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| Porn Users Forum » Higher education for the ruling class? |
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| 11-10-10 07:55am - 5156 days | Original Post - #1 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User  Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Higher education for the ruling class? I thought that the cost of going to college in the U.S. had gotten bad. But the price of higher education is set to zoom in the UK. How does the British government think middle class and lower class students will be able to afford the price of a university education? Or maybe the British government thinks the middle and lower classes don't deserve a university education? >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> <<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Thousands of UK students protest tuition fees hike By JILL LAWLESS and GILLIAN SMITH, Associated Press Jill Lawless And Gillian Smith, Associated Press – 11 mins ago LONDON – Tens of thousands of students marched noisily through London on Wednesday against plans to triple university tuition fees, and some tried to occupy the headquarters of the governing Conservative Party, in the largest street protest yet against the government's sweeping austerity measures. Organizers said 50,000 students, lecturers and supporters were demonstrating against plans to raise the cost of studying at a university to 9,000 pounds ($14,000) a year — three times the current rate. Violence flared as a handful of people smashed windows in a high-rise building that houses Conservative headquarters, as others lit a bonfire of placards outside the building. Office workers were evacuated as several dozen protesters managed to get into the lobby, chanting "Tories Out," while outside police faced off against a crowd that occasionally hurled food, soda cans and placards. "We are destroying the building just like they are destroying our chances of affording higher education," said Corin Parkin, 20, a student at London's City University. Organizers condemned the violence. Sally Hunt, general secretary of faculty group the University and College Union, said "the actions of a minority, out of 50,000 people, is regrettable." Elsewhere, protesters were peaceful but determined. "I am here because it is important that students stand up and shout about what is going on," said Anna Tennant-Siren, a student at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, said: "Politicians don't seem to care. They should be taking money from people who earn seven-figure salaries, not from students who don't have any money." Frances O'Grady, of the Trades Union Congress, said the hike would make colleges "no-go zones for young people from ordinary backgrounds." "This is about turning colleges and universities from learning institutions into finishing schools for the rich," she said. Britain's Liberal Democrats, who are part of the coalition government with the Conservatives, pledged during the country's election campaign to abolish fees. Protest leaders said they would attempt to use recall powers to oust lawmakers who break campaign promises on the issue. The National Union of Students said it would try to recall legislators from the party who vote in favor on the hike. "We will not tolerate the previous generation passing on its debts to the next, nor will we pick up the bill to access a college and university education that was funded for them," said union president Aaron Porter. While British tuition fees are modest compared to those at some U.S. colleges, British universities are public institutions. Opponents of the tuition increase have pointed out that Prime Minister David Cameron and other members of the government attended elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge at a time when university education was free. The previous Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair introduced the first fees for students soon after it was elected in 1997. Scotland abolished tuition fees in 2000, and in the rest of Britain the cost is capped at about 3,000 pounds ($4,800) a year. Prime Minister David Cameron's government plans to triple that and cut funding to universities as it strives to slash 81 billion pounds ($128 billion) from public expenditure over the next four years. | |
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| 11-10-10 08:28am - 5156 days | #2 | |
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messmer (0)
Disabled User  Posts: 2,582 Registered: Sep 12, '07 Location: Canada |
The Brits, same as the Canadians and Americans are digging their own economic graves by making it impossible for many who simply don't have the money, but might very well be the next inventors of something great and different, to attend University. Our manufacturing jobs are disappearing so we are dependent on young, bright, well-educated people to come up with alternatives. In Canada tuition fees are so ridiculously high that it takes an extra curricular job as well as a huge student loan to complete one's education. Many end up with bills as high as $ 40.000 when they finally get their degrees. Good way to start a career! Higher Education is the most important tool we have to create a good future for all and in my opinion should be free. | |
