The Sisters of Mercy Forum
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on general principles.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11874633sultan2075 wrote:What exactly is the issue here? Unsurprisingly, it hasn't gotten a lot of coverage over here. As a college prof., I'm curious what exactly it takes to get college students to riot. Or take an interest in anything beyond the mirror, for that matter.
Well..students believe that although further education gives them vastly superior job prospets, they shouldn't be asked to contribute to the cost if those superior job prospects actually materialise.sultan2075 wrote:What exactly is the issue here? Unsurprisingly, it hasn't gotten a lot of coverage over here. As a college prof., I'm curious what exactly it takes to get college students to riot. Or take an interest in anything beyond the mirror, for that matter.
New undergraduates (aged 18 now) were six years old when fees were introduced in 1998 and twelve when they were increased to their current levels in 2004. Mystery solved.DeWinter wrote:The students screaming about Clegg and the Libs remained rather quiet when the Labour government introduced the fees in the first place, so quite why they're now wetting their collective knickers is somewhat of a mystery.
Thats a record response, I barely clicked the post button!!markfiend wrote:Because, of course, the fact that (on average) the "vastly superior job prospets" means that they get higher-paying jobs, which in turn means they pay more taxes, doesn't count as contributing to the cost of their education?
Students starting university this year will leave in an average of about £25000 of debt; (source) add another £18000 onto that for the fees increase and you're asking graduates to start their working life £43000 in debt. Our fucking mortgage isn't that much!
It's a complete disincentive for anyone other than the privileged few to study.
And your analysis of students' character ("unbearably brimful of self-entitlement and twattish") seems to come straight from the pages of Viz and Student Grant.
Haha, that is quite true! Didn't think that one through much. Point stands though. Do you remember rioting on either occasion, or just sulky letters in the student rag? I suspect it's largely because it's the Tories in.markfiend wrote:And another thing...New undergraduates (aged 18 now) were six years old when fees were introduced in 1998 and twelve when they were increased to their current levels in 2004. Mystery solved.DeWinter wrote:The students screaming about Clegg and the Libs remained rather quiet when the Labour government introduced the fees in the first place, so quite why they're now wetting their collective knickers is somewhat of a mystery.
I think it's the sense of betrayal by the LibDems. They got a big student vote off the back of their promise to scrap the fees. That promise has not just been broken but shattered. At least that's how I read it.DeWinter wrote:I suspect it's largely because it's the Tories in.
I think this is the thing that disturbs me most. How have we got to the point where we are basically telling young people that it's okay to take on such vast debt, and all by the age of 21? That would have been unthinkable not so long ago. I really worry about this country.markfiend wrote: Students starting university this year will leave in an average of about £25000 of debt; (source) add another £18000 onto that for the fees increase and you're asking graduates to start their working life £43000 in debt. Our fucking mortgage isn't that much!
One of Clegg's first actions as leader of the Libs was to go back on his party's manifesto pledge on the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty. Ordered his M.P's to abstain from the vote and fired the front benchers who actually voted with their conscience. So the guy does have form!markfiend wrote: I think it's the sense of betrayal by the LibDems. They got a big student vote off the back of their promise to scrap the fees. That promise has not just been broken but shattered. At least that's how I read it.
DeWinter wrote: I can't think of a single promise the Coalition has actually kept!
Politicians, eh?Spot on. We always knew the Tories would f**k us, that's why we didn't vote for them. But I think its fair to say that almost every single student that actually voted went with Liberal Democrat, so there is a definite bad feeling.markfiend wrote:I think it's the sense of betrayal by the LibDems. They got a big student vote off the back of their promise to scrap the fees. That promise has not just been broken but shattered. At least that's how I read it.DeWinter wrote:I suspect it's largely because it's the Tories in.
Because his planet-sized ego couldn't resist the "Deputy Prime Minister" title waved at him?DeWinter wrote:What stopped Clegg from telling Cameron to form a minority government and he'd support its legislation as and when his party felt it right?
