student fees

[botmad]

Yes maggie had the balls ......
And what did she do with them .....
Shut and closed down the biggest industry and job supplier in the UK ( THE PITS ).....
So i suppose the Uni's will be shut next then .......

The Pits had a very strong Union which supported the lowest honest working man with more power than any Government which Maggie crushed along with the working man .....

The Student union is threatening the same action .......
All i can say is watch out ......

[typhoon_driver]

2nd choice everytime Craig. The major problem was Labour saying that 50% of young people should get a degree. A good chunk of jobs don't need one and you end up with a flood of people towards unis devaluing the degrees already around.

Ha NUS are a bunch of useless muppets. Nothing to fear from that union. The fear as far as the government should be concerned comes when a large number of students decided to mobilise using modern technology to communicate. Flash demonstrations and mass demonstrations organised with only a weeks notice could cause huge disruption to any city.

[grant_ploughbot]

I went to uni, paying just over £3000 a year on fee's.
I think the rise in fee's is a good thing, hopefully making most the useless muppets who go to uni think twice about going!

At the moment, the majority of degree's are now utter useless. Purely because of 1) they are so easy to get into, 2) half the degress only require something stupid like 12hours a week, and 3) its so cheap and easy to get into uni with all the money being handed out.

I dont agree with any of the comments about it effecting the poorer community - Why would it? My parents didnt pay for my tuition, student loan's paid that - which i pay back personally. I think they need to make University harder to get into, and offer money off the tuition fee's the better you do. That would be an incentive for people to actually do some work! Maybe then a degree might be worth something.

[widow_twanky]

The Pits had a very strong Union which supported the lowest honest working man with more power than any Government which Maggie crushed along with the working man .....

The miners strike is one which is very interesting when you look at the history and I believe that it was driven by a massive amount of ideology (cutting subsidies etc) as is the current issue with student fees.

If you look at what thatcher did:

1979 got elected
1980 introduced laws restricting provision of welfare benefits to strikers families where their dependents took a compulsory reduction in their benefits and were banned from receiving ugrent needs payments
1982 (ish) -1984 stockpiling of coal at uk power stations
1984 pit closures announced

It was a cynical well planned attack on the miners and the miners leaders did not see it coming because they had a significant bavado after almost bringing the country to its knees in 1974 (3day week and all)

Putting aside the rights and wrongs of that strike, the government had it well thought out and had planned in significant detail what they were going to do and had probably considered most of the options of what eventually happened.

In the current situation I see a policy driven simply by the conservative ideology. I do not see substantial consideration of the consequences. I do not see strong leadership.

Pete you are very right to say watch out but i suspect that there are already a large number of people who have been hit already. Redundancies at barnet council happened at the beginning of december. This was 25% of the total staff and it didn't even hit the local paper!!!

Ha NUS are a bunch of useless muppets. Nothing to fear from that union. The fear as far as the government should be concerned comes when a large number of students decided to mobilise using modern technology to communicate. Flash demonstrations and mass demonstrations organised with only a weeks notice could cause huge disruption to any city.

I'd suggest that demonstrations are relatively easy for a government to deal with in the long term. it doesn't take long for them to work out who to monitor and how to deal with things. The other thing is that there is a great tendancy in the media for them to simply publicise the violence.

Now if the large numbers of students were to mobilise and register to vote, now that'd send a chill down their spine!! Voter turnout at the last general election was about 65%. Not sure how many 18-25's voted this time but in 2005 it was about 37%.
The government has been niaive to think that the argument that we now live in an age of austerity will wash for the extent of what is happening and that the general public will sit by and watch people being crushed without comment. Student fees are a good distraction from the redundancies being made in local councils, the cancellation of the building schools for the future programme (crushing large parts of the construction industry) and so on.

[botmad]

andy wrote :
The government has been niaive to think that the argument that we now live in an age of austerity will wash for the extent of what is happening and that the general public will sit by and watch people being crushed without comment. Student fees are a good distraction from the redundancies being made in local councils, the cancellation of the building schools for the future programme (crushing large parts of the construction industry) and so on.


I think we should all take a look past the fees increase and see what else they are upto behind this smokescreen ..........

[Thunder arrow]

I went to uni, paying just over £3000 a year on fee's.
I think the rise in fee's is a good thing, hopefully making most the useless muppets who go to uni think twice about going!

how is it a good thing?
The vat is going up,food price are going up,so that will mean less money to spend on uni fee's. And if you do get a loan you are going to have to pay back so much more! If they want a job with no degres thery are going to get low pay jobs which older people will want because there are not many jobs about at are current state. If I go to uni at the rate now I will have to pay about 12000 to 20000 !


Theo

[widow_twanky]

If they want a job with no degres thery are going to get low pay jobs

And there is the lie which has become 'reality' over the time of the labour government. I never did my degree until i was about 28 and i did it then because i wanted to.