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| 11-10-10 09:25am - 5156 days | #3 | |
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Capn (0)
Active User  Posts: 1,740 Registered: Sep 05, '09 Location: Near the Beer! |
There is no such thing as free education. It will always have to be paid for somehow. Unfortunately in the UK there is a glut of folk with degrees. A degree is not the magic bullet for getting a decent career. I know of at least one fella with a degree who does a milk round. Vocational training may be a preferable option for many. Cap'n.  Admiral of the PU Hindenburg. 2009 PU AwardHilarious Post of the Year 2010 PU Award ( I would have preferred it to be Helpful Post of the Year for Guys who Hate 'Retail Therapy' ) :0/ Sanity is in the eye of the Beholder! | |
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| 11-10-10 11:55am - 5156 days | #4 | |
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messmer (0)
Disabled User Posts: 2,582 Registered: Sep 12, '07 Location: Canada |
I agree completely. Same thing in Canada. A Bachelor's Degree, the most common being a BA (Bachelor of Arts) does not guarantee a job these days. This makes the high tuition fees even more of a burden on the individual. I also agree that some don't want a University Education and would prefer to go the vocational route. I was thinking more of bright young people who are well educated in Science because they are our future as far as I am concerned. If education were free then more of the gifted ones would be tempted to take that route. And, of course, free education isn't truly free but I'd be happy to pay for it through my taxes if it ensured a good life for my grandchildren. | |
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| 11-10-10 12:27pm - 5156 days | #5 | |
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Capn (0)
Active User Posts: 1,740 Registered: Sep 05, '09 Location: Near the Beer! |
Trouble is that would be a vote loser for politicians from taxpayers who don't have children. Cap'n. Admiral of the PU Hindenburg. 2009 PU AwardHilarious Post of the Year 2010 PU Award ( I would have preferred it to be Helpful Post of the Year for Guys who Hate 'Retail Therapy' ) :0/ Sanity is in the eye of the Beholder! | |
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| 11-10-10 12:44pm - 5156 days | #6 | |
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rearadmiral (0)
Active User Posts: 1,453 Registered: Jul 16, '07 Location: NB/Canada |
I'm mixed on this. On one hand, university has been marketed as the best route to success when it really may not be for many people. I can't speak for other parts of the planet, but here in eastern Canada we could do with a few less university graduates and few more plumbers. On the other hand, a university education, regardless of the cost, is a good investment in a person's future. I remember reading that the average university graduate earns close to a million dollars more over the span of a career versus someone without a university education. I paid my own way through two degrees and came out with a lot of debt, but it was worth the cost. I complained a bit about debt-load at the time, but I eventually came to realize that no one else was obligated to invest in my future so it was up to me. I'm glad I went that route. Not necessarily related to the topic, I think that far too many universities offer and university students expect career training. In some applied areas (such as engineering, law and medicine) that may be true, but I think the real value of a university education is learning to think critically and gather evidence that leads you to a conclusion. But if we all did that people like Dr. Phil would be unemployed... | |
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| 11-10-10 02:54pm - 5156 days | #7 | |
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messmer (0)
Disabled User Posts: 2,582 Registered: Sep 12, '07 Location: Canada |
That's always been my view, rearadmiral. I have always told my friends and family that University taught me to think critically. To look at a subject from every angle, to NOT think black and white only, and I have been deeply grateful that my professors were liberal enough to allow us to find our own truths. My remarks above were caused by an interview with an economist I watched on CNN the other day. He said, basically, the "good old days won't come back no matter how much the tea party may yearn for them. Our manufacturing base has left for cheaper pastures (he was speaking about the U.S. but might as well have been speaking for Canada). What will save us is good old-fashioned American ingenuity, and a can do spirit by inventing things that didn't exist before and market them to the world. For that we need people who excel in science and currently America is in 27th place world wide when it comes to that subject!" (Paraphrased) I tend to agree with him. We'll never get the factories back and outsourcing will continue as long as it can be done somewhere else more cheaply .. therefore give the kids who are gifted an excellent education, especially in science and if this means that I would have to subsidize education I'd go along with it. | |
