In rushing to blame the government, you miss out a very important issue. Universities have become huge managerial bureaucracies. They pay insane salaries to the people at the top who don't even teach or research, and they have been taken over by administrators who create reasons for their own existence and interfere with the teaching by the faculty. Academics are pushed to work long hours and produce several poor quality research papers a year, whereas previously they would produce one good paper every two or three years. The reason it's suddenly so expensive to 'teach' students (who actually receive less teaching than ever before) is that universities have become corporations rather than institutions, with all the nonsense that comes with that.
Here in Australia Prime Minister Gough Whitlam made ALL university courses completely free in 1974; I received a free teaching degree. The govt. funded everything, overseas students studied fee-free too. In 1990 (also under the ALP) the HECS contibution scheme charged for all courses, students from overseas were charged more than Aus. citizens. Gradually, Unis have developed charging into a science and rely heavily on overseas full-fee paying students. Overseas student enrolment has now dropped sharply, consequently unis are crying poor...their "science" was wrong and greedy. Education in Australia is in crisis at every level....I finished high school teaching before the crisis....Tertiary Education in the future will be as it was in the pre-industrial era; the reserve of those who can pay with the majority pop. working in the "cottage". It's a bleak prediction, but based on current trajectories both here and the in the UK, is sadly, the only plausible final outcome.
This is true, but I dont see how it absolves the Tories as they have damaged Universities in a completely different way in terms of day to day operating costs.
I used to work at the university of Essex which of course is in the UK. In 2018 during a meeting with management the head of the university said to other managers," I don't care what you have to f*cking say or do just get the f*cking tuition fees off them!" He was of course refering to signing up new students. If you're a parent and you are thinking of sending your son/daughter to Essex university then don't. If you go to their open days the management instruct staff and researchers to lie to you about job prospects for graduates in the hope they can get those tuition fees. What they never tell you are where graduates end up after leaving with their piece of paper and the reason they don't readily tell you is that the numbers are so shocking. Essex uni has one of the lowest job prospects for graduates. Oh and they use the same exams year in year out in a desperate bid to raise their rankings. Oh and don't even get me started on the dyslexia scam. The more dyslexia students they say they have the more money they can get. It's total bullshit!
Hi. I was working on a site with a group of tradespeople near Essex university a few years ago, right near where many of the students live. I saw so many young people walking by, I presume going to and from the university. So many young people, paying so much money (or getting into debt). In about ten minutes over 40 people must have walked by. Such a huge debt there. There was a young bloke on site who took the trades option and I said to him "Just think about the debt they are getting" he took a different path and avoided this. So sad for so many of these people, sold a dream which in many cases is a deception.
@@homegardens7682 that young chap will out earn all of those people. The problem is with getting a degree is that they have no value as virtually everybody has one. In fact even higher level qualifications such as a masters of a phd aren't much better. I had a friend at Essex who had to exclude her phd qualification ( biologist) just to get a job as a receptionist in a school. Yes, sold a dream is exactly how i would describe it. At the open days, staff would be instructed that Pfizer and GSK regular come to the university to identify potential students to work on blah blah blah. This is a total lie but like you say, "they are selling a dream"
Totally agree, Essex is a diploma mill. I am an ex staff member. Multiple bars and a nightclub on campus, there was nothing for the students to do but drink. Some would come to class drunk at 9am. Truly heartbreaking. Of course, Anthony the VC is making £200000+ per year, all expenses including private chef paid for, about to retire with a nice pension. Meanwhile, admin is abusing both the instructors and the students . The students very quickly realize that they do not have a future post uni, with data science MS graduates working as waiters in Colchester.
@@User2024now haha I didn't know Tony had a private chef. I'm sure the students in biological sciences who are told that for their third year projects they'll be growing some plants and counting the seeds that are produced will fully understand where the cash is going.
@@homegardens7682 tell the young guy on your site the he has made the right decision. Even with a science PhD you'd struggle to get a job above minimum so just think what chabce those with a degree have.
@@Purple_flower09Like what. Go on. Name some. Because I can't get a house, a train, a bus, a gp appointment, a job. Can't afford to rent or have a kid, can't get a decent education. Cant rely on the police to protect me from criminals.
When you have to buy your own books, have limited printers available to print and none for free, accommodate yourself, feed yourself, and have say 100 people on your course, how the fuck does it cost £5000 per student per year in the first place. I'm baffled.
Why do teachers accept printed assignments? All teachers should just accept that students submit their work through email and/or digital kiosk. Students will save money on the cost of printers and the paper and as well as the ink and and it will be much better for the environment.
On my course, e-books are enough - most students don't buy a single book and they do fine - they can access an e-book from anywhere via the library site. None of them print anything elther - it's all electronic submissions. How it costs that much - staff. There are teaching staff, but also technicians, librarians, admin staff, student support staff... 100 students would bring in £1 million a year, which doesn't go that far if lecturing staff are on an average of, say, £50k (plus employer pension and NI, etc.), not to mention utility costs, software licenses... and there are lots of courses with fewer than 100 students.
@@gayakola3 A degree from one of the "lesser" universities is almost worthless and a complete waste of money! Those "universities" or rather "doss houses" should be allowed to declare bankruptcy! However, there are too many "managers" who need employment, for that to happen!
The video does not once question why it costs the university over £11k per student. A few hours of lectures and the rest of the time reading from books (paid or at additional expense to the students). Instead of suggesting more money needs to be spent, how about an explanation as to how the university needs over £11k per student just to break even... Where is this excess money going? Wages? Pensions? Also, a sleight of hand from the presenter here. When he compared tuition fees increase against inflation, he neglected to mention that the year before his comparison, tuition fees were under 4 grand. So the inflation picture looks a lot different... This is how to lie with statistics.
I agree with the point around questionning why it costs so much per student, particularly for non-lab based students. However the reason that tuition went up from 4 to 9k in one year was due to the fact the English government withdrew funding and shifted the costs to students via student loans instead. So it isn't really relevent to compare the two years for this argument.
I really, really want to start seeing some breakdowns of where universities spend their money. I can understand how some things cost a lot. Eg. Building works. Investing in new facilities costs a lot (even if you do it efficiently), repairing old buildings can cost a lot. Although there's room for cost cutting there, some level of investment will always exist. Similarly, staff, software licenses, materials, and all the required people to manage that. You need a pretty large IT/Admin/Library team, and that's fine. You also need people working in finance to make the budgets and to invest - fine. And finally... you do need researchers. But my university is small and it takes 3000 new undergraduates a year. Let's pretend undergrads all do 3 year courses. That is a minimum of £27.7 million from each intake every year - and that's £83.25m per year coming in from undergrad tuition. This is excluding scholarship & bursary recipients but also excluding post-grads and international undergrads, who pay more... it's also excluding fees students pay for some events and the universities who own accommodation recieving rental income. It's also excluding all other investment income. I know running a university is expensive but that is a lot of money. In reality, my university has income more like 10x that amount, according to their own site. And it's so, so hard to see where it goes as a student.
The worst thing the government did to universities was to stop subsidising tuition fees for nursing students. We'll always need nurses, but what exactly are the incentives for young people to become a nurse? Back in 2010 when I did my degree, the only benefit I could see of studying nursing (as opposed to another useful degree like psychology) was the lack of debt at the end of it.
If most of the nurses didn't leave immediately then you'd have a point, but we were mostly just providing the world with nurses, while we got ours from other countries.
@@SaintGerbilUK 1. That was only a fraction of total nurses. "Most" is a comical overstatement. 2. That could have been fixed by improving working conditions. It's not like people uproot their lifes just for trivial reasons. 3. "while we got ours from other countries" Well yes so what exactly is the issue anyways? The UK trains some nurses that leave and gets some nurses that were trained abroad.
Psychology isn't a good choice these days: the postgraduate job market is extremely competitive for several reasons but the problem with that is that you need experience in order to be admitted to any of the professional doctoral training courses that allow you to become a full practitioner psychologist in your chosen specialism. If I may offer myself as an example, I spent years working as a healthcare assistant and even did a 9-month stint as an unpaid honorary assistant psychologist to try and break through the experience ceiling but I never got anywhere. I and many of my classmates from my cohort have noted that the field seems to seek out specific demographics (can't help but notice that most psychologists are middle class women) for doctoral training and everyone else can go to hell. Thankfully I now work in data science for the defense & intelligence sector with much better pay, working conditions, and employee benefits, but I like many other psych grads struggled for years in low paid and overworked jobs to try our best to progress, but the opportunities needed simply aren't there for a lot of hopeful psychologists when we need them. I hope the irony isn't lost on you all regarding how difficult it is to become a psychologist at a time when we've had a mental health crisis for years! In a nutshell, I caution anyone reading this against choosing psychology as your career because no matter how hard you work or how much effort you put in, a good degree and work experience isn't a guarantee of success and you're probably better off choosing a different profession, at least until the situation improves. (Reposted since my first comment got deleted somehow while I was editing it)
It's the working conditions of being a nurse and the lack of jobs to be a nurse. Teams keep getting cut smaller and smaller, and thus the working conditions get harder, then they leave to do anything but nursing ever again. It's not about the education.
I'm finding it hard to feel sorry for them. They have made being a student miserable and the cost simply can not be justified anymore when postgraduates STILL cant even find work. It's seen as an investment, but they have turned it into a high risk investment. People aren't willing to take that risk, not to mention the ramifications it has on student's lives. If you go to uni, you cant afford to save money, you cant afford rent, let alone a mortgage, you cant afford to feed your family or even start a family..... so is it really worth it to a lot of people?
I actually think the universities should be co-signers for student loans. Yes that would be worse for them, but then they will be selective about who they take on.
You're over exaggerating tbh. You don't have to pay back any of the loans. It gets written off after 30 years. Once you get a job it's just treated like an extra tax so you can forget about it. It doesn't actually impact your life much. I'm not planning on paying back any of my loans bar the minimum amount that gets taxed out of my salary automatically.
I'm baffled as to how it remains so expensive while lecturers are on strike several times a year about their pay and conditions. Plus some universities are massively cutting their budgets for degrees in the arts and history. Where is the money actually going?
🤫 Or they'll realise you're right and start slashing staffing costs, building maintenance quality and frequency, along with tools and equipment, so we end up with the education equivalent of hospitals. On the actual point you raise, I don't know that it is "so expensive". A lot of people are involved in such institutions, some of the most critical won't do it for lower wages as they're able to work for businesses instead, likely making far more money and not having to put up with a bunch of "meddling kids". They need to keep equipment somewhat up to the date, for the training to be relevant for what they're training in, they take up a fair bit of land and their "customer base" (so to speak) is highly limited. Their only potential for *significant & sustained* income that's not tied to how many they're able to enroll is through patents and to a less extent, cooperative development agreements with industry. Just some thoughts, I'm not well informed on the topic though (dunno I'm sharing from a position of ignorance, but ... here I am)
It is 11000€ in Germany per student. I am not so sure about it being expensive. We are not talking about really high numbers compared to the uk wealth. If you want it cheaper, it can only be done by making studies worse, e.g. not investing into essential equipment and buildings, getting competent staff etc. That's simply wrong. In Germany, the state pays for the university costs, so it's much cheaper (you only need money for rental, food etc, not for education). So you can either raise the fee or put some tax money to keep prices low.
Kwazi is OK, he is just being too honest (he admitted that the inflation of tax thresholds were a part of his plan, and he was kinda right. I liked his policies too, many in my quarters did).
Costs for universities didn't really go down during COVID. Staff costs (which are most of the costs) were the same, even empty buildings have to be maintained, and more licenses for online learning platforms had to be paid for.
@@IntrovertnetBut these are all fixed costs, whereas since it's online, there's no limit to the number of students they can admit, so they could've just lowered prices and offset it by admitting more students.
Halting prospects of international students when you want them in your university to pay those insane prices. A lot of parents don't think it's worth it to send them to the UK, when there are better options such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The UK has been on a high horse for too long in terms of so called academic prestige, that is very much replaceable.
Universities in NZ and Canada are a huge disaster. Australian universities have much better reputation but I do not know if this good reputation is justified.
all of campuses in countries you mentioned in your comment are all money eaters, and they are the example of what commercial-oriented education looks like. They got reputation because of their name only.
@@iljaviktorov1799 I think the idea here is that they can have decent prospects within the country, upon graduation. Instead, the UK has a much harsher immigration policy for their overseas graduates.
Meanwhile Singapore is charging foreign students the same subsidized university school fees as locals if they commit to working locally for at least 3 years after graduation (under the Tuition Grant scheme). & I heard of teachers being sent to other countries e.g. China to identify foreign students to award scholarships to to study in Singapore (from secondary/middle school onwards). For foreign students without scholarship, those from ASEAN (Association of SE Asian Nations) countries (of which Singapore is a member) are sometimes charged a lower rate than those from other countries. I also guess that foreign students have a higher chance of eventually getting PR if they are on scholarship.
Those countries you counted are no better too, especially Canada. United States is the only English speaking country that having the best universities, if you have money. If you don’t have money, go to the Europe.
British unis are a rip-off. The level of edu is not worth the terrible tuition fees, in particular when they charge unacceptable fees "overseas" students. Majority of the young see the study in the UK as a chance later to stay there and find a job. As for the edu, the UK provides the average level of edu.
Tony Blair wanted half the population to go through university, which was obviously unaffordable. He took away education as a way out of poverty by diluting its value.
Everything works better with a lot of money, but the question is whether the state has the capacity of providing the service or not. It is easy to think that the state has infinite amounts of money, but it is more likely that countries have to have an extremely good economic condition to invest in education. Even France has had to undergo some cuts in education budget. Besides, those universities are extremely politicised.
One thing that i think is important to mention is that in 2012 the cap for UK student fees was raised from £3k to £9k a year, whilst at the same time central government funding of universities was slashed (due to austerity) so whilst at first it looks like universities were getting 3x more money per student, in actuality it stayed the same and over time actually became less (because of the cap being frozen and not keeping up with inflation)
Funding used to be anywhere up to 80% funded from central gov. But there was also a numbers cap. Contrary to what would make sense I.e removing the cap for more students=more money. Without a predictable allocation of resources each year Universities may spend aggressively in an ‘open market’ and fail to recoup costs if numbers drop the following year. Universities have to essentially ’grow or die’ at the expense of each other
It was pretty obvious to everyone that that was the entire point of increasing tuition fees, Peter Mandelson who would have been tasked with implementing it had labour stayed in power admitted to rigging the "independent" report they'd timed to be released after the election to recommend a rise in tuition fees to fill the hole left by the cuts he wanted to make to university funding.