Is it a necessary measure? I'm reminded again: eventually, you run out of other people's money to spend.markfiend wrote:University fees are to be increased form a current average of around £3000 per year to £9000.
More particularly, a plank of the Liberal Democrat party's platform at the last General Election was a pledge to scrap university tuition fees. Now the LibDems are part of a coalition government who wish to treble the fees.
It is not proving to be a popular measure.
I don't think anyone has a positive right to higher education. I've certainly seen enough students traipse through my classrooms who--to be perfectly honest--aren't fit to shear sheep for a living. Yet we (in the US, at least) have convinced ourselves that everyone needs a college degree. I'm partly getting the impression that such is the case over there, as well. As Rousseau wrote (paraphrased from memory), he who would be a bad poet or a subaltern geometer might well have made an excellent clothmaker. A great many that are admitted to colleges and universities simply don't belong there.EvilBastard wrote:I agree that higher education (at least, one's first degree) should be a right, not a privilege, but we have to face some uncomfortable facts.
True. I get paid in vegetable scraps, for instance. Might as well be working for free, actually. But there are intangible benefits: at the end of the day, I'm extraordinarily lucky to be paid (very little) to talk about the great books of western civilization with interested and intelligent young people. Granted, there aren't as many interested and intelligent young people as I'd like, but still: there's nothing I like better than seeing that someone has actually understood something in Plato or Hobbes or Nietzsche.EvilBastard wrote:
Ultimately, someone somewhere has to pay for it. University lecturers don't work for free.
I've no idea how your grading system works, but I think I've gotten the gist of it from your comments. And again, I see what strike me as the same problems as we have in the US. When education moves from a "formation of souls" model, as it had for most of Western history, to a "customer service" model, the product declines. In most commercial transactions, the customer can know what he wants and pursue it. In education, however, the so-called customer is, by definition, ignorant. Serving the student's wants is not identical to serving the student's needs, and the student doesn't know what he needs. For example, at the beginning of the semester that is winding down now, a number of my students complained to me that 1) there's too much reading, 2) I don't use Power Point, 3) I don't give them copies of my own notes, 4) I expect them to remember too much, 5) I expect them to write too much, and 6) I don't provide electronic resources of any kind. By the end of the semester, after they'd actually learned something, many of those students thanked me for organizing the class the way I had, because unlike the vast majority of their other teachers, in both college and high-school, I didn't coddle them and do the work for them. They were actually grateful that I made them think, even though they were against it at the beginning of the semester. If I'd organized the class along the lines that they would have liked at the start, we'd have watched movies all the time. If I'd organized the class along customer-service lines, they'd have learned nothing. I'm lucky in this regard: I have colleagues at other colleges who have told me that their administration pressures them to "dumb down" their courses in order to keep "bums on seats." Luckily for me, the administrators I deal with are too stupid to exert that sort of pressure on me.EvilBastard wrote:
...
Back in the day when a university education was not a default progression from secondary school, the amount of taxpayer money going into the pot was sufficient to cover fees. These days, when universities are offering degrees in frankly laughable subjects (war studies, pop music of the 1980s, underwater basket-weaving) in an effort to get more bums on seats and therefore increase their funding from the govt., everyone can find a course for which they're qualified. Time was when you didn't get a look-in unless you had 3 Cs at A level, and if you didn't have 3 As you didn't get onto the popular courses - vetinary science at Glasgow, law at Durham, archaeology at Lampeter. Now you can get onto a 3-year sandwich course for domestic science at Teeside Poly if you have 2 Us and an NF.
It should come from them. Society does need artists, it does need humanists, it does need philosophers and anthropologists and political scientists. These people do play a very important role in society. The scholar plays a very important role in society. But at the same time, the scholar has an obligation to study subjects that are a bit more serious than pop music of the 80's. I love TSOM, for example, but the idea that someone might get a Ph.D. for writing a dissertation on them somewhat sickens me.EvilBastard wrote:
If we want to continue to encourage those whose university education will ultimately provide little benefit to the common purse to pursue higher education, then the money has to come from somewhere.