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| 11-10-10 03:09pm - 5156 days | #8 | |
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Capn (0)
Active User Posts: 1,740 Registered: Sep 05, '09 Location: Near the Beer! |
Unfortunately, I think there would be many who wouldn't take your altruistic, longer, broader sighted view. 'I'm not paying for the education of some lazy good fer nothin' ( This is not my view BTW, but I have often heard it said. Especially when I was a student!  I am just trying to balance the argument & perhaps being the Devils Advocate  )Cap'n. Admiral of the PU Hindenburg. 2009 PU AwardHilarious Post of the Year 2010 PU Award ( I would have preferred it to be Helpful Post of the Year for Guys who Hate 'Retail Therapy' ) :0/ Sanity is in the eye of the Beholder! | |
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| 11-10-10 03:11pm - 5156 days | #9 | |
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Ed2009 (0)
Suspended Webmaster  Posts: 509 Registered: Sep 12, '09 Location: Wales, UK |
Someone should be asking why university education cost SO much more than secondary (high) schools. I realise that science and medical courses will be expensive to run but surely many subjects should actually be cheaper than in school? The average lecture has a much larger student to teacher ratio and most of the students I know only attend about 2-3 days worth of lectures/tutorials a week. On top of that there should be a certain degree of economies of scale kicking in. Something is deeply wrong there. Maybe the government would be better off reducing the number of students by getting rid of the pointless degree courses like Film Criticism, Stable Management and Surfing. At the moment I think degrees are devalued by the number and variation of them out there. Webmaster of StripGameCentral and A Measure of Curiosity. | |
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| 11-10-10 03:14pm - 5156 days | #10 | |
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Capn (0)
Active User Posts: 1,740 Registered: Sep 05, '09 Location: Near the Beer! |
I think you are correct there, Ed. I reckon it is the UK Govt. trying to unload some of the cost of tertiary education. Cap'n.  Admiral of the PU Hindenburg. 2009 PU AwardHilarious Post of the Year 2010 PU Award ( I would have preferred it to be Helpful Post of the Year for Guys who Hate 'Retail Therapy' ) :0/ Sanity is in the eye of the Beholder! | |
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| 11-10-10 03:46pm - 5155 days | #11 | |
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rearadmiral (0)
Active User Posts: 1,453 Registered: Jul 16, '07 Location: NB/Canada |
That's been my position for a while too, but I recently heard an interview with someone who said that the U.S. remains the largest manufacturing country in the world and still has among the most productive workforce. This guy's position was that the items manufactured in the U.S. are no longer the obvious things like steel. Industry has sent prodcution of that 'dirty' low-profit stuff to less developed countries and the U.S. now makes high-tech stuff like aerospace items and technologies that get used in some of the items being made overseas. From what I understood, and this part might be wrong, the interviewee even said that there are still a lot of people employed in this manufacturing. Maybe it is less noticable because these new manufacturing workers look more like Bill Gates than Archie Bunker. | |
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| 11-10-10 06:22pm - 5155 days | #12 | |
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messmer (0)
Disabled User Posts: 2,582 Registered: Sep 12, '07 Location: Canada |
"I'm not paying for the education of some lazy good fer nothin'" I'm afraid you'd get a lot of that coming from the Red States, Cap'n! My argument would not be welcomed by lovers of unrestricted Free Trade and Laissez Faire Capitalism. | |
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| 11-11-10 02:42pm - 5155 days | #13 | |
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turboshaft (0)
Active User Posts: 1,958 Registered: Apr 01, '08 |
Uh, who ever said Dr. Phil was a critical thinker? A critical snake oil salesman is about as much credit as I would give him.  Of course if you ask me--and you didn't, but here's my 2 cents anyway  --if you go to college, for however long or whatever reason, and still look to Dr. Phil or anything else on TV for answers or advice then critical thinking is probably the last thing on your mind. Also I would add that part of going to college is learning to meet new people and be able to work and interact with them, and I don't mean party or bang as many people as you can, I just mean the tolerance and maturity to civilly get along with people different from yourself (except Dr. Phil). I know that sounds like a wishy-washy pipe dream of diversity (the dreaded "d-word"), but seriously how many of the problems in our modern globalized economies are because of our ignorance of one another? On that note, my school recently introduced an etiquette class, and I think that's the kind of class that should be a requirement. "It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hardcore Commie works." - Gen. Jack D. Rippper, Dr. Stranglove | |