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Uk student here paying £9250 a year for an average of 6-8 hours of lectures and about the same in pre recorded lectures per week. The university terms are basically oct-may with breaks for Christmas and Easter, so about 7 months total. So assume 32 hours per week for 30 weeks, that totals to 960 hours a year. Just over £9.50 an hour. This is per person in an engineering degree, with almost no practical work to speak of. Its all lectures and theory. Recently the university invested millions into a new tech building featuring all sorts of high end stuff prominantly displayed for passers by to see. These get used by a handful of people doing research. So I highly doubt the university is losing any money on your average undergrad, rather it wastes the majority of it on stuff only a few people will see in their entire uni experience.
My experience as well. We go in and some guy at the front of the classroom talks at us for a couple hours. £9k per student for that and they're going bankrupt? They should stop wasting money then because they're not spending it on the students.
when you were at secondary school that cost £6.2k a year per child for the government. Engineering costs more than humanities etc, your course probably costs much more than £12k per student to run. Your teachers are super qualified academics who also do research - they are going to be paid much more than secondary school teachers, although lots of their pay will come from grants for their research. Your facilities are expensive. 9k does not go very far at all. Of course some of the university and its buildings are research orientated - you shouldn't expect that every building is made for you. Your contact hours are actually on the high side for the UK and self-directed study is a huge part of what Uni actually is. A lot of people on this chat seem to see universities as just a super-college, and that they are paying a transaction for a service. Universities are knowledge and research centres that also provide degrees that lead to jobs. Your loan is structured as a graduate tax that you don't pay back if you don't succeed / 30 years later. If your course does not lead to many job prospects then you chose the wrong course.
30 months in a single year? That's all 3 years in one not per year. Each term is only about 11 weeks long and the 3rd term is always shorter so total about 25ish weeks each year of 8 hour lectures is 200 hours a year that's about £46 per hour. Way higher if you do your maths right
@@Barney_Wharam my point is, you receive a fraction of the time you would in secondary school, and with next to no practical work, there are barely any costly experiments for us to run. Multiply the £9.50 per hour by 80 students, and you get £760 per hour. I haven't added how many of the lecturers are extremely poor teachers compared to other schools (confirmed by them). And the idea is you shouldn't aim to not earn enough to pay back the loan
Lectures are pretty cheap. It's practicals and the like that are expensive to unis. The issue here is not really overspending. UK unis definitely spend a little more than they should but if you compare internationally it's not that significant. The issue is the lack of government funding.
So as a graduate who worked for my university and befriended a Ph. D Student who told me all about it. The government stopped basically subsiding student capacity and instead gave money based on research. So the fees were brought up to the cost of teaching and the more research the uni pump out (and supposedly influences the research field) the more they!d get for facilities for teaching and research. THIS is why universities pretty much employ lecturers on a ‘if you don’t pump out research papers and teach your specialism and play a role in your subject here, you get booted out’ basis. So they work long hours, universities don’t pay them for ALL of their time, publishers make huge profit on the publishing (lecturer see none of it btw). The uni money is also stretched to fund their marketing and admin teams which no one knows is there but their jobs are to pump out ‘come here!’ propaganda and steal students (paying customers) away from the competition. More students = more grants = more staff = more research = more money = more buildings = more students and it goes on. That’s also why universities seem to take up whole city centres now. It’s not until you’ve been there that you see how influential the ripple effect from a student population is. They fill jobs, they stimulate the local economies. Universities as a whole are worth billions from all these cycles of money and influence.
It's mostly a waste of time. I am convinced that you could cut the bottom 70% of UK courses and it would have no impact on UK productivity - it would probably go up as people would work for another 3 years. University used to be for the academically elite, now it is for anybody. 95% of jobs can be done with the teaching up to A Levels - only a few STEM and vocational jobs need further academic training. The government needs to push apprenticeships - on the job experience and learning is far more valuable
@@NH-gw3vc I don't disagree with the general idea but the problem is the framing. Apprenticeships have dropped for a lot of reasons - lack of investment, the big "push into higher education" and so on, but one of the major reasons is... employers don't want to pay the cost of training up an employee to a qualified level. Because at that point, the apprentice-turned-employee could leave and they will effectively have lost out on a lot of time and energy. It's a genuine issue and needs to be sorted out, because until something changes, they won't have incentives to offer apprenticeships. Young people, aged 18, will sit and look at their available options. They want to upskill themselves and do some sort of further qualification. Their current options are a) university degrees or b) fighting for one of the very, very few apprenticeships out there. You can see why most people end up going for option A - even if they would've preferred an apprenticeship. We could cut university places but that would leave these people staggering. There's already a hiring issue where most jobs want a degree and pay 25k. Having a huge increase in the number of young people struggling to get jobs would be useless. Cutting down on higher education placements would have to come later. Step 1? Make apprenticeships more abundant and worth something more. Once those start coming about, a gradual shift will begin and student numbers will start dropping a little on their own. After that, you can see what more needs doing - but starting with decimating universities is a terrible plan.
This isn't, for universities which are part of national pay agreements (nearly all) there has been a percentage increase nearly every year. For example for the first university i looked at just now, the lowest lecturer salary was 33k in 2020 (the earliest they have online) and this year it is 37k. While it can be said staff aren't paid enough, and many other issues, they have had a pay rise.
Well, since 2011, tuition fees have more than tripled. In 2011 they were under £3500 per year, and the following year they went to £9k. The presenter did a sleight of hand by starting from exactly 2012, with no mention of the 250+% jump in fees only the year before.
You work for 40yrs to have $1m in your retirement, Meanwhile some people are putting just $10k in a meme coin for just few months and now they are multi millionaires. I pray that anyone who reads this will be successful in life
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I guess the professors should just work for free, or maybe they should stop having courses which don't pay for themselves like "underwater basket weaving", "why white people are literally satan" and "listening to Taylor swift as a degree".
@@CommonWealthSnowstate funding as schools are potentially. I’m not saying we absolutely should do that but that’s how other countries fund higher education and lowers fees on students.
@CommonWealthSnow In germany (and most of the EU), universities are free or really low cost (and even in italy, the most expensive in europe, there are still big deductions if your family can't afford the full price)
This has been coming for a long time. I studied in the UK at a smaller uni and about 70% of the students in my class where international students from the EU. Back then the extraa fees where paid through EU programes. Pretty shure there is no way for smaller institutions to replace all that lost revenue with people from outside of the EU.
We shouldn't ignore the role which university managements have played. UEA, for example, has spent a fortune on new buildings while failing to maintain the old ones which now need emergency repairs.
The incentives from this comes from students and the "marketisation of universities" - ie The Tories. Students are "paying" 9k for their university and expect state of the art facilities. So universities invest in capital to entice good students and good staff. once they're here they can be bumped to the bad buildings. If you don't invest in this way the students wont come, and if they don't come then all the other questions stop mattering.
Same at my uni. Useless, unnecessary building projects being prioritised over underpaid staff doing work essential to the running of the university. Absolutely shameful.
I spent 3 months in University of South Wales. The on-campus flat I lived in was supposedly 5 years old and I have seen half a decade old buildings in far better shape.
@@TedThomasTTyes if you want degrees in media, dance, drama etc, entry requirement is a cycling proficiency test grade B But if you want engineering etc go to south east Asia, where you need decent grades in science based subjects.
...They were, in fact, introduced in 1998, and only applied to students beginning their degrees in that year, which meant 2/3rds of students didn't have to pay them. This dropped to 1/3rd in 1999, and then everyone was getting soaked by 2000. It was the usual divide and rule tactic, and to be expected from the Labour right.
It's incredible to me that, over the last 6 years, I don't think a single positive piece of news or information has come out of the UK. It is really incredible how the country continues to get worse and worse
It turns out when you treat a country that only leads in like a few industries (Publishing) like a business then it starts to go bankrupt. Add the fact that it abandoned it's closet trading partners to be closer to a nation that's a literal ocean apart and this is what you get.
@@TheJonesdude Not to mention just how much of the nation is overdependent on the finance industry, which has continued to struggle through recent years, and is getting walloped by new fintech companies. The UK has like, zero notable tech companies
@@moomie1634 No tech companies, no leading car manufactures, no Software and a weak video game industry. The UK use to lead the world in ship building, some people seem to be under the delusion that it still does. But how many ships leave Sunderland and Manchester? British companies aren't even British anymore. Cadbury is American. BP is mostly owned by American shareholders. We have to buy our energy from the French. Corrupt politicians have destroyed this country.
@@moomie1634 ARM is a notable one for creating the processor architecture that is powering our phones. Not British owned, but still headquartered in England There is also the Raspberry Pi.
The thing that always got me as a student is how a 30-per-year engineering class with 20 hours of lectures and labs every week and 10 plus full-time staff was able to be run at a net positive for the university while a 200-per-year psychology course with 10 hours of lectures and labs every week and 6 full-time staff was a net loss for the university. It never made sense.
Truthfully, it will be the research departments. Universities currently have a two pronged role as places of education, and places of research. Its entirely up to you if you agree with that or not, but thats the way it goes. And research is fucking expensive. It sounds like your uni's psychology department was far bigger than your engineering department, so while the psychology undergrad course would make money, the sheer amount of researchers would have eaten away at that number and more. And in my experience, universities would rather be seen as amazing at one thing, than "pretty good" at everything, so they'll keep subsidising their huge psychology department while making their engineering departments foot the bill, meaning that the profits of engineering are siphoned off to psychology research
@@xenon8342 "Universities currently have a two pronged role as places of education, and places of research" What do you mean by currently? It was always like that. University Professors doing research has been around since European Universities were founded (possibly the same elsewhere, I do not know).
If it has always been like that it needs to change. We should have two types of institutions. One an undergraduate teaching institution and one a research institute. That way the undergraduate is just being charged for his or her course.
@@samfyfe2949 It isn't really that simple, as many undergraduates also do research and are expected to have some research experience for postgraduate courses.
My very close friend move to london 7 months, he is there to accompany the wife as she has scholarship to study there for 3 years, my fren followed, he is allowed to work. 1st month is a real test to him, getting a place to stay , looking for job makes him cried. 2nd month he get a full-time job, the may is minimum but good enough for him, but the tax is 25%. Shocked him. 3rd month the wife pregnant, the landlord ask them to move. Another test trying to look for a place to stay when you have a pregnant wife. He said every month is a test, if it wasn't becos of the wife, he would go back to work in SEA anytime. Life is hard there even the pound sounds great!
A degree is not worth the paper it's printed on. It's the biggest impediment to finding a job in the UK. I was part of that mass exodus of further and higher education teachers who left the UK from the early 2000s when the work dried up. Take your knowledge and skills abroad where it's valued.
My mother works for one of the big unis that's run out of room now to juggle funding gaps which began way back in the 2010's. They've already gutted out a lot of their high-paying jobs with voluntary redundancies over the past 12 months, and now it's likely that mass layoffs will happen come summer. So if you ignore the general mess that the UK's higher education model is (fees, funding, etc), the impending pop of this bubble is also going to cripple local economies when a large portion of their workforce suddenly finds themselves unemployed.
Notable that the universities in serious crisis at the moment are former polytechnics. Seems the problem to me is that there are too many universities, does the UK really need 166 universities? There are only 76 cities.
@@ryank3321 Agree! A degree from the former polytechnics is worthless. The level of student they attract would not compare to a group 1, 14 year old attending high school. Far too many universities, providing well paid jobs to high earning middle management.
It is refreshing to hear that high-paying middle management jobs with little accountability and no measurable output have been removed. The local economies will have to re-invent themselves to survive! The function of a university is to provide academia, not to support the local economy.
I'm an international student studying Mathematics at King's College London. I don't agree with a lot of the points in this video. The reason it's going bankrupt is because universities in the U.S are far better. The Times ranking is nonsense. Many asian and european students prefer an average US university as opposed to a top one in the UK. For example, I got into UCL, Edinburgh, and King's which are apparently great. But being honest I would have much rather gone to Rice or harvey mudd which are far far better, but not even in the top 150 according to times' nonsense rankings
Yep, that too. University rankings are back patting BS made in the UK to show how great UK universities are and attract more students and money to, you guessed it, the UK. What a great business model!
Got my bachelors at a Russell group uni. Now doing a medical degree at a Russell group uni. Both are supposedly top 15 in the country. The quality of teaching at both is shockingly bad. I did my masters at a polytechnic uni. The teaching there was the best I’ve ever had. I learnt more in that 1 year than either of the others. But employers did not care as much for it as it was not “prestigious” The education system is a huge fucking joke and needs to be reformed, if not outright abolished. If they can teach online classes during covid, it’s barely a step away from just teaching yourself on TH-cam and Wikipedia, which is what most end up doing anyway. Rankings are a joke. Education is a joke. The times “rankings” are barely more than propaganda. We don’t hold a candle to most American or even European countries, and it’s all propped up by an outdated and unearned reputation.
Honestly I've NEVER trusted those rankings. Students always say they study more and better at their public universities in Europe (even if they aren't that 'fancy') than in the UK, US, when they have a chance to compare. It's more about reputation than actual quality
The lifetime graduate premium is still 130k for men and 100k for women (after accounting for taxes and student loans). The median salary for someone without a degree is 25k, the median salary for someone with a degree is 36K. There is still a big lifetime financial incentive to get a degree. Will you graduate and walk into a great paying job on day 1? Unlikely, but over your lifetime you're getter off. This is across all subjects, there are subjects that are higher paying, but a study in 2015 found that 50% of graduate jobs didn't mention a subject.
@@paddy8254 The graduate premium has been plummeting and is negative for some humanities subjects. It's only the high quality degrees from good universities that are worth the time and money these days.
Most degrees were never actually about training for work. They were just an easy way for lazy employers to filter for 'the right sort of people' when only the rich could afford it. Now it just shows that you're in the top half of school leavers.
Universities should be a social utility, not a business. Education is a society's means of social reproduction. University should be free, period. Universities shouldn't be able to go "bankrupt" because they shouldn't be a profit driven enterprise.
This was the argument in the 1990s. Unfortunately, the U.K. decided to go down a path of 'inclusion' rather than 'excellence'. Polytechnics were given degree-awarding powers. Blair wanted 50 per cent of young people arbitrarily to have a degree (why not 40 per cent, or 60 per cent?) Anyhow, I escaped the U.K. in 2015.
