Should we abolish student fees?
- Thread starter Silly Goose On The Loose
- Start date
Soldato
My missus studied accounting and tax at uni, neither of us feel like it should have been free for her to do so (would have been nice though 
), but it does seem cruel that interest levels are what they are on student loans and as a result, some ex students actually end up owing more after a year of paying because of the interest. Also, her student loan really hammered our affordability on our mortgage application which was an annoyance. But such is life 
), but it does seem cruel that interest levels are what they are on student loans and as a result, some ex students actually end up owing more after a year of paying because of the interest. Also, her student loan really hammered our affordability on our mortgage application which was an annoyance. But such is life 
Ahh yes "terrible". The real question is however... what "employment" is this, is it genuinely requiring the degree or is literally people working for minimum 2:1 degree jobs where the subject of the degree is superfluous?
Do low-paid jobs count?
Soldato
My thought is that people who do STEM degrees should then go on to earn enough that it's not a problem for them to pay back the fees, and for other nonsense courses, I'm perfectly happy to fees to apply as a deterrent.
So fees OK all round for me.
What's your solution, keep treating people who spend 3 years drinking while doing Sociology the same as people taking Medicine?
Oh nevermind found my answer...
Aww man, look at those delicious sub 20k jobs.
Look at biological sciences are way down the list. Who would have thought that a degree in history or philosophy would be a better route into a well-paid job?
STEM isn't the be all and end all.
Soldato
I guess to the people that want free tuition, where do you draw the line? Should all kinds of study be free?
I was sponsored to do my ACCA qualification by my work, should that have been paid for? What about people doing Network/Microsoft certifications? Legal training contracts? Should they be free too? I don't see where you'd draw the line.
As a basis i agree with Tuition fees, although i do think they should be reduced to a slightly more manageable level.
I was sponsored to do my ACCA qualification by my work, should that have been paid for? What about people doing Network/Microsoft certifications? Legal training contracts? Should they be free too? I don't see where you'd draw the line.
As a basis i agree with Tuition fees, although i do think they should be reduced to a slightly more manageable level.
While almost all of social/whatevery studies are below most STEM studies, and you choose the one outlier?
I'm sure there's a good reason for biological sciences paying poorly, but you can't ignore the average pay for less useful studies being pretty much worthless.
In fact i do know the reason, Scientists in general aren't paid much and there isn't much outlying scope for biology graduates like there are for more mathematical based sciences.
because they can still do something useful - like become nurses, midwives or perhaps take a more vocational IT/computing course that is still valued by employers but perhaps for different types of roles
The problem is that we're currently funding degrees that we don't actually need, sure quality is important, but public money shouldn't be spent on something that the public don't actually need, which is what currently happens.
Historically, and perhaps rather unfairly, Biology was always considered the fall back science subject that Girls, and Boys who weren't capable of doing anything harder, would be encouraged to study.
How much of this is still true today, I do not know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was still a factor to some extent.
Soldato
I would have each degree with a different fee, so Medicine and nurses would be £0 but Politics would be £30,000 per year.
Given we've got a shortage of nurses and seem to have had to rely on the EU for them then I think we're OK on the available jobs front - it was an example of an area where people who got the A-Level grades you cited can add value - I don't know enough about nursing to argue whether or not degrees are required per say though I do know of one nurse (a friend's wife) who is studying for an MSc in Australia because without it she'd not be able to perform some of the more specialist tasks she was able to in the UK - medicine is getting to be more complicated
I didn't say anything about poor programs though, it isn't necessarily a reasonable assumption in this case - less academic/more vocational programs, sure. But such programs can still be useful. For example we hired one guy with a degree from the University of Westminster for an application support role, he had a good general technical skillset which was what we wanted, he wasn't expected to necessarily do anything particularly mathematical or understand complex derivatives but he was expected to be able to pick up some basics fairly quickly and have a general level of technical competence, it worked out rather well and we hired second guy from the same uni (yes we have hired non-grads for the same role but they're generally older and have several years experience, frankly both of these grads were up to speed quicker than usual compared to older hires who still also needed to learn rather a lot in the first 6-12 months of the role). On the other hand for grads going into say product owner type roles we had a guy from LSE and a girl from Caltech.
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Surely the person doing law might have benefited more from... doing law surely?, but whatever. I don't particularly have an axe to grind with geography though.
Well perhaps a jump now, I'm not sure what the grades were at the time without the degree course or experience they'd not have the skillset/background we'd have been after (though a-Levels grades have experienced some inflation too over that time period, today's B is more like a C from a few years ago).
As for training 18 yr olds in such a role, IIRC there was one such case who moved from an in house IT Helpdesk type role to an operations type role, but it was more a case that he was already hired for the basic IT role, had that for a couple of years and started slowly taking on a few ad hoc roles relating to his next role. That isn't sufficient in itself terms of recruitment (the teams concerned being significantly larger than the small team performing basic office IT jobs that one guy came from) - if someone leaves you want a replacement fairly quickly (that usually requires experienced hires) and if you're looking to expand the team over the next year say then that is where grads who have a certain basic level of knowledge come in. But yeah the support team and the similar ops team were composed of a mix of grads and non-grads and there certainly wasn't any rule that said we only hire grads for those roles, it was just useful to do so in some cases - you'd pay 40-50k for an experienced guy for one of these roles whereas you could pick up a grad for 30k who'd be happy with say 3-4k pay rises for the next few years and can sometimes be just as useful as the guy on 50k.
Indeed - though perhaps with fees at 9k per year there is increasing pressure for such courses to justify their existence, maybe pressure can be further applied if all courses were forced to make clear certain stats re: % in employment, % in post grad study and perhaps salary range of grads and types of jobs they've gone into so that 18 yr olds aren't under false pretences re: their general prospects after studying particular subjects at particular institutions.
Caporegime
Yeah, I wasn't sure whether that was serious or some elaborate troll.