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| 11-11-10 02:54pm - 5155 days | #14 | |
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turboshaft (0)
Active User Posts: 1,958 Registered: Apr 01, '08 |
Here in the U.S. some people (mostly conservatives) want to dismantle the entire Education Dept., and have been wanting to do so since its inception. Hey, when the country's falling behind most industrialized countries in almost all school subjects, I say, why not? Screw it--too late now to do anything. Actually the Dept of Education is one of the smallest federal departments and due to the extremely decentralized setup of American public education the federal government doesn't have nearly as much say in curricula as some might think, beyond of course the basics like telling brown kids they can't attend certain schools, or reading is no longer a requirement to graduate high school. Oddly when national standards are attempted, at least by a conservative like Bush II, liberals usually end up hating it. What are you gonna do? Besides, we haven't even come to a consensus on evolution yet, so we've got a long way to go! "It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hardcore Commie works." - Gen. Jack D. Rippper, Dr. Stranglove Edited on Nov 12, 2010, 10:02pm | |
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| 11-12-10 03:35pm - 5153 days | #15 | |
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Drooler (0)
Disabled User  Posts: 1,831 Registered: Mar 11, '07 Location: USA |
A free college education is a bad idea. A very bad idea. It is because as with anything else, if you don't have anything at stake, you take it for granted. If the student doesn't have a stake in the outcome, he or she will take it as an entitlement and won't work hard enough to get the education. Standards go down, people start graduating from what has become a diploma mill, and recruiters won't be interested in hiring them because the free education winds up not being much of one. And sure, there are exceptions among the students, but exceptions they are. And some of them come from abroad to study here because of this problem in their own countries with socialized higher education. But the problem in the US is that it has become too expensive for many in the middle class to even afford a good college education, and now it's happening with a jolt in the UK as the govt looks for ways to reduce its own spending. Of course, the really gifted students in science and math and engineering can garner scholarships to help pay their way, though that's not going to do much to raise the general level of education across the board. And that's what's always been lacking in the US. I wanted something new, so I left England for New England. | |
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| 11-12-10 04:33pm - 5153 days | #16 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The article I quoted at the start of this thread mentions that as recently as 1997, in the UK, education at the elite universities was free. Oxford and Cambridge, internationally recognized names, were free. I didn't realize that, because in the U.S., names like Harvard and Princeton were extremely expensive to attend. But the price of university education in the U.K. is zooming. From free in 1997, to approximately $4,800 yearly today, to $14,000 yearly in the near future, if Parliament passes the legislation. I would assume that almost all the members of Parliament are university graduates, and that they all enjoyed a free university education, or a university education that was, at most, extremely low-cost compared to the current fees, and even more low-cost compared to the proposed increased fees. The attitude seems to be, "I got mine, too bad you didn't get yours". But we're in an economic downturn, and everyone has to bite the bullet. Except that the politicians in power somehow avoided that bullet they didn't have to bite, because they enjoyed a free or very low-cost education. Tuition increases have been common in the U.S., and there have been many forms of cutbacks in public funding of college/university education. Starting next year, the California State University system will have raised tuition by 60% over what it was two years ago. That is a large increase, but it's still much smaller than what the U.K. students are facing. (There are other ways the cutbacks are affecting U.S. colleges, like offering fewer classes, etc.) Tuition for a full-time undergraduate during the current academic year at Cal State University, Northridge, is $5,076, the result of a 32 percent jump from the previous year. With the new increases set for the 2011-2012 acadmic year, those same students will pay $5,837. $5,800 per year for a university education in California is expensive compared to what it was a decade ago. But $5,800 is cheap compared to $14,000 a year in the U.K. Especially when the U.K. was free education 13 years ago. (I am not quoting prices of Harvard and Princeton and other private colleges, which were always extremely expensive compared to public colleges and universities in the U.S.) | |
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