@@threethrushes - for sure, man. Not only the UK; the USA, and Canada and much of the Anglophonic world as well. University expenses are absurd. You are correct in blaming it on the Blairites. What Americans need to wrap their brains around is that the Democratic Party went through the same transformation. The rise of Trump and his idiot minions is directly correlative with the collapse of New Deal with Ronald Reagan / GH Bush, followed by the Clinton Admin, who, in reality, was a continuation of the idiocy from Reagan/Bush, and it was the Clinton Admin that threw the working class under the bus. So, when the Dems offered up Hillary in 2016, you wonder why there was a subconscious revulsion? Yes, she should have been president (Trump won an Electoral College victory, not a popular victory) but she was the wrong candidate for the times in that she was the proper candidate for a useless Democratic party. And now, the USA is in the seriously compromised position of either electing the rot from the DNC, or, simply revoking the American Democratic Experiment in the form of deranged Trumpian fascism. And NEITHER of them are in favour of actual public education. Instead, education is being reduced to job training - which is actually a gift to the corporations, as they don't have to pay for the training of their workers - you get the workers and the state to finance that... basically, industry offloaded training expenses onto the public sector. It is a recipe for catastrophe.
Bankruptcy has little to do with being a profit driven enterprise. Individuals can go bankrupt, charities can, countries technically can. If they can get into debt, they can go bankrupt. Treating things as too big or important to do so is part of what's causing the problem - they generate more debts that they'll likely never be able to pay and the cracks of the pressure of dealing with them ripple out to everyone else.
@@dehn6581 - if it's a government service, it, by definition, can't go bankrupt. It can lose money, but it can't go bankrupt. ESPECIALLY in the USA with its currency. So, no, you're wrong.
@@Novalarke So what’s the solution, just keep blindly handing money to schools forever, no matter the price? Just because something is government funded doesn’t mean it’s efficient or well run. Schools can be outrageously overpriced without being profitable.
I was an international (EU) student in London for 5 years, in late 90s; studied for undergrad and two post-grad degrees and paid ZERO for tuition. All I had to do was to submit a form yearly, which the Uni authorities then forwarded to the local council in order to receive the EU grant funds for my tuition. That was it! Students, back then, were admitted on the basis of academic merit, not their ability to pay tuition fees. Anyway, another reason why Brexit was such a bad idea..
Perhaps this is the reason why the UK has failed its citizens. Did you pay back the tuition through post-grad income tax? Does your country offer free education to foreigners? Im sick of non-Brits taking advantage of national resources and thinking Brexit was a bad idea when resources are spent on people the gov isn't elected to represent. This is why China will win. Put your own first
@@vanguard8889 You' re totally wrong! British universities cannot cover their operational expenses without EU grants; that was the whole point of the video! The EU paid my tuition, not the British taxpayer! Only non-EU international students had to pay tuition fees, back then. At the beginning of each academic year, non-EU students had to pay their tuition and EU students had to do this EU paperwork, so that the Uni can get their grant money from the EU. I thought all this was common knowledge.. The UK economy benefitted significantly by the EU students; these were people that had costed the UK nothing and each one of them spent thousands of pounds of their own money per month in the UK, for 3 or more consecutive years. And to answer your question, yes my country does offer free education to foreigners; Universities here are public bodies and are funded exclusively by the state.
@@zix_zix_zix "The EU paid my tuition, not the British taxpayer! " lol Where do you think the EU got its money from? Was it the taxpayers from the EU countries maybe? Which 3 countries paid the most into the EU coffers? Was the UK one of them? You still have a lot to learn.
@@egastap Well if you really want to get into it, then most of that money came from the imperial periphery, but I don't expect you to know much about that
@@egastapUK is one lowest net positive per capita contribution to the EU. It looks big only becuase the population is big. Otherwise, most UK aspect is subsidized by EU.
Education should not be a for-profit commodity. It is a public good. But then this country has privatised every other human right so far and they're working on healthcare too so what else would I expect.
But the universities aren't profiteering. That's the point. The UK teaches their own students at a net loss to the economy as £9000 is not enough to cover the operating costs of the university. Nationalising universities just means that the government has to now pay for it. With the fiscal headroom being very tight in current times like the aftermath of COVID or the ongoing Ukraine war, it would hard to make a case that this won't come with huge economic tradeoffs.
I don't buy loss of EU funding as a reason. Britain was a net contributor, all the EU did, was act as a middle-man for our own funding to pass through. The real reasons are a combination of demographics, foreign competition, poor policy, economic factors, and degrees too often offering poor value and not keeping pace.
I think university only really makes sense now if you are going into STEM or a higher value field that requires it to enter the industry, such as Law or Medicine. As a naive 17 year old back in 2009, I signed up for a Bachelors in Advertising, mainly because it was drilled into us at the time that it was essential to go. It absolutely wasnt and there is no way I would do the same today, given that the cost of comparable courses are almost 4 times as high. 60-80k Debt for a degree that is, at best, an extra box tick on your CV, is not worth it.
I just can't imagine universities making a loss on charging undergrads 9K a year. I just finished a phd in science, my bench fees (which we wouldn't always spend all of) were 4.5k a year and I probably did 200x more experiments a year than your typical undergrad. Now I get that my teaching fees from lecturers are vastly reduced but unis have giant lecture theatres where 1 lecturer teaches 300 students. So hard to see how that can cost 11k each per year.
Universities mostly own the buildings so no mortgage/loan for buildings. Most universities charge a lot of money for accommodation (a small room with bed and desk sharing kitchen and often bathrooms) They basic and expensive. You know this
The introduction of the £9K cap in 2012 sparked considerable controversy, particularly as it was initially intended to apply primarily to prestigious universities. Moreover, it seemed to be motivated by a subtle political maneuver against Clegg, which proved to be quite effective, I must admit.
Don't really need to look to Australia for case studies, some of our own universities are the result of mergers. London Metropolitan University is a merger between the University of North London and the London Guildhall University in 2002, and the University of South Wales was formed in 2013 from a merger of the University of Glamorgan and University of Wales, Newport.
Now one can perhaps ask the following question: which party has been in government for most of those 40 years? The Greens? Liberal Democrats? I'm having memory trouble...
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgia C: 1979-1997 L:1997-2010 C:2010-present Greed. Power. Short-term thinking. When a society incentivizes and rewards these traits, any wonder why the elected representatives mirror that society?
The thing that killed universities was changing them from education and turning them into businesses. I went in the early 90s when it was still quite hard to get a Place and a lot less people went. I got my fees paid and a grant. Once they tried to get more and more people going the standards dropped as more people meant more money as grants turned to loans. It seems now the only qualification needed for some courses is having a pulse. Things need to go back to the old way of doing it. Less students and better quality. This will not happen of course and I see some universities folding and going away which may not be a bad thing.
I disagree. What the problem is a lot of what is being taught is just not valuable anymore. I spent many years in computer science and I have still not learnt more than I should have been able to learn using Google. Then they indoctrinate students into political ideologies and make students into activists. Why exactly should students who are there to learn be encouraged to get involved into politics?
This important video needs to be broadcast all over the internet. Lots of people need to understand this right now. No politician can fix this issue no matter what they promise without raising home student fees and bringing in more foreign students regardless of how the UK hates immigration apparently. If not then expect university closures, simple as that.
The main reason overseas student numbers went down is that the government changed the rules and no longer let the students bring all their dependents into the UK with them.
@@Purple_flower09 Pay lots of money to come to our country and study then perform roles that we are desperate for people to do BUT you can't bring any family
I wonder how other European countries finance their university education - not with fees as high as in the UK, in Germany for example it isn't tuition fees, but admin and so on and not higher than about 300-400 Euro.
The "business model" of universities is changing, the landscape is becoming more competitive internationally and domestically combined with rising costs and over expansion leads to (not for profit) universities losing money.
I completed a bachelor's degree in UK as an Intl fees paying student. Then I moved to Findland to do a Master's degree. In Finland then (2011) it was tuition free. Finland universities pay their teachers and research students better and higher salaries, the Universities are better equiped with all modern,new,state of the art equipments. Notice that,they do all of that in Finland while charging no fees but the UK universities that would charge the HIGHEST fees in Europe are going broke. They spend so much money in UK on buildings. In the UK they have all these futuristic buildings on campuses whereas in Finland you can walk pass a University and not even realise it is a University but when you walk into the University then you get the BEST, MOST MODERN of books and equipments.
Finland is doing its best to repeat other countries mistakes, including UK. So we'll see how long it takes until we get to the same situation as the UK.
The trajectory for UK universities is looking, in general very bleak. As an academic at a medium-sized university, everything that has been said is enitrley true. Since brexit, the number of international students (EU) has rapidly declined, and the public spending for universities is at an all-time low this century. It is around 15-20% currently, and compared to Germany/France/other EU countries, their respective % is at 60%+. What wasn't mentioned, which I believe should be, are the conditions of academics, and the fact more pressure is being put on teaching and ensuring a strong student satisfication. If this continues, more and more academics will be leaving academia completely, and that will provide a huge-shortage on teaching, and as a result students. As the lack of funding is increase, more is the dependency of international students, and less of a focus on research for academics. I do not think Labour will do much, my honest 2 cents is that public funding will increase (slightly, just) and that tuition fees will go up, it's inevitable.
Why don't they start work aged 16 and work their way up? Running up massive debts on useless ology ''degrees'' ...yet another Blair, Blair, Blair disaster.
@@KILKennyLaDa9898-js2nr that will definitely work for many jobs but a) we still need doctors and nurses, and b) employers would need to be prepared to train new starters and take on apprentices much more than they currently do.
It's the fundamental approach that is broken. The UK is obsessed with fancy prestige unis like Oxford or Cambridge and even the ones that aren't anywhere close to that level are still obsessed with getting there. Yet this leads to overall worse education outcomes. Noone needs a handful of highly prestigious unis. What is needed is good education and research. Across the board.
In the US, it's the opposite. Governors have cut support to state universities, causing record high prices in tuition, creating the student debt crisis.
That's not really the opposite though is it, as our government has also cut support to universities, and has also massively increased the interest rate applied to student loans which contributes to our cost of living crisis.
Education should not be run like a business and it is not something we should be paying for with tuition fees. Further and higher education are essential for the betterment of our society. It makes a smarter, more productive population and helps with social mobility. I'd even go as far as saying that industries where we have a shortfall, there should be a stipend to encourage people to study in those fields. The stipend should also be means tested so if a mature student with a mortgage wants to become a doctor, we should have systems in place to allow them to do this.
We have nearly doubled the percentage of people who go to university since 2006 and things have only gotten worse since then. So how do you justify that more people in university is better?
the current system is effectively a tax that only graduates pay. it is not real debt and is not considered such by banks. They could literally have an almost identical system called the graduate tax and it would "remove fees" but would also remove the idea of personal responsibility of wasting govt money. the vast majority of graduates, including myself, will not pay it all back, but will pay an extra % on my income as I do now, to do a job I wouldnt have got otherwise.
It takes up to 10 times as much time and work to put together a good lecture for distant delivery than in a standard lecture. That would be fine if lecturers were not being rated on their research output and not teaching, or having to teach more lectures than there is time to prepare these.
@@michaelxz1305yes, they were once. I was a lecturer when the fees first came in fully in 2003/4. It was because there was an aim to get 50% of people attending university to increase skills. But the slippery slope to massive student debt was apparent even then
Easy, when the Government gets cheap and does not pay for education with TAX payers money, and Unis are forced to take in anyone and everyone and they don't pay for their tuition in the end, this is what happens. We pay taxes for a reason, health, education and emergency services, it is about time the Gov't uses such money on these things. Education isn't a business it is to keep working standards up for a reason.
@@Barney_Wharam "taxing only graduates" makes no sense because at the moment they graduate, the person has made zero income whatsoever, only debts. How do you tax income that doesn't even exist? It's not a consumption tax either.
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgia you only repay loans if you earn over a certain threshold. The loan system is a graduate tax. Graduates have higher incomes in the medium term, which is why they are subject to this, but only if you earn more than a certain amount
My parents sold their summer house to send me to a mid-weight British University back in 1997, I was an international student from abroad. The education if the Uni was average at best and I often went hungry for days as everything was expensive. But the British culture was great, I thought at the time! They were welcoming, encouraging, interested in foreign students. It was actually fun to be a foreign student back then, in despite of .all the hardship... So I thought all the sacrifices of my parents were worth it.... I don't think that anymore! Sadly. The only real selling point of the UK was its open and fun culture. Without that, you are just average, and it isn't worth it!
LOL 700,000 international students and they're still running short of money. They've been fiddling the standards for years and years. I wrote to BBC Panorama about my experiences teaching pre-sessional courses; they weren't interested because it wasn't PC to say it
@@bigbarry8343 I don't know why but it's deleted my reply which said: ELEVEN years ago my academic manager said to me "this will be a big scandal one day"
I was a Ph.D. student at a top 10 global university in London, 20 years ago. I taught some u/g classes full of foreign students from one country in particular. The students were lovely, but their written work wouldn't have been accepted at my prep school. Anyhow, I emigrated to Europe many years ago. Thanks for the education, U.K., shame it isn't a meritocracy anymore.
@@threethrushes Behind the scenes at the University I worked for ten years ago, the lecturers were in open revolt at all the appallingly written work they had to mark But the Vice Chancellor had their pension to think about!
Maybe universities are just chronically overspending, my uni had nearly 30k students; meaning nearly £270million a year. If they can't find a way to budget that I kinda think that's on them...
How many staff members? How much real estate? All the overheads that are often not thought about when equating one thing to another? But I do agree with you, budgeting is a nightmare
I guess they can cut off some of the cleaning staff and make students clean their own classrooms and dormitories for free. That should save some money. The solution is actually quite simple, either increase fees for the local students or increase the ratio of foreign students to make ends meet. Universities can also auction off antiques they had in possession that cost money to maintain, I am sure there are lots of portraits and silverware that can be sold off to collectors
I don't understand how for example economics/finance/maths degrees justifies c. £9k per year where all you'll get in return is someone reading off slides they found online.
Most of my friends now do uni online, one dropped out of hall and the other dropped out of Surrey, they now do their studies in there room and buy the equipment they need off Amazon
Two points: Why should a foreign student even consider attending British universities when he can study free of charge in Germany where universities are just as good as any other university listed in the Russell Group. Secondly, there is a bias against universities where the media of teaching are other languages than English. Universities of English speaking countries always score higher perhaps because those who conduct the ranking survey hardly speak any other foreign languages. We all live in an English centric world.
So the reason I got from a German friend who came to the UK for uni boiled down to wanting to be taught by the German education system. Basically there experiences with it in there childhood made them feel like the german universities would be overly harsh and bad for their mental health. A lot of Germans I know seem to have really bad perspectives on the German system, to the point they would rather for to other countries than engage with there own unis. This might have a selection bias though within by friend group. Anecdotal, not scientific. :)
Bachelors in biochemistry. Worked as a delivery driver to survive. Masters in Biotechnology. Worked as a carer on the side. Can’t get a job. A mountain of debt I will never pay back. Didn’t even want to go to uni. Got pressured to because my grades were good. I hate this country.
In many respects, this mirrors what is happening in New Zealand. Once upon a time, students who were eligible (to a decent literate standard as garnered by University Entrance exam results got their education mostly on the tax payers with nominal student fees and were expected to enter the workforce to contribute to the tax base as a means of repaying for their education (and providing the country with skilled workers like doctors etc. In the 80s the system got turned on its head (by a bunch of people who got their education that way) who decide that user pays was the way to go. So students then had to pay hefty fees instead and ended up with a millstone around their necks before they could even think about saving to buy a house because in order to prop the model up, student loans were introduced. The nett effect was students taking off for higher paying overseas jobs, loans being defaulted on and tertiary education institutes relying on a tranche of overseas students to pay the bills. Any disruption to that model resulted in exactly what appears to be happening in Britain. And then a Black Swan in the form of Covid19 appeared top upset the apple-cart; the borders were shut and the supply of overseas students choked off. In short, a working system was broken by greedy economic doctrines and the resulting carnage is what we've got; a dearth of skilled labour and young people not wanting to saddle themselves with a debt the moment they get out of school. It isn't rocket science to figure out what has gone wrong or what it would take to put things right. Hint - tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy who got their education pretty much for free won't fix it. And I want to make the point that higher education is not "public expenditure; it is an _investment_ in the future as I'm sure the aging population would agree when they begin to suffer from a range of ailments which require hospitalization and specialist care.
UK,NZ,Ca, Aus want to adopt the American model for tertiary education. The only difference is we are not America where the value of education goes hand in hand with high paying jobs for graduates. In our countries, certainly in the UK high paying jobs for graduates are few and far between
"British Universities can't afford to keep opperating with the money they get for UK students and have to make up the difference with politically controversial forigen students who pay the full cost." is literally a Yes Minister script from the 1980s. That show truely never gets old. Just Remember what Sir Humphrey said, Britian needs, "... a system to protect the important things in life, and to keep them out of the hands of the Barabrians. Things like... the Universites. Both of them."
@@keysersoze1522 The only demographic in the UK which has massively increased their share of wealth over the last 5 years is Billionaires. They can afford to pay more taxes. If they leave the country, good riddance. The nation does not need really rich traitors, who will abandon it. The nation needs nurses, builders, publishers, bus drivers etc...
As someone who works at a university; thank you for covering this and saying it exactly how it is. It is utter non-sense to try and bring down migration, but targeting people who are literally only here for a few years and very few actually want to stay for longer.
Because the primary purpose of a university is to train educate and train the next generation, as well as providing a hub for research. Whilst it's nice to have people from abroad study here it shouldn't be at the expense of places for UK students. If universities are reliant on hundreds of thousands of foreign students to pay the bills it's already broken. I'd be pretty annoyed to loose out on university because someone on the other side of the world has lower grades and more money.
"We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers. We want some scientists, but we must keep them in their proper place." The government needs to focus on trades, that's why. No wonder shoddy newbuilds are being built, education and trades need to be seen as equals.
50% of 18 year olds going to university was never a sustainable model. It was only done to reduce the headline figure for unemployment. The result has been a lowering of standards and a massive debt burden on those who go. When it was 10% not only were universities free, but you could get a grant to go. Furthermore the degree you got at the end made you sought after, with employers falling over themselves with job offers. At least that was my experience when I went in the 70s.
By the time I went to university in the mid-1990s we were given grants. Polytechnics were given degree-awarding status. Blair infamously said "education, education, education." ...and it has spiralled downwards ever since.
As a us citizen I find this conversation interesting. Because we are the complete opposite side of the spectrum, with just passing on the debts/insolvency to the students. Harvard and yales endowments combined are the same GDP as Luxembourg or Guatemala.
Civilised countries have universities which are either entirely free or require just a basic fee to cover some administrative costs and discourage time-wasters. The problem of advanced education funding is real and it is felt by those civilised countries too but an advanced nation needs skilled workers. The room for unskilled labour is getting thinner and thinner and sooner or later most people will need the equivalent of a BA/BS education.
"I find myself questioning the necessity of pursuing education beyond primary and secondary levels, as many jobs seem to require skills that could easily be attained during 14 years of basic schooling."
"The room for unskilled labour is getting thinner and thinner and sooner or later most people will need the equivalent of a BA/BS education." Not really. There is shortage of actual skilled workers and overproduction of low tier uni graduates.
@@useodyseeorbitchute9450 if you talk about plumbers, electricians, carpenters, builders, Taylors and highly trained artisans I perfectly agree with you. Plus, everybody knows that a B in gender studies is essentially useless
Good. The 9K a year is rip off for what they actually provide. I calculated when I was at uni that for every 1 hour of teaching I was paying almost £250 for the privilege. Likewise the amount of bogus degrees worth nothing and international students being passed with fraudulent degrees is abhorrent.
The UK currently has 288 degree awarding institutions. At least 150 of these should be closed and the capacity in the others reduced by a third. Universities need to return to being academically demanding research establishments for those with proven higher order analytical ability. In other word return to the mid-a980s when around 1 in 8 people went to university, not the current 1 in 2. There should be a return to most middle ranking professions, such as social work, physiotherapy, retail management, primary teaching, mid grade civil servants outside the 'central civil service' mainly being trained through two or three year courses that combine on the job experience with a paid salary with some time each week in academic training paid for by the employer. The main reason the UK had a massive expansion in university education was to pull a trick on the lower-middle and working class to give the impression that they had now all been given the opportunity to go to university. In reality, this means they now do the same jobs as they always did, with many professions no better trained than they were 50 years ago, but with all these people left with huge bills for a level of education they got in the past for free and while earning a salary.
Indeed, it's also keeping young people out of the job market, akin to the impact of mandatory military service decades ago. And now there's talk of reintroducing it, as the University degree is being exposed as scam.
"Hey, instead of trying to transform our country into the modern era, let's take our country back to a previous era, and essentially keep it behind everyone else. That sure is a great idea". There are words I wish I could call you, but TH-cam keeps deleting my comments, so I won't.
@@danielutriabrooks477 See, this is the problem with people - they fail to realize that we must always progress. Your feelings should not make us regress.
But it has not been an advance. People are not better educated or better prepared for their job. The cost of training for a profession was shifted from the employer to the employee and the pretence was that they had achieved ‘social mobility’ because they had gone to university. The generation where the most working class people got into ‘higher professions’ such as medicine, law, engineering or architecture were those who went through high school between 1950 and 1980. How is it better if fewer working class kids get into these professions than 50 years ago, and those starting in pretty average professions do so saddled with debt.
Thank god I live in a country without tuition fees. That is a really stupid idea, since you should train your countries best students to maximise your job markets productivity, not the ones who can pay for it the most, because their parents are rich. It is better to tax the successful then after it to finance it from those that have enough to spare. And before anybody says, that would not create an incentive to finish university, let alone successfully so, I think you are a. leaving in a dream world if you think any student is not keenly aware of wanting to get a good job, but b. that should clearly be managed by tight checks on students progress in an educational sense, not a monetary one. Also, you should have a working non-university model for getting the knowledge for many jobs, which I feel the UK is also lacking. That at least is less a just UK issue, but there are better models out there that function even in our modern world. Heck in Germany there are even hybrid models between learning a trade and going to university, to address the rising need for non-academic, but university level engineering, IT, specialised STEM or business graduates. They have been super successful and are significantly paid for by the companies, just like trades are.
I fully concur that universities should primarily serve as institutions of learning, emphasizing selectivity based on academic merit rather than functioning as mere facilitators of visas for foreign students.
@@unidentified5390 No, but only since you left the EU. Most EU/EEA citizens can study for free, and the fee for non EU citizens is between 1500-3500€, so still less than in the UK. You need to be accepted first of course. And while the UK may rank more highly for its 3 most elite university by some measures, the rest are at best comparable to decent public universities here. There are elite private universities that can charge whatever they want, but they are fairly few, most for very highly specialised topics.
The b b c is not for direct entry, that was for pathway course. Which is known as foundation year before getting into main course. And if student can't secure certain mark typically 2:1 they do not get progression into main course. So that doesn't affect domestic students.
I'd love to be able to go over the books for some of the universities, it would be interesting to actually see exactly what money is going in and out. I feel that the perception is that universities are generally not very good at managing their money and would love to actually see if its true or not.
The univerisity I go to do not even have in-person lectures anymore, just some bland recorded mini lectures that usually don't make much sense. The only in-person sessions are seminars. In other words there is no in-person teaching at all. And due to strikes and teacher absences those seminars do not operate properly either.
@@keysersoze1522 Did you know that people actually communicate differently depending on the context? You may notice that we're in a youtube comment section, if you have anything valuable to say, please say that instead. :)
Some important points here about international students: A lot of intl. students came to the UK, because the UK was a connection point to the EU and the US. So even if the way they were treated was shite (high visa prices, being scapegoats when they can’t even vote), it was worth the high price of admission. Now, the UK is isolated. Not only that, they insist on putting a minimum floor for skilled visas (38,000 pounds), which is well in excess of most fields. Which means, most are being kicked out after finishing their education. Not only in broadly useful fields, but also in law and finance. They also get double taxed: NHS surcharge is in excess of 1000 pounds per year, on top of paying for national insurance. So… a person earning 38,000 pounds is paying taxes like they are earning 48,00 pounds. So, looking at those circumstances… why would an international student want to study in the UK?
"putting a minimum floor for skilled visas (38,000 pounds), which is well in excess of most fields." If you look at the average salary in the UK 38k£ cannot be considered high for a skilled visa. I was making 35k£ on a STEM field with zero experience in 2019. It is almost impossible to find an offer in the same field in 2024 that is below 40k£ (and you have to be very desperate to take it). If you do not have an offer above that threshold is because you do not bring enough value to the company (and therefore the country) to make it economically profitable to issue you a visa. Let us take into account someone on a 38k£ salary pays around 4.8k£ in taxes and 2.9k£ in NI per year. All it takes is for that person to have 1 child in the school system and is almost costing the country more than they pay in. One visit to the doctor and is a negative contribution.
@@rafaelcosta3238 I'm a postdoctoral research scientist at a UK university and I get paid considerably less than £38k. Standard postdoc pay outside of London is ~£36k though some universities will pay quite a bit less than that (e.g. mine). You could argue that a postdoctoral scientist in academia is less valuable than someone in industry, but I'd still class it as "skilled work" considering a PhD and demonstrable research output is a pre-requisite. A lot of Postdocs in the UK come from all around the world because the UK still does have some very prestigious institutions that conduct world-leading research, but the £38k skilled visa now requirement basically precludes international applicants from postdoctoral research jobs. For a government that claims it wants to make the UK a "science superpower" this is a very odd decision. Universities could of course get around this problem simply by paying their researchers more, but we all know this is not going to happen.
@@TheWiseSalmon " I'd still class it as "skilled work" considering a PhD and demonstrable research output is a pre-requisite" You do, but the job market doesn't. We cannot give "skilled work" visas to people earning barely more than the average wage.
@@rafaelcosta3238 but what about nurses and teachers? Both undoubtedly skilled jobs that are necessary to have a country that functions well. Both careers where many jobs pay less than £38.7 k a year.
I didn't know about the difference in admission criteria. I think this is really bad, also as I suspect it will also force lecturers to lower the overall level of what they will be teaching (since failing students is rather unpopular nowadays).
What I never understood is why such an important decision like brexit was decided by a simple majority of votes. A decision whose impact can span into generations. Just incredible.
@@sagunsingh7415 Is it democracy if the brexit advertised before teh vote is different from the brexit delivered after the vote? More like a bait and switch no?
For all the intellectual brains running a university they still could not figure out how to run a profitable education system. Overpriced and still going bankrupt is a sign of inefficiency. Scary to pay money to learn from these smart people.
You may have missed another high impact point - the pandemic. These university businesses kept all the fees despite low standard online learning. This upset a lot of families, siblings, and other relations
![[MV] A leap of faith...ความเชื่อใจครั้งสุดท้าย (From "Petrichor the series")](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/U1piZH2CNXA/mqdefault.jpg)
_"Universities are still one of the few things the UK does well"_
Westminster: _TARGET ACQUIRED!_
UK universities also have a terrible reputation for bad free speech, so its already going down the drain
Oo
If it isn’t in London, they don’t care…so make sure to choose yourself a London University 😂
Tories*
@@theweirdsideofreddit3079 King's College London over King's College Cambridge? With regrets to Henry IV, yes, I suppose it's moving that way.
In rushing to blame the government, you miss out a very important issue. Universities have become huge managerial bureaucracies. They pay insane salaries to the people at the top who don't even teach or research, and they have been taken over by administrators who create reasons for their own existence and interfere with the teaching by the faculty. Academics are pushed to work long hours and produce several poor quality research papers a year, whereas previously they would produce one good paper every two or three years. The reason it's suddenly so expensive to 'teach' students (who actually receive less teaching than ever before) is that universities have become corporations rather than institutions, with all the nonsense that comes with that.
Here in Australia Prime Minister Gough Whitlam made ALL university courses completely free in 1974; I received a free teaching degree. The govt. funded everything, overseas students studied fee-free too. In 1990 (also under the ALP) the HECS contibution scheme charged for all courses, students from overseas were charged more than Aus. citizens. Gradually, Unis have developed charging into a science and rely heavily on overseas full-fee paying students. Overseas student enrolment has now dropped sharply, consequently unis are crying poor...their "science" was wrong and greedy. Education in Australia is in crisis at every level....I finished high school teaching before the crisis....Tertiary Education in the future will be as it was in the pre-industrial era; the reserve of those who can pay with the majority pop. working in the "cottage". It's a bleak prediction, but based on current trajectories both here and the in the UK, is sadly, the only plausible final outcome.
agreed. Maybe high school graduates should seriously think of trades and vocations. Or even start a business.
They have also become unelected semi political bodies, almost like a voice piece for the equally as unelected NGOs, to influence government decisions.
Spot on
This is true, but I dont see how it absolves the Tories as they have damaged Universities in a completely different way in terms of day to day operating costs.
I used to work at the university of Essex which of course is in the UK. In 2018 during a meeting with management the head of the university said to other managers," I don't care what you have to f*cking say or do just get the f*cking tuition fees off them!" He was of course refering to signing up new students. If you're a parent and you are thinking of sending your son/daughter to Essex university then don't. If you go to their open days the management instruct staff and researchers to lie to you about job prospects for graduates in the hope they can get those tuition fees. What they never tell you are where graduates end up after leaving with their piece of paper and the reason they don't readily tell you is that the numbers are so shocking. Essex uni has one of the lowest job prospects for graduates.
Oh and they use the same exams year in year out in a desperate bid to raise their rankings. Oh and don't even get me started on the dyslexia scam. The more dyslexia students they say they have the more money they can get. It's total bullshit!
Hi. I was working on a site with a group of tradespeople near Essex university a few years ago, right near where many of the students live. I saw so many young people walking by, I presume going to and from the university. So many young people, paying so much money (or getting into debt). In about ten minutes over 40 people must have walked by. Such a huge debt there. There was a young bloke on site who took the trades option and I said to him "Just think about the debt they are getting" he took a different path and avoided this. So sad for so many of these people, sold a dream which in many cases is a deception.
@@homegardens7682 that young chap will out earn all of those people. The problem is with getting a degree is that they have no value as virtually everybody has one. In fact even higher level qualifications such as a masters of a phd aren't much better. I had a friend at Essex who had to exclude her phd qualification ( biologist) just to get a job as a receptionist in a school.
Yes, sold a dream is exactly how i would describe it. At the open days, staff would be instructed that Pfizer and GSK regular come to the university to identify potential students to work on blah blah blah. This is a total lie but like you say, "they are selling a dream"
Totally agree, Essex is a diploma mill. I am an ex staff member. Multiple bars and a nightclub on campus, there was nothing for the students to do but drink. Some would come to class drunk at 9am. Truly heartbreaking. Of course, Anthony the VC is making £200000+ per year, all expenses including private chef paid for, about to retire with a nice pension. Meanwhile, admin is abusing both the instructors and the students . The students very quickly realize that they do not have a future post uni, with data science MS graduates working as waiters in Colchester.
@@User2024now haha I didn't know Tony had a private chef. I'm sure the students in biological sciences who are told that for their third year projects they'll be growing some plants and counting the seeds that are produced will fully understand where the cash is going.
@@homegardens7682 tell the young guy on your site the he has made the right decision. Even with a science PhD you'd struggle to get a job above minimum so just think what chabce those with a degree have.
Is there anything in the UK which isn’t in crisis?
Pensions
@@matt5347not exactly. There was a bit of a scandal recently covered by metro
Millions of things in the UK are working well. Maybe you spend too much time on social media.
@@matt5347Give it a few months
@@Purple_flower09Like what. Go on. Name some. Because I can't get a house, a train, a bus, a gp appointment, a job. Can't afford to rent or have a kid, can't get a decent education. Cant rely on the police to protect me from criminals.
When you have to buy your own books, have limited printers available to print and none for free, accommodate yourself, feed yourself, and have say 100 people on your course, how the fuck does it cost £5000 per student per year in the first place. I'm baffled.
easy. privatise the whole venture, reduce government funding and bring in 'managers' who demand a high-paying salary for 'managing' the 'business'
Why do teachers accept printed assignments? All teachers should just accept that students submit their work through email and/or digital kiosk.
Students will save money on the cost of printers and the paper and as well as the ink and and it will be much better for the environment.
On my course, e-books are enough - most students don't buy a single book and they do fine - they can access an e-book from anywhere via the library site. None of them print anything elther - it's all electronic submissions. How it costs that much - staff. There are teaching staff, but also technicians, librarians, admin staff, student support staff... 100 students would bring in £1 million a year, which doesn't go that far if lecturing staff are on an average of, say, £50k (plus employer pension and NI, etc.), not to mention utility costs, software licenses... and there are lots of courses with fewer than 100 students.
@@gayakola3 A degree from one of the "lesser" universities is almost worthless and a complete waste of money! Those "universities" or rather "doss houses" should be allowed to declare bankruptcy! However, there are too many "managers" who need employment, for that to happen!
5000 ? Per year? And you complaining?
Gosh international students paying at least 20 000
The video does not once question why it costs the university over £11k per student.
A few hours of lectures and the rest of the time reading from books (paid or at additional expense to the students).
Instead of suggesting more money needs to be spent, how about an explanation as to how the university needs over £11k per student just to break even... Where is this excess money going? Wages? Pensions?
Also, a sleight of hand from the presenter here. When he compared tuition fees increase against inflation, he neglected to mention that the year before his comparison, tuition fees were under 4 grand. So the inflation picture looks a lot different... This is how to lie with statistics.
I agree with the point around questionning why it costs so much per student, particularly for non-lab based students. However the reason that tuition went up from 4 to 9k in one year was due to the fact the English government withdrew funding and shifted the costs to students via student loans instead. So it isn't really relevent to compare the two years for this argument.
agreed the math doesnt add up and this video is super misleading about it
Pension and overblown back office. Why do you need to contribute 20% pension and crazy amount of annual leave.
I also thought it was very weird that the presenter didn't even mention fees were much lower before.
I really, really want to start seeing some breakdowns of where universities spend their money.
I can understand how some things cost a lot. Eg. Building works. Investing in new facilities costs a lot (even if you do it efficiently), repairing old buildings can cost a lot. Although there's room for cost cutting there, some level of investment will always exist.
Similarly, staff, software licenses, materials, and all the required people to manage that. You need a pretty large IT/Admin/Library team, and that's fine. You also need people working in finance to make the budgets and to invest - fine. And finally... you do need researchers.
But my university is small and it takes 3000 new undergraduates a year. Let's pretend undergrads all do 3 year courses. That is a minimum of £27.7 million from each intake every year - and that's £83.25m per year coming in from undergrad tuition. This is excluding scholarship & bursary recipients but also excluding post-grads and international undergrads, who pay more... it's also excluding fees students pay for some events and the universities who own accommodation recieving rental income. It's also excluding all other investment income.
I know running a university is expensive but that is a lot of money. In reality, my university has income more like 10x that amount, according to their own site. And it's so, so hard to see where it goes as a student.
The worst thing the government did to universities was to stop subsidising tuition fees for nursing students. We'll always need nurses, but what exactly are the incentives for young people to become a nurse? Back in 2010 when I did my degree, the only benefit I could see of studying nursing (as opposed to another useful degree like psychology) was the lack of debt at the end of it.
If most of the nurses didn't leave immediately then you'd have a point, but we were mostly just providing the world with nurses, while we got ours from other countries.
@@SaintGerbilUK 1. That was only a fraction of total nurses. "Most" is a comical overstatement.
2. That could have been fixed by improving working conditions. It's not like people uproot their lifes just for trivial reasons.
3. "while we got ours from other countries" Well yes so what exactly is the issue anyways? The UK trains some nurses that leave and gets some nurses that were trained abroad.
Why do nurses need degrees they didn't until Tony Blair decided making it degree only would make it more prestigious
Psychology isn't a good choice these days: the postgraduate job market is extremely competitive for several reasons but the problem with that is that you need experience in order to be admitted to any of the professional doctoral training courses that allow you to become a full practitioner psychologist in your chosen specialism. If I may offer myself as an example, I spent years working as a healthcare assistant and even did a 9-month stint as an unpaid honorary assistant psychologist to try and break through the experience ceiling but I never got anywhere. I and many of my classmates from my cohort have noted that the field seems to seek out specific demographics (can't help but notice that most psychologists are middle class women) for doctoral training and everyone else can go to hell. Thankfully I now work in data science for the defense & intelligence sector with much better pay, working conditions, and employee benefits, but I like many other psych grads struggled for years in low paid and overworked jobs to try our best to progress, but the opportunities needed simply aren't there for a lot of hopeful psychologists when we need them. I hope the irony isn't lost on you all regarding how difficult it is to become a psychologist at a time when we've had a mental health crisis for years! In a nutshell, I caution anyone reading this against choosing psychology as your career because no matter how hard you work or how much effort you put in, a good degree and work experience isn't a guarantee of success and you're probably better off choosing a different profession, at least until the situation improves. (Reposted since my first comment got deleted somehow while I was editing it)
It's the working conditions of being a nurse and the lack of jobs to be a nurse. Teams keep getting cut smaller and smaller, and thus the working conditions get harder, then they leave to do anything but nursing ever again. It's not about the education.
I'm finding it hard to feel sorry for them. They have made being a student miserable and the cost simply can not be justified anymore when postgraduates STILL cant even find work. It's seen as an investment, but they have turned it into a high risk investment. People aren't willing to take that risk, not to mention the ramifications it has on student's lives. If you go to uni, you cant afford to save money, you cant afford rent, let alone a mortgage, you cant afford to feed your family or even start a family..... so is it really worth it to a lot of people?
I actually think the universities should be co-signers for student loans.
Yes that would be worse for them, but then they will be selective about who they take on.
You're over exaggerating tbh. You don't have to pay back any of the loans. It gets written off after 30 years. Once you get a job it's just treated like an extra tax so you can forget about it. It doesn't actually impact your life much.
I'm not planning on paying back any of my loans bar the minimum amount that gets taxed out of my salary automatically.
@@chickenmadness1732 "written off" means payed for by tax payers.
The money has to come from somewhere.
@@SaintGerbilUK...So they'd only accept rich people?
@@SaintGerbilUKThat's fine. It should be free in the first place like it is everywhere else in Europe.
From the inside: huge salaries mainly for admin, nepotism, high and rising fees, high cost of living for students
I think the focus of the debate should be why it's so expensive, and not trying to come up with ways fill the shortfalls.
I'm baffled as to how it remains so expensive while lecturers are on strike several times a year about their pay and conditions. Plus some universities are massively cutting their budgets for degrees in the arts and history. Where is the money actually going?
@@bassetts1899the higher ups
🤫 Or they'll realise you're right and start slashing staffing costs, building maintenance quality and frequency, along with tools and equipment, so we end up with the education equivalent of hospitals.
On the actual point you raise, I don't know that it is "so expensive". A lot of people are involved in such institutions, some of the most critical won't do it for lower wages as they're able to work for businesses instead, likely making far more money and not having to put up with a bunch of "meddling kids".
They need to keep equipment somewhat up to the date, for the training to be relevant for what they're training in, they take up a fair bit of land and their "customer base" (so to speak) is highly limited. Their only potential for *significant & sustained* income that's not tied to how many they're able to enroll is through patents and to a less extent, cooperative development agreements with industry.
Just some thoughts, I'm not well informed on the topic though (dunno I'm sharing from a position of ignorance, but ... here I am)
@@bassetts1899 Administration
It is 11000€ in Germany per student. I am not so sure about it being expensive. We are not talking about really high numbers compared to the uk wealth.
If you want it cheaper, it can only be done by making studies worse, e.g. not investing into essential equipment and buildings, getting competent staff etc. That's simply wrong. In Germany, the state pays for the university costs, so it's much cheaper (you only need money for rental, food etc, not for education). So you can either raise the fee or put some tax money to keep prices low.
Amazing British universities have given us big brains like Boris Johnson (Oxford), Liz Truss (Oxford), and Kwasi Kwarteng (Cambridge)
@@DDSizeBra , the Un-nobel prize winners
there are more than one reason to close them down..!
Savage.
Kwazi is OK, he is just being too honest (he admitted that the inflation of tax thresholds were a part of his plan, and he was kinda right. I liked his policies too, many in my quarters did).
You can't polish a poop in to a diamond
It's becoming like the international students are the full-fee paying customers and the British students are the "scholarship" students.
so what is wrong with that? Always gonna have some sort of previlges for home students and if they are meritorious they can do easy avail
@@optus7113 well if they have priveliges then there won't be much international students lol
and those will be bankrupt. its the intl students are paying your tuition@@optus7113
another angle - they want international tuition money but wont accept international cultures in the society, that's hypocrisy of the right.
its more like the other way round. Internationals can get scholarship as there are more range and less range for home students
What they did over COVID was a joke. 9 k for a online and no face to face lessons...
Costs for universities didn't really go down during COVID. Staff costs (which are most of the costs) were the same, even empty buildings have to be maintained, and more licenses for online learning platforms had to be paid for.
@@IntrovertnetBut these are all fixed costs, whereas since it's online, there's no limit to the number of students they can admit, so they could've just lowered prices and offset it by admitting more students.
@@me-myself-i787 No
@@Kalenz1234yes
Online degrees cost very little to run compared with face to face, but they still charge top dollar.
Halting prospects of international students when you want them in your university to pay those insane prices. A lot of parents don't think it's worth it to send them to the UK, when there are better options such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The UK has been on a high horse for too long in terms of so called academic prestige, that is very much replaceable.
Universities in NZ and Canada are a huge disaster. Australian universities have much better reputation but I do not know if this good reputation is justified.
all of campuses in countries you mentioned in your comment are all money eaters, and they are the example of what commercial-oriented education looks like. They got reputation because of their name only.
@@iljaviktorov1799 I think the idea here is that they can have decent prospects within the country, upon graduation. Instead, the UK has a much harsher immigration policy for their overseas graduates.
Meanwhile Singapore is charging foreign students the same subsidized university school fees as locals if they commit to working locally for at least 3 years after graduation (under the Tuition Grant scheme). & I heard of teachers being sent to other countries e.g. China to identify foreign students to award scholarships to to study in Singapore (from secondary/middle school onwards). For foreign students without scholarship, those from ASEAN (Association of SE Asian Nations) countries (of which Singapore is a member) are sometimes charged a lower rate than those from other countries. I also guess that foreign students have a higher chance of eventually getting PR if they are on scholarship.
Those countries you counted are no better too, especially Canada.
United States is the only English speaking country that having the best universities, if you have money.
If you don’t have money, go to the Europe.
British unis are a rip-off. The level of edu is not worth the terrible tuition fees, in particular when they charge unacceptable fees "overseas" students. Majority of the young see the study in the UK as a chance later to stay there and find a job. As for the edu, the UK provides the average level of edu.
It’s almost like education works better as a public good, not a for-profit industry. Totally inconceivable…
Universities are not for profit.
Tony Blair wanted half the population to go through university, which was obviously unaffordable. He took away education as a way out of poverty by diluting its value.
Everything works better with a lot of money, but the question is whether the state has the capacity of providing the service or not. It is easy to think that the state has infinite amounts of money, but it is more likely that countries have to have an extremely good economic condition to invest in education. Even France has had to undergo some cuts in education budget.
Besides, those universities are extremely politicised.
The corporatization of higher education (chancellor salary and bonuses) is a key reason.
Did you even watch the video? The reason universities are losing money isn't to do with them being for profit.
