt round your neck. If you never quite reach £21K a year but then win £100,000 on a lottery will you have to pay £9,000 that year to SLC?

If somewhere down the line you get unfairly dismissed and win £50,000 as a settlement will you in addition to income tax on £20,000 of it have to pay a further 9% on all of it to SLC?

When the dust settles (if it ever does) on mortgages, and you start earning enough to save up a deposit and buy a house, might the lender say "oh yeah ... I see 15 years ago you were unlucky enough to sign up for £50K's worth of student debt which the government is now asking you to pay back at 19% not 9% of everything over £11,000 new sterling not the £21,000 old sterling we had in our pockets before sterling crashed so actually we must reduce what we can otherwise lend someone without the debt by about 20% and ask them not to leave the country for five years because we've found that with open doors on immigration much of our default is from people who study here with British or EU passports and then disappear somewhere else entirely which we can't find even on the NHS database we were given access to in 2012 when you started the loan".

University is not a meal ticket to a job. It was 35 years ago, but now it absolutely is not so why buy one at these extortionate prices? Who says the government can't turn into loan sharks if push came to shove and UK went t|ts up?

Also I reckon in this climate if you haven't the gumption or ability to have got yourself and held down some meaningful job before you go to university you are reducing your chances of getting one when you graduate.

Never mind "MSE News: 'Lower tuition fees can cost students more'", a lower degree of sensitisation to the enormous financial decision you are being herded into can result in a far longer lasting effect than buying the wrong course at the wrong price than any Viagra tablet and you will be the ones being shafted.

Kids you are being systematically de-sensitised to a disgraceful privatisation of your dreams of a meaningful life through learning. You have had internet all your lives which has opened your eyes to gigantic heaps of knowledge yet these barstewards running England as a separate experiment with their Tory ideas inside a bigger UK where they can barely win a single vote are now planning on privatising the important stuff which only the best brains can process.

You are being corralled with the more worthless who until recently saw university as an excuse for a laugh and one reason for that is because politicians have no appetite for getting their hands dirty and addressing that problem at source before university and no appetite for addressing the problem even at university where shirkers should be chucked out early.

You are being invited to a new type of party where you have no idea what's in the bottles and no idea when some sharp pr|ck of doubtful origin is going to ruin your day or your life. The only truth in it is that you will have to be either seriously rich or seriously clever to out-manoeuvre the worst of it before the interest with your name on it stacks up. Do you all know how compound interest works? Don't even think about university unless you can already create and rationalise the results from your very own spreadsheet which shows you how the interest stacks up on an SLC Tuition Fee Loan. Only then can you really understand why "MSE News: 'Lower tuition fees can cost students more'" and a whole host of other stuff that protects you from corporates.

If you already understand all this and still want to spin the roulette wheel on borrowed chips then your choice is fully respected, but do open your eyes wide before you walk in to sign those SLC forms. I'd say you won't die, but it may well be like signing a consent form for a new type of NHS treatment that hasn't previously been mass-trialled like Cameron was on about today. Or like the new drugs testing that some students get paid for ... I take it that will go out the window as a secondary income for 2012 students ... hey ho!

setmefree2

Good article here if anyone is interested

Academic activist hits out at higher education policies



http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/dec/05/simon-szreter-attacks-government-policies?newsfeed=true

Taiko

But that is from The Guardian, who will try anything.

A few years back, some of their reporters were trying to contact my staff and various local authorities to obtain inside information. I do know one person who didn't cotton on until it was too late, but they were lying through their teeth.

2sides2everystory

Taiko wrote: »

But that is from The Guardian, who will try anything.

That's not news! Did you not realise Taiko that any corporate will try anything? It's called "business in 2011" (whether you are selling undergraduate courses or newspapers).

The_One_Who

Taiko wrote: »

NUS are looking bad in all this.

"Lower the fees"
"Ok, now you've lowered them, give us more money".

Law of unintended consequences.

NUS look bad all the time in my eyes. I'm no union fan anyway, but NUS just annoy me. Thank God my university decided not to join them, they would have ruined it.

2sides2everystory wrote: »

Listen kids - I reckon there is no point going to university at all unless you know that you will start work pretty straightforwardly as soon as you leave university and find yourself paying this new 9% surtax from Day One of your post-graduate career. No point at all.

University is not a meal ticket to a job. It was 35 years ago, but now it absolutely is not so why buy one at these extortionate prices? Who says the government can't turn into loan sharks if push came to shove and UK went t|ts up?

No one can know that they will get a job upon graduation, at least not one in their field of interest. When I started university the economy was booming, but when I graduated pretty much all recruitment had been frozen for the year. The career (along with my backup) I was originally interested in were no longer of interest to me, so I had to change tack. This is incredibly common for people not to know what they 'want to do with their lives' when they graduate.

Some people don't go to university for a job (at least not a specific one), some go to learn and to broaden their horizons, whether they be educational, economic or socio-cultural.

Taiko

Hardly business 2011 when it was many years ago, is it?

I assume you don't read posts, facts, or anything else that is likely to challenge your misconceptions.

2sides2everystory

Taiko wrote: »

Hardly business 2011 when it was many years ago, is it?

What do you mean many years ago??? SMF2 introduced a Guardian article Academic activist hits out at higher education policies - which (per the guardian website) 'was published on guardian.co.uk at 18.45 GMT on Monday 5 December 2011. A version appeared on p38 of the EducationGuardian section of the Guardian on Tuesday 6 December 2011. It was last modified at 00.05 GMT on Tuesday 6 December 2011.'

I assume you don't read posts, facts, or anything else that is likely to challenge your misconceptions.

I read plenty thanks, but unlike you I don't get my bread and butter from spinning a line in education which is no doubt similar to one you've been continued spinning since someone from the Guardian rang up one of your departmental assets 'a few years back' or 'many years ago' (take your pick) but they were lying through their teeth so no harm done there I assume ?