I had this discussion with zach recently that you get paid well by working hard and normally if you do something to the best of your abilities then opportunities start to present themselves. Opportunity never walked in anyones front room and presented itself whilst someone was sat on their watching the jeremy kyle show. The point is you have to do SOMETHING!!

This applies to anyone. Irrespective of the legnth of education and irrespective of whether they can even spell the word degree or not!!

[robotwars]

Its all bolotics !!!

I have never voted, and probably never will.... they are all a bunch of liars.... and once again its been proven.
Some say you cant moan if you dont vite, but i refuse to vote for someone i dont believe in, from what I understand, ( not much ) labour were set to raise the fees anyway, but now are trying to cover it up..

Hate politics, always have, always will..... they should make me priminister !!

The reason why my educational projects are so popular, and why I'm heavily involved with organisations such as Aim Higher and Setpoint is because of my history.

I started not wanting to go to UNI, did an apprenticeship, then decided I wanted to go to UNI, so studied a BTEC aswell at the same time. Went to UNI... loved it.... worked my placement year at NISSAN as a designer.... started RR for a year didn€™t go back. Year later went back and finished my degree aswell as running RR.

i don€™t necessarily use my degree now, but Nissan offered me a job, which I wouldn€™t have got without UNI, turned it down to do RR. But I know if i ever want to get a €œproper job€, I can because of my degree, a degree opens doors !!!

I always recommend people to go to UNI... changes your life, and makes you grow up. The fact is, its going to cost, but you just have to not think about it, as they wont ask you to pay it back straight away, and if you are paying it back it means your in a good job anyway !!


I think the damage and protests are stupid... what a bunch of *******ers !!

[RogueTwoRobots]

If I go to uni at the rate now I will have to pay about 12000 to 20000 !

Welcome to reality mate. Even with my tuition fees paid for up here, I'm awaiting my next statement from the Student Loans Company informing me that my debt is now around £15,000.

Thing is though, you don't start making repayments on that until you're earning above £15,000 a year; small repayments if you're in a low-paid job, larger repayments in a higher-earning job. And because of your time spent at university and your qualifications, you are capable of coming out into a job around, say, the £22,000 mark, and if you work hard that salary can easily rise, so paying off the loan isn't too difficult financially (provided you don't blow your wages willy-nilly) even though it may take a while.

Grant makes an interesting point about higher fees maybe rooting out the useless muppets. Maybe if we paid fees up here, I would've dropped out/been kicked out of uni a good few years back, because I simply didn't work hard enough (numerous resits resulted in me taking five years to gain what is effectively a three-year qualification). I wasn't really mature enough and didn't really appreciate my position until the final year that I was there and that's when I started working harder and getting better results/gaining a better understanding of the subject matter. It was also, incidentally, my final year that I was surrounded by a group of friends who balanced out the socialising side of things with just as much studying in the lead up to exams, whereas previous years I hung out with folk who spent more time in the union than anywhere else. I don't blame them for me failing stuff, that was my fault, but just the difference in mindset that is gained from having study-minded people around is clearly evident.

I had this discussion with zach recently that you get paid well by working hard and normally if you do something to the best of your abilities then opportunities start to present themselves. Opportunity never walked in anyones front room and presented itself whilst someone was sat on their watching the jeremy kyle show. The point is you have to do SOMETHING!!

Again, something I took my time to realise at uni! Got through first year without really studying much, unintentionally took a similar approach in second year and it all dive-bombed from there
But it was a learning experience to say the least, and even though I was sick of my course after a couple of years, I started enjoying it again towards the end and the idea of going back in a few years and getting another degree in something else (tempted by robotics and cybernetics) is starting to appeal to me

[typhoon_driver]

A reduction in fees for better marks sounds great until you think about the real world.

So I walk out of university with a 3rd class bachelors having the full wack of my fees, lets say 30grand plus another 10 for living through uni. Great, except most employers say they need a 2:1 minimum........ Ok so I'm then left paying through the teeth in most likely a dead end Mcjob because I didn't get the grades.

On the flip side, I walk out with a first, walk into a high paying graduate job and am able to pay off my much smaller loan in a far quicker time

Not entirely fair now is it?

The other problem with raising up fees is that you are saddled with a huge debt leaving university. Ok so we will use the same 40 grand debt figure as before. You go to a bank and ask for a mortgage. Ok says the bank, we will give you a mortgage of 3 and a half times your wage (lets say it's at the 20k mark), O but wait you have a 40k debt already? Ok lets subtract that from the amount we will give you in a mortgage and if you sign on the dotted line we will get you the 30K. Not many houses going for that kind of cash nowadays .

A hugely simplified version of events but no one has considered whether the banks will take a huge debt into account when it comes to loans etc in the future. Having a huge loan may cripple your chances of home ownership from the get go.