One thing that i think is important to mention is that in 2012 the cap for UK student fees was raised from £3k to £9k a year, whilst at the same time central government funding of universities was slashed (due to austerity) so whilst at first it looks like universities were getting 3x more money per student, in actuality it stayed the same and over time actually became less (because of the cap being frozen and not keeping up with inflation)
i am sure, you love the Tories for that... there is no need for working class kids to go to university!
Tuition fees were introduced by Labour in 1998.
Funding used to be anywhere up to 80% funded from central gov. But there was also a numbers cap. Contrary to what would make sense I.e removing the cap for more students=more money. Without a predictable allocation of resources each year Universities may spend aggressively in an ‘open market’ and fail to recoup costs if numbers drop the following year. Universities have to essentially ’grow or die’ at the expense of each other
It was pretty obvious to everyone that that was the entire point of increasing tuition fees, Peter Mandelson who would have been tasked with implementing it had labour stayed in power admitted to rigging the "independent" report they'd timed to be released after the election to recommend a rise in tuition fees to fill the hole left by the cuts he wanted to make to university funding.
@@davidlegrice4207 good ole’ Mandy
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This is from ChatGPT... this channel uses engagement bots. "Chapter 7?" That's US law.
Uk student here paying £9250 a year for an average of 6-8 hours of lectures and about the same in pre recorded lectures per week. The university terms are basically oct-may with breaks for Christmas and Easter, so about 7 months total.
So assume 32 hours per week for 30 weeks, that totals to 960 hours a year. Just over £9.50 an hour.
This is per person in an engineering degree, with almost no practical work to speak of. Its all lectures and theory.
Recently the university invested millions into a new tech building featuring all sorts of high end stuff prominantly displayed for passers by to see. These get used by a handful of people doing research.
So I highly doubt the university is losing any money on your average undergrad, rather it wastes the majority of it on stuff only a few people will see in their entire uni experience.
My experience as well. We go in and some guy at the front of the classroom talks at us for a couple hours.
£9k per student for that and they're going bankrupt?
They should stop wasting money then because they're not spending it on the students.
when you were at secondary school that cost £6.2k a year per child for the government. Engineering costs more than humanities etc, your course probably costs much more than £12k per student to run. Your teachers are super qualified academics who also do research - they are going to be paid much more than secondary school teachers, although lots of their pay will come from grants for their research.
Your facilities are expensive. 9k does not go very far at all. Of course some of the university and its buildings are research orientated - you shouldn't expect that every building is made for you. Your contact hours are actually on the high side for the UK and self-directed study is a huge part of what Uni actually is.
A lot of people on this chat seem to see universities as just a super-college, and that they are paying a transaction for a service. Universities are knowledge and research centres that also provide degrees that lead to jobs. Your loan is structured as a graduate tax that you don't pay back if you don't succeed / 30 years later. If your course does not lead to many job prospects then you chose the wrong course.
30 months in a single year? That's all 3 years in one not per year. Each term is only about 11 weeks long and the 3rd term is always shorter so total about 25ish weeks each year of 8 hour lectures is 200 hours a year that's about £46 per hour. Way higher if you do your maths right
@@Barney_Wharam my point is, you receive a fraction of the time you would in secondary school, and with next to no practical work, there are barely any costly experiments for us to run. Multiply the £9.50 per hour by 80 students, and you get £760 per hour. I haven't added how many of the lecturers are extremely poor teachers compared to other schools (confirmed by them). And the idea is you shouldn't aim to not earn enough to pay back the loan
Lectures are pretty cheap. It's practicals and the like that are expensive to unis.
The issue here is not really overspending. UK unis definitely spend a little more than they should but if you compare internationally it's not that significant. The issue is the lack of government funding.
sometimes I forget how good we have it up in Scotland, free tuition for every Scottish citizen really is a privilege
Im sure the "patriotic" first minister will change that and ensure immigrants get that money
@@vanguard8889 bro the term is literally "no true scotsman"
Tbf though paying back the student loan isn't really that much of a problem in the uk. It's a small tax
@@SASMADBRUV7 ye tbf we probably end up paying the same when you take into account the difference in tax
@@vanguard8889you are making fun calling patriotic because he is not white ?
So as a graduate who worked for my university and befriended a Ph. D Student who told me all about it.
The government stopped basically subsiding student capacity and instead gave money based on research. So the fees were brought up to the cost of teaching and the more research the uni pump out (and supposedly influences the research field) the more they!d get for facilities for teaching and research.
THIS is why universities pretty much employ lecturers on a ‘if you don’t pump out research papers and teach your specialism and play a role in your subject here, you get booted out’ basis. So they work long hours, universities don’t pay them for ALL of their time, publishers make huge profit on the publishing (lecturer see none of it btw). The uni money is also stretched to fund their marketing and admin teams which no one knows is there but their jobs are to pump out ‘come here!’ propaganda and steal students (paying customers) away from the competition.
More students = more grants = more staff = more research = more money = more buildings = more students and it goes on.
That’s also why universities seem to take up whole city centres now. It’s not until you’ve been there that you see how influential the ripple effect from a student population is. They fill jobs, they stimulate the local economies. Universities as a whole are worth billions from all these cycles of money and influence.
It's mostly a waste of time. I am convinced that you could cut the bottom 70% of UK courses and it would have no impact on UK productivity - it would probably go up as people would work for another 3 years. University used to be for the academically elite, now it is for anybody. 95% of jobs can be done with the teaching up to A Levels - only a few STEM and vocational jobs need further academic training. The government needs to push apprenticeships - on the job experience and learning is far more valuable
@@NH-gw3vc I don't disagree with the general idea but the problem is the framing.
Apprenticeships have dropped for a lot of reasons - lack of investment, the big "push into higher education" and so on, but one of the major reasons is... employers don't want to pay the cost of training up an employee to a qualified level. Because at that point, the apprentice-turned-employee could leave and they will effectively have lost out on a lot of time and energy. It's a genuine issue and needs to be sorted out, because until something changes, they won't have incentives to offer apprenticeships.
Young people, aged 18, will sit and look at their available options. They want to upskill themselves and do some sort of further qualification. Their current options are a) university degrees or b) fighting for one of the very, very few apprenticeships out there. You can see why most people end up going for option A - even if they would've preferred an apprenticeship.
We could cut university places but that would leave these people staggering. There's already a hiring issue where most jobs want a degree and pay 25k. Having a huge increase in the number of young people struggling to get jobs would be useless.
Cutting down on higher education placements would have to come later. Step 1? Make apprenticeships more abundant and worth something more. Once those start coming about, a gradual shift will begin and student numbers will start dropping a little on their own. After that, you can see what more needs doing - but starting with decimating universities is a terrible plan.
The fees haven't risen since 2012!? Well neither have wages
But costs have rocketed
Students can borrow more 🎉
This isn't, for universities which are part of national pay agreements (nearly all) there has been a percentage increase nearly every year. For example for the first university i looked at just now, the lowest lecturer salary was 33k in 2020 (the earliest they have online) and this year it is 37k. While it can be said staff aren't paid enough, and many other issues, they have had a pay rise.
they have received a pay rise but in real terms with inflation and higher rents/mortgages considered, it's a pay loss@@chriskeene
Well, since 2011, tuition fees have more than tripled. In 2011 they were under £3500 per year, and the following year they went to £9k. The presenter did a sleight of hand by starting from exactly 2012, with no mention of the 250+% jump in fees only the year before.
Who would have thought, that the Tories would not match the EU's funds for British Universities?? About 52%, in 2016.
Another Brexit win.
@@passais lol
@@passaisthe money is going to migrants instead of university. Same is being done all over the eu though.
@@duanebailey6253 i know, it's the immigrants, always the immigrants. Sigh...
💯@@Langstrath
You work for 40yrs to have $1m in your retirement, Meanwhile some people are putting just $10k in a meme coin for just few months and now they are multi millionaires. I pray that anyone who reads this will be successful in life
After I raised up to 325k trading with her I bought a new House and a car here in the states 🇺🇸🇺🇸also paid for my son's surgery (Oscar). Glory to God.shalom..
Yeah, 253k from Maria Davis, looking up to acquire a new House, blessings.
Bots...
@@Custodian123 whats funny is that most of the accounts are made on 1st of april
God bless you
It's almost like university fees are a fucking stupid idea.
As a student myself...I genuinely don't know what else they can do, if they are already struggling with £9k tuition fees.
How would you expect universities to operate if they cannot charge for the courses they run?
I guess the professors should just work for free, or maybe they should stop having courses which don't pay for themselves like "underwater basket weaving", "why white people are literally satan" and "listening to Taylor swift as a degree".
@@CommonWealthSnowstate funding as schools are potentially. I’m not saying we absolutely should do that but that’s how other countries fund higher education and lowers fees on students.
@CommonWealthSnow
In germany (and most of the EU), universities are free or really low cost (and even in italy, the most expensive in europe, there are still big deductions if your family can't afford the full price)
This has been coming for a long time. I studied in the UK at a smaller uni and about 70% of the students in my class where international students from the EU. Back then the extraa fees where paid through EU programes. Pretty shure there is no way for smaller institutions to replace all that lost revenue with people from outside of the EU.
Biggest problem in the UK is share holder to many of them sucking all the money out of the business
We shouldn't ignore the role which university managements have played. UEA, for example, has spent a fortune on new buildings while failing to maintain the old ones which now need emergency repairs.
The incentives from this comes from students and the "marketisation of universities" - ie The Tories. Students are "paying" 9k for their university and expect state of the art facilities. So universities invest in capital to entice good students and good staff. once they're here they can be bumped to the bad buildings.
If you don't invest in this way the students wont come, and if they don't come then all the other questions stop mattering.
Same at my uni. Useless, unnecessary building projects being prioritised over underpaid staff doing work essential to the running of the university. Absolutely shameful.
I spent 3 months in University of South Wales. The on-campus flat I lived in was supposedly 5 years old and I have seen half a decade old buildings in far better shape.
Universities are one of the few things the UK still does well. Brutal😭😭😢
That's just a lazy social media lie.
@@Purple_flower09 its literally a fact.
@@Purple_flower09 name something else that Britain is doing well in nowadays?
@@TedThomasTTyes if you want degrees in media, dance, drama etc, entry requirement is a cycling proficiency test grade B
But if you want engineering etc go to south east Asia, where you need decent grades in science based subjects.
Brexit is the gift that never stop on giving lmaooo
Tuition fees were not 'Introduced at 9000 pounds in 2012' they were introduced at 1000 pounds beginning 1997.
...They were, in fact, introduced in 1998, and only applied to students beginning their degrees in that year, which meant 2/3rds of students didn't have to pay them. This dropped to 1/3rd in 1999, and then everyone was getting soaked by 2000. It was the usual divide and rule tactic, and to be expected from the Labour right.
@@TruculentSheep announced 1997 I should have said.
Bold introduction! “Like everything else in the UK, universities are loosing money” 😳
*losing
as shown on this channel multiple times in the past few months, they are not wrong lol
Nothing wrong with this statement.
Losing
@@imtiazalam8187You would think this would’ve been rectified after the comment was edited, too. Yikes.
It's incredible to me that, over the last 6 years, I don't think a single positive piece of news or information has come out of the UK. It is really incredible how the country continues to get worse and worse
It turns out when you treat a country that only leads in like a few industries (Publishing) like a business then it starts to go bankrupt. Add the fact that it abandoned it's closet trading partners to be closer to a nation that's a literal ocean apart and this is what you get.
@@TheJonesdude Not to mention just how much of the nation is overdependent on the finance industry, which has continued to struggle through recent years, and is getting walloped by new fintech companies. The UK has like, zero notable tech companies
@@moomie1634 No tech companies, no leading car manufactures, no Software and a weak video game industry. The UK use to lead the world in ship building, some people seem to be under the delusion that it still does. But how many ships leave Sunderland and Manchester?
British companies aren't even British anymore. Cadbury is American. BP is mostly owned by American shareholders. We have to buy our energy from the French.
Corrupt politicians have destroyed this country.
@@moomie1634 ARM is a notable one for creating the processor architecture that is powering our phones. Not British owned, but still headquartered in England
There is also the Raspberry Pi.
@@Ozzianman oh boy what would the world do without the RASBERRY PI. Oh deary me. We're doomed without it
Well, if you try to run an educational institution as a business, this is what you get.
The thing that always got me as a student is how a 30-per-year engineering class with 20 hours of lectures and labs every week and 10 plus full-time staff was able to be run at a net positive for the university while a 200-per-year psychology course with 10 hours of lectures and labs every week and 6 full-time staff was a net loss for the university. It never made sense.
Truthfully, it will be the research departments. Universities currently have a two pronged role as places of education, and places of research. Its entirely up to you if you agree with that or not, but thats the way it goes.
And research is fucking expensive. It sounds like your uni's psychology department was far bigger than your engineering department, so while the psychology undergrad course would make money, the sheer amount of researchers would have eaten away at that number and more.
And in my experience, universities would rather be seen as amazing at one thing, than "pretty good" at everything, so they'll keep subsidising their huge psychology department while making their engineering departments foot the bill, meaning that the profits of engineering are siphoned off to psychology research
@@xenon8342
"Universities currently have a two pronged role as places of education, and places of research"
What do you mean by currently?
It was always like that.
University Professors doing research has been around since European Universities were founded (possibly the same elsewhere, I do not know).
If it has always been like that it needs to change. We should have two types of institutions. One an undergraduate teaching institution and one a research institute. That way the undergraduate is just being charged for his or her course.
@@rafaelcosta3238Most of that research was done either independently or thanks to goverment/elite patronage, not thanks to the university itself
@@samfyfe2949 It isn't really that simple, as many undergraduates also do research and are expected to have some research experience for postgraduate courses.
40+ years of stripping the copper out of the walls of the British estate will do this.
My very close friend move to london 7 months, he is there to accompany the wife as she has scholarship to study there for 3 years, my fren followed, he is allowed to work.
1st month is a real test to him, getting a place to stay , looking for job makes him cried.
2nd month he get a full-time job, the may is minimum but good enough for him, but the tax is 25%. Shocked him.
3rd month the wife pregnant, the landlord ask them to move.
Another test trying to look for a place to stay when you have a pregnant wife. He said every month is a test, if it wasn't becos of the wife, he would go back to work in SEA anytime. Life is hard there even the pound sounds great!
No offense but your friend is so stupid. Why would you get pregnant your wife while you are unemployed and your wife is still studying?
A degree is not worth the paper it's printed on. It's the biggest impediment to finding a job in the UK. I was part of that mass exodus of further and higher education teachers who left the UK from the early 2000s when the work dried up. Take your knowledge and skills abroad where it's valued.
This. I emigrated in 2015 to Europe. Business-friendly, quality of life is phenomenal.
My mother works for one of the big unis that's run out of room now to juggle funding gaps which began way back in the 2010's. They've already gutted out a lot of their high-paying jobs with voluntary redundancies over the past 12 months, and now it's likely that mass layoffs will happen come summer. So if you ignore the general mess that the UK's higher education model is (fees, funding, etc), the impending pop of this bubble is also going to cripple local economies when a large portion of their workforce suddenly finds themselves unemployed.
Notable that the universities in serious crisis at the moment are former polytechnics. Seems the problem to me is that there are too many universities, does the UK really need 166 universities? There are only 76 cities.
@@ryank3321 Agree! A degree from the former polytechnics is worthless. The level of student they attract would not compare to a group 1, 14 year old attending high school. Far too many universities, providing well paid jobs to high earning middle management.
It is refreshing to hear that high-paying middle management jobs with little accountability and no measurable output have been removed. The local economies will have to re-invent themselves to survive! The function of a university is to provide academia, not to support the local economy.
I'm an international student studying Mathematics at King's College London. I don't agree with a lot of the points in this video. The reason it's going bankrupt is because universities in the U.S are far better. The Times ranking is nonsense. Many asian and european students prefer an average US university as opposed to a top one in the UK. For example, I got into UCL, Edinburgh, and King's which are apparently great. But being honest I would have much rather gone to Rice or harvey mudd which are far far better, but not even in the top 150 according to times' nonsense rankings
Yep, that too. University rankings are back patting BS made in the UK to show how great UK universities are and attract more students and money to, you guessed it, the UK. What a great business model!
Got my bachelors at a Russell group uni. Now doing a medical degree at a Russell group uni. Both are supposedly top 15 in the country. The quality of teaching at both is shockingly bad. I did my masters at a polytechnic uni. The teaching there was the best I’ve ever had. I learnt more in that 1 year than either of the others. But employers did not care as much for it as it was not “prestigious”
The education system is a huge fucking joke and needs to be reformed, if not outright abolished. If they can teach online classes during covid, it’s barely a step away from just teaching yourself on TH-cam and Wikipedia, which is what most end up doing anyway.
Rankings are a joke. Education is a joke. The times “rankings” are barely more than propaganda. We don’t hold a candle to most American or even European countries, and it’s all propped up by an outdated and unearned reputation.
Honestly I've NEVER trusted those rankings. Students always say they study more and better at their public universities in Europe (even if they aren't that 'fancy') than in the UK, US, when they have a chance to compare. It's more about reputation than actual quality
Most degrees have become redundant anyway, my girlfriend has a Masters degree but hasn’t been able to fine a job for 4 months
Out of curiosity what field is that in? It's particularly bad in a few fields right now.
Four months? That’s kind of on her, you can get a basic office admin job in a week anywhere in the country. She is clearly being too picky
The lifetime graduate premium is still 130k for men and 100k for women (after accounting for taxes and student loans). The median salary for someone without a degree is 25k, the median salary for someone with a degree is 36K. There is still a big lifetime financial incentive to get a degree. Will you graduate and walk into a great paying job on day 1? Unlikely, but over your lifetime you're getter off.
This is across all subjects, there are subjects that are higher paying, but a study in 2015 found that 50% of graduate jobs didn't mention a subject.
@@paddy8254 The graduate premium has been plummeting and is negative for some humanities subjects. It's only the high quality degrees from good universities that are worth the time and money these days.
Most degrees were never actually about training for work. They were just an easy way for lazy employers to filter for 'the right sort of people' when only the rich could afford it. Now it just shows that you're in the top half of school leavers.
Universities should be a social utility, not a business. Education is a society's means of social reproduction. University should be free, period. Universities shouldn't be able to go "bankrupt" because they shouldn't be a profit driven enterprise.
This was the argument in the 1990s. Unfortunately, the U.K. decided to go down a path of 'inclusion' rather than 'excellence'.
Polytechnics were given degree-awarding powers. Blair wanted 50 per cent of young people arbitrarily to have a degree (why not 40 per cent, or 60 per cent?)
Anyhow, I escaped the U.K. in 2015.
@@threethrushes - for sure, man. Not only the UK; the USA, and Canada and much of the Anglophonic world as well. University expenses are absurd. You are correct in blaming it on the Blairites. What Americans need to wrap their brains around is that the Democratic Party went through the same transformation. The rise of Trump and his idiot minions is directly correlative with the collapse of New Deal with Ronald Reagan / GH Bush, followed by the Clinton Admin, who, in reality, was a continuation of the idiocy from Reagan/Bush, and it was the Clinton Admin that threw the working class under the bus. So, when the Dems offered up Hillary in 2016, you wonder why there was a subconscious revulsion? Yes, she should have been president (Trump won an Electoral College victory, not a popular victory) but she was the wrong candidate for the times in that she was the proper candidate for a useless Democratic party.
And now, the USA is in the seriously compromised position of either electing the rot from the DNC, or, simply revoking the American Democratic Experiment in the form of deranged Trumpian fascism. And NEITHER of them are in favour of actual public education. Instead, education is being reduced to job training - which is actually a gift to the corporations, as they don't have to pay for the training of their workers - you get the workers and the state to finance that... basically, industry offloaded training expenses onto the public sector. It is a recipe for catastrophe.
Bankruptcy has little to do with being a profit driven enterprise. Individuals can go bankrupt, charities can, countries technically can. If they can get into debt, they can go bankrupt. Treating things as too big or important to do so is part of what's causing the problem - they generate more debts that they'll likely never be able to pay and the cracks of the pressure of dealing with them ripple out to everyone else.
@@dehn6581 - if it's a government service, it, by definition, can't go bankrupt. It can lose money, but it can't go bankrupt.
ESPECIALLY in the USA with its currency. So, no, you're wrong.
@@Novalarke So what’s the solution, just keep blindly handing money to schools forever, no matter the price? Just because something is government funded doesn’t mean it’s efficient or well run.
Schools can be outrageously overpriced without being profitable.
Last year, I was hovering between Cambridge and Princeton, and I finally decided on Princeton. I’m really happy with my decision.
I was an international (EU) student in London for 5 years, in late 90s; studied for undergrad and two post-grad degrees and paid ZERO for tuition. All I had to do was to submit a form yearly, which the Uni authorities then forwarded to the local council in order to receive the EU grant funds for my tuition. That was it! Students, back then, were admitted on the basis of academic merit, not their ability to pay tuition fees. Anyway, another reason why Brexit was such a bad idea..
Perhaps this is the reason why the UK has failed its citizens. Did you pay back the tuition through post-grad income tax? Does your country offer free education to foreigners? Im sick of non-Brits taking advantage of national resources and thinking Brexit was a bad idea when resources are spent on people the gov isn't elected to represent. This is why China will win. Put your own first
@@vanguard8889 You' re totally wrong! British universities cannot cover their operational expenses without EU grants; that was the whole point of the video! The EU paid my tuition, not the British taxpayer! Only non-EU international students had to pay tuition fees, back then. At the beginning of each academic year, non-EU students had to pay their tuition and EU students had to do this EU paperwork, so that the Uni can get their grant money from the EU. I thought all this was common knowledge.. The UK economy benefitted significantly by the EU students; these were people that had costed the UK nothing and each one of them spent thousands of pounds of their own money per month in the UK, for 3 or more consecutive years. And to answer your question, yes my country does offer free education to foreigners; Universities here are public bodies and are funded exclusively by the state.
@@zix_zix_zix "The EU paid my tuition, not the British taxpayer! " lol Where do you think the EU got its money from? Was it the taxpayers from the EU countries maybe? Which 3 countries paid the most into the EU coffers? Was the UK one of them? You still have a lot to learn.
@@egastap Well if you really want to get into it, then most of that money came from the imperial periphery, but I don't expect you to know much about that
@@egastapUK is one lowest net positive per capita contribution to the EU. It looks big only becuase the population is big. Otherwise, most UK aspect is subsidized by EU.
Education should not be a for-profit commodity. It is a public good.
But then this country has privatised every other human right so far and they're working on healthcare too so what else would I expect.
But the universities aren't profiteering. That's the point.
The UK teaches their own students at a net loss to the economy as £9000 is not enough to cover the operating costs of the university.
Nationalising universities just means that the government has to now pay for it. With the fiscal headroom being very tight in current times like the aftermath of COVID or the ongoing Ukraine war, it would hard to make a case that this won't come with huge economic tradeoffs.
I don't buy loss of EU funding as a reason. Britain was a net contributor, all the EU did, was act as a middle-man for our own funding to pass through. The real reasons are a combination of demographics, foreign competition, poor policy, economic factors, and degrees too often offering poor value and not keeping pace.
how do you extort people and still go bankrupt
I think university only really makes sense now if you are going into STEM or a higher value field that requires it to enter the industry, such as Law or Medicine.
As a naive 17 year old back in 2009, I signed up for a Bachelors in Advertising, mainly because it was drilled into us at the time that it was essential to go.
It absolutely wasnt and there is no way I would do the same today, given that the cost of comparable courses are almost 4 times as high.
60-80k Debt for a degree that is, at best, an extra box tick on your CV, is not worth it.
STEM or the other fields you mention will become saturated too.
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgia I'd rather saturation in high skill areas instead of hoards of people with generic media or business studies degrees.
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgia Not at any time soon. UK is short of over 800,000 skilled electrical, electronics and mechanical engineers by 2030!
I just can't imagine universities making a loss on charging undergrads 9K a year. I just finished a phd in science, my bench fees (which we wouldn't always spend all of) were 4.5k a year and I probably did 200x more experiments a year than your typical undergrad. Now I get that my teaching fees from lecturers are vastly reduced but unis have giant lecture theatres where 1 lecturer teaches 300 students. So hard to see how that can cost 11k each per year.
Universities mostly own the buildings so no mortgage/loan for buildings.
Most universities charge a lot of money for accommodation (a small room with bed and desk sharing kitchen and often bathrooms)
They basic and expensive.
You know this
The introduction of the £9K cap in 2012 sparked considerable controversy, particularly as it was initially intended to apply primarily to prestigious universities. Moreover, it seemed to be motivated by a subtle political maneuver against Clegg, which proved to be quite effective, I must admit.
Britain is going to become a developing country tomorrow.
Two big universities in South Australia are currently merging - it might be an interesting case study.
Don't really need to look to Australia for case studies, some of our own universities are the result of mergers. London Metropolitan University is a merger between the University of North London and the London Guildhall University in 2002, and the University of South Wales was formed in 2013 from a merger of the University of Glamorgan and University of Wales, Newport.
Funny when you think back 40 years, everything worked ok, but now everything is broken.
The people studying this problem were part of creating it in the first place, they will never find the real cause.
UK and EU had much less immigrants. less no-go zones. less stabbing and less grooming gangs.
Are allowed to say the quiet part out loud? 🤔
Now one can perhaps ask the following question: which party has been in government for most of those 40 years? The Greens? Liberal Democrats? I'm having memory trouble...
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgia
C: 1979-1997
L:1997-2010
C:2010-present
Greed. Power. Short-term thinking.
When a society incentivizes and rewards these traits, any wonder why the elected representatives mirror that society?
The thing that killed universities was changing them from education and turning them into businesses. I went in the early 90s when it was still quite hard to get a Place and a lot less people went. I got my fees paid and a grant. Once they tried to get more and more people going the standards dropped as more people meant more money as grants turned to loans. It seems now the only qualification needed for some courses is having a pulse. Things need to go back to the old way of doing it. Less students and better quality. This will not happen of course and I see some universities folding and going away which may not be a bad thing.
I disagree. What the problem is a lot of what is being taught is just not valuable anymore. I spent many years in computer science and I have still not learnt more than I should have been able to learn using Google. Then they indoctrinate students into political ideologies and make students into activists. Why exactly should students who are there to learn be encouraged to get involved into politics?
This important video needs to be broadcast all over the internet. Lots of people need to understand this right now. No politician can fix this issue no matter what they promise without raising home student fees and bringing in more foreign students regardless of how the UK hates immigration apparently. If not then expect university closures, simple as that.
The main reason overseas student numbers went down is that the government changed the rules and no longer let the students bring all their dependents into the UK with them.
@@Purple_flower09 Pay lots of money to come to our country and study then perform roles that we are desperate for people to do BUT you can't bring any family
I wonder how other European countries finance their university education - not with fees as high as in the UK, in Germany for example it isn't tuition fees, but admin and so on and not higher than about 300-400 Euro.
The "business model" of universities is changing, the landscape is becoming more competitive internationally and domestically combined with rising costs and over expansion leads to (not for profit) universities losing money.
I completed a bachelor's degree in UK as an Intl fees paying student.
Then I moved to Findland to do a Master's degree.
In Finland then (2011) it was tuition free. Finland universities pay their teachers and research students better and higher salaries, the Universities are better equiped with all modern,new,state of the art equipments.
Notice that,they do all of that in Finland while charging no fees but the UK universities that would charge the HIGHEST fees in Europe are going broke. They spend so much money in UK on buildings. In the UK they have all these futuristic buildings on campuses whereas in Finland you can walk pass a University and not even realise it is a University but when you walk into the University then you get the BEST, MOST MODERN of books and equipments.
Finland is doing its best to repeat other countries mistakes, including UK. So we'll see how long it takes until we get to the same situation as the UK.
@@mikkokahkonen9183 Could you please elaborate on that? I intend to apply for phd in Finland in 2-3 years
The trajectory for UK universities is looking, in general very bleak. As an academic at a medium-sized university, everything that has been said is enitrley true. Since brexit, the number of international students (EU) has rapidly declined, and the public spending for universities is at an all-time low this century. It is around 15-20% currently, and compared to Germany/France/other EU countries, their respective % is at 60%+. What wasn't mentioned, which I believe should be, are the conditions of academics, and the fact more pressure is being put on teaching and ensuring a strong student satisfication. If this continues, more and more academics will be leaving academia completely, and that will provide a huge-shortage on teaching, and as a result students. As the lack of funding is increase, more is the dependency of international students, and less of a focus on research for academics. I do not think Labour will do much, my honest 2 cents is that public funding will increase (slightly, just) and that tuition fees will go up, it's inevitable.
Why don't they start work aged 16 and work their way up?
Running up massive debts on useless ology ''degrees'' ...yet another Blair, Blair, Blair disaster.
@@KILKennyLaDa9898-js2nr that will definitely work for many jobs but a) we still need doctors and nurses, and b) employers would need to be prepared to train new starters and take on apprentices much more than they currently do.
@@bassetts1899not enough students doing apprenticeships instead of degrees
The trajectory for the UK itself is looking quite bleak tbf
It's the fundamental approach that is broken. The UK is obsessed with fancy prestige unis like Oxford or Cambridge and even the ones that aren't anywhere close to that level are still obsessed with getting there. Yet this leads to overall worse education outcomes. Noone needs a handful of highly prestigious unis. What is needed is good education and research. Across the board.
In the US, it's the opposite. Governors have cut support to state universities, causing record high prices in tuition, creating the student debt crisis.
That's not really the opposite though is it, as our government has also cut support to universities, and has also massively increased the interest rate applied to student loans which contributes to our cost of living crisis.
Classic UK "Hey foreigners, give us all your money, and also go home! But psst, actually come here..."
Education should not be run like a business and it is not something we should be paying for with tuition fees. Further and higher education are essential for the betterment of our society. It makes a smarter, more productive population and helps with social mobility. I'd even go as far as saying that industries where we have a shortfall, there should be a stipend to encourage people to study in those fields. The stipend should also be means tested so if a mature student with a mortgage wants to become a doctor, we should have systems in place to allow them to do this.
We have nearly doubled the percentage of people who go to university since 2006 and things have only gotten worse since then.
So how do you justify that more people in university is better?
@@SaintGerbilUKwhy are you assuming that every problem in the country stems from university rates?
Who will pay the lecturers and staff?
@@adridaplague-boi I don't, I'm asking Mikey to validate his assertion.
the current system is effectively a tax that only graduates pay. it is not real debt and is not considered such by banks. They could literally have an almost identical system called the graduate tax and it would "remove fees" but would also remove the idea of personal responsibility of wasting govt money. the vast majority of graduates, including myself, will not pay it all back, but will pay an extra % on my income as I do now, to do a job I wouldnt have got otherwise.
How are universities running out of money when the quality of lectures has decreased significantly since covid.
Decline in home students and end of chinese students going abroad in large numbers
Over expansion and a ballooning of costs.
It takes up to 10 times as much time and work to put together a good lecture for distant delivery than in a standard lecture. That would be fine if lecturers were not being rated on their research output and not teaching, or having to teach more lectures than there is time to prepare these.
Some of them were shit well before Rona, tbh.
The quality of the lectures often declines in tune with the quality of the average student coming in. That's as much as I can say. Fill in the blanks.
Tuition fees came in in England in the early 2000s at £1000 py increasing to £3000py and then jumped to £9k per year.
ah so that's probably why I thought the Universities were government funded.
@@michaelxz1305yes, they were once. I was a lecturer when the fees first came in fully in 2003/4. It was because there was an aim to get 50% of people attending university to increase skills. But the slippery slope to massive student debt was apparent even then
Easy, when the Government gets cheap and does not pay for education with TAX payers money, and Unis are forced to take in anyone and everyone and they don't pay for their tuition in the end, this is what happens. We pay taxes for a reason, health, education and emergency services, it is about time the Gov't uses such money on these things. Education isn't a business it is to keep working standards up for a reason.
students fees are basically a roundabout way of taxing only graduates. it doesnt function as normal debt.
@@Barney_Wharam "taxing only graduates" makes no sense because at the moment they graduate, the person has made zero income whatsoever, only debts. How do you tax income that doesn't even exist? It's not a consumption tax either.
@@oldskoolmusicnostalgia you only repay loans if you earn over a certain threshold. The loan system is a graduate tax. Graduates have higher incomes in the medium term, which is why they are subject to this, but only if you earn more than a certain amount
"Arrow goes up" is an interesting choice for a thumbnail about bankruptcies :D
A fabulous and comprehensive analysis!! Well done!! I would love to see a similar analysis done for US universities as well ❤
The fees are still too high, Universities must be wasting huge amounts of money.
oh boy, they are!
The first sentence. What a burn.
My parents sold their summer house to send me to a mid-weight British University back in 1997, I was an international student from abroad. The education if the Uni was average at best and I often went hungry for days as everything was expensive. But the British culture was great, I thought at the time! They were welcoming, encouraging, interested in foreign students. It was actually fun to be a foreign student back then, in despite of .all the hardship... So I thought all the sacrifices of my parents were worth it.... I don't think that anymore! Sadly. The only real selling point of the UK was its open and fun culture. Without that, you are just average, and it isn't worth it!
LOL 700,000 international students and they're still running short of money. They've been fiddling the standards for years and years. I wrote to BBC Panorama about my experiences teaching pre-sessional courses; they weren't interested because it wasn't PC to say it
This!
@@bigbarry8343 ELEVEN years ago my academic manager said to me "this will be a big scandal one day"
@@bigbarry8343 I don't know why but it's deleted my reply which said: ELEVEN years ago my academic manager said to me "this will be a big scandal one day"
I was a Ph.D. student at a top 10 global university in London, 20 years ago.
I taught some u/g classes full of foreign students from one country in particular. The students were lovely, but their written work wouldn't have been accepted at my prep school.
Anyhow, I emigrated to Europe many years ago. Thanks for the education, U.K., shame it isn't a meritocracy anymore.
@@threethrushes Behind the scenes at the University I worked for ten years ago, the lecturers were in open revolt at all the appallingly written work they had to mark
But the Vice Chancellor had their pension to think about!
Maybe universities are just chronically overspending, my uni had nearly 30k students; meaning nearly £270million a year. If they can't find a way to budget that I kinda think that's on them...
How many staff members? How much real estate? All the overheads that are often not thought about when equating one thing to another?
But I do agree with you, budgeting is a nightmare
I guess they can cut off some of the cleaning staff and make students clean their own classrooms and dormitories for free. That should save some money.
The solution is actually quite simple, either increase fees for the local students or increase the ratio of foreign students to make ends meet.
Universities can also auction off antiques they had in possession that cost money to maintain, I am sure there are lots of portraits and silverware that can be sold off to collectors
I don't understand how for example economics/finance/maths degrees justifies c. £9k per year where all you'll get in return is someone reading off slides they found online.
that's assuming UK students only the total Is likely to far higher with internationals paying more
@@MrL702😂😂😂
Most of my friends now do uni online, one dropped out of hall and the other dropped out of Surrey, they now do their studies in there room and buy the equipment they need off Amazon
Two points: Why should a foreign student even consider attending British universities when he can study free of charge in Germany where universities are just as good as any other university listed in the Russell Group. Secondly, there is a bias against universities where the media of teaching are other languages than English. Universities of English speaking countries always score higher perhaps because those who conduct the ranking survey hardly speak any other foreign languages. We all live in an English centric world.
Status
Yet UK universities are packed with foreign students and they are queuing up.
When demand is high and supply is low price rises it economics101.
Imperial College is definitely not better than the Technical University of Munich@@user-op8fg3ny3j
So the reason I got from a German friend who came to the UK for uni boiled down to wanting to be taught by the German education system. Basically there experiences with it in there childhood made them feel like the german universities would be overly harsh and bad for their mental health. A lot of Germans I know seem to have really bad perspectives on the German system, to the point they would rather for to other countries than engage with there own unis. This might have a selection bias though within by friend group. Anecdotal, not scientific. :)
The amount of german students or european students is negligible compared to those who stay in their country. Always has been.@@SaintGerbilUK
I have 2 masters degrees on top of an undergraduate in criminology and psychology... now i work with mostly immigrants in construction. True story.
Very very 😭 sad
Bachelors in biochemistry. Worked as a delivery driver to survive.
Masters in Biotechnology. Worked as a carer on the side.
Can’t get a job. A mountain of debt I will never pay back.
Didn’t even want to go to uni. Got pressured to because my grades were good.
I hate this country.
In many respects, this mirrors what is happening in New Zealand. Once upon a time, students who were eligible (to a decent literate standard as garnered by University Entrance exam results got their education mostly on the tax payers with nominal student fees and were expected to enter the workforce to contribute to the tax base as a means of repaying for their education (and providing the country with skilled workers like doctors etc. In the 80s the system got turned on its head (by a bunch of people who got their education that way) who decide that user pays was the way to go. So students then had to pay hefty fees instead and ended up with a millstone around their necks before they could even think about saving to buy a house because in order to prop the model up, student loans were introduced. The nett effect was students taking off for higher paying overseas jobs, loans being defaulted on and tertiary education institutes relying on a tranche of overseas students to pay the bills. Any disruption to that model resulted in exactly what appears to be happening in Britain.
And then a Black Swan in the form of Covid19 appeared top upset the apple-cart; the borders were shut and the supply of overseas students choked off.
In short, a working system was broken by greedy economic doctrines and the resulting carnage is what we've got; a dearth of skilled labour and young people not wanting to saddle themselves with a debt the moment they get out of school. It isn't rocket science to figure out what has gone wrong or what it would take to put things right. Hint - tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy who got their education pretty much for free won't fix it. And I want to make the point that higher education is not "public expenditure; it is an _investment_ in the future as I'm sure the aging population would agree when they begin to suffer from a range of ailments which require hospitalization and specialist care.
UK,NZ,Ca, Aus want to adopt the American model for tertiary education. The only difference is we are not America where the value of education goes hand in hand with high paying jobs for graduates. In our countries, certainly in the UK high paying jobs for graduates are few and far between
"British Universities can't afford to keep opperating with the money they get for UK students and have to make up the difference with politically controversial forigen students who pay the full cost." is literally a Yes Minister script from the 1980s. That show truely never gets old. Just Remember what Sir Humphrey said, Britian needs, "... a system to protect the important things in life, and to keep them out of the hands of the Barabrians. Things like... the Universites. Both of them."
Sure Berg
UK should be increasing taxes on their super rich (including empty estates tax) to fund education
This has never worked, they would just move their money.
@@keysersoze1522 The only demographic in the UK which has massively increased their share of wealth over the last 5 years is Billionaires. They can afford to pay more taxes. If they leave the country, good riddance. The nation does not need really rich traitors, who will abandon it. The nation needs nurses, builders, publishers, bus drivers etc...
As someone who works at a university; thank you for covering this and saying it exactly how it is. It is utter non-sense to try and bring down migration, but targeting people who are literally only here for a few years and very few actually want to stay for longer.
Because the primary purpose of a university is to train educate and train the next generation, as well as providing a hub for research. Whilst it's nice to have people from abroad study here it shouldn't be at the expense of places for UK students. If universities are reliant on hundreds of thousands of foreign students to pay the bills it's already broken. I'd be pretty annoyed to loose out on university because someone on the other side of the world has lower grades and more money.
"We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers. We want some scientists, but we must keep them in their proper place." The government needs to focus on trades, that's why. No wonder shoddy newbuilds are being built, education and trades need to be seen as equals.
50% of 18 year olds going to university was never a sustainable model. It was only done to reduce the headline figure for unemployment. The result has been a lowering of standards and a massive debt burden on those who go. When it was 10% not only were universities free, but you could get a grant to go. Furthermore the degree you got at the end made you sought after, with employers falling over themselves with job offers. At least that was my experience when I went in the 70s.
A lot of young people forget this and think it was just made expensive for no apparent reason other than "profiteering".
By the time I went to university in the mid-1990s we were given grants.
Polytechnics were given degree-awarding status.
Blair infamously said "education, education, education."
...and it has spiralled downwards ever since.
As a us citizen I find this conversation interesting. Because we are the complete opposite side of the spectrum, with just passing on the debts/insolvency to the students.
Harvard and yales endowments combined are the same GDP as Luxembourg or Guatemala.
Civilised countries have universities which are either entirely free or require just a basic fee to cover some administrative costs and discourage time-wasters.
The problem of advanced education funding is real and it is felt by those civilised countries too but an advanced nation needs skilled workers.
The room for unskilled labour is getting thinner and thinner and sooner or later most people will need the equivalent of a BA/BS education.
"I find myself questioning the necessity of pursuing education beyond primary and secondary levels, as many jobs seem to require skills that could easily be attained during 14 years of basic schooling."
"The room for unskilled labour is getting thinner and thinner and sooner or later most people will need the equivalent of a BA/BS education." Not really. There is shortage of actual skilled workers and overproduction of low tier uni graduates.
@@useodyseeorbitchute9450 if you talk about plumbers, electricians, carpenters, builders, Taylors and highly trained artisans I perfectly agree with you.
Plus, everybody knows that a B in gender studies is essentially useless
All because of populism and the people not having a clue about how to run a country 😡
Good. The 9K a year is rip off for what they actually provide. I calculated when I was at uni that for every 1 hour of teaching I was paying almost £250 for the privilege. Likewise the amount of bogus degrees worth nothing and international students being passed with fraudulent degrees is abhorrent.
The UK currently has 288 degree awarding institutions. At least 150 of these should be closed and the capacity in the others reduced by a third. Universities need to return to being academically demanding research establishments for those with proven higher order analytical ability. In other word return to the mid-a980s when around 1 in 8 people went to university, not the current 1 in 2. There should be a return to most middle ranking professions, such as social work, physiotherapy, retail management, primary teaching, mid grade civil servants outside the 'central civil service' mainly being trained through two or three year courses that combine on the job experience with a paid salary with some time each week in academic training paid for by the employer. The main reason the UK had a massive expansion in university education was to pull a trick on the lower-middle and working class to give the impression that they had now all been given the opportunity to go to university. In reality, this means they now do the same jobs as they always did, with many professions no better trained than they were 50 years ago, but with all these people left with huge bills for a level of education they got in the past for free and while earning a salary.
Indeed, it's also keeping young people out of the job market, akin to the impact of mandatory military service decades ago. And now there's talk of reintroducing it, as the University degree is being exposed as scam.
"Hey, instead of trying to transform our country into the modern era, let's take our country back to a previous era, and essentially keep it behind everyone else. That sure is a great idea". There are words I wish I could call you, but TH-cam keeps deleting my comments, so I won't.
@@DaDARKPassIf the modern era is like this, I would preffer a more vintage approach, to be honest
@@danielutriabrooks477 See, this is the problem with people - they fail to realize that we must always progress. Your feelings should not make us regress.
But it has not been an advance. People are not better educated or better prepared for their job. The cost of training for a profession was shifted from the employer to the employee and the pretence was that they had achieved ‘social mobility’ because they had gone to university. The generation where the most working class people got into ‘higher professions’ such as medicine, law, engineering or architecture were those who went through high school between 1950 and 1980. How is it better if fewer working class kids get into these professions than 50 years ago, and those starting in pretty average professions do so saddled with debt.
Thank god I live in a country without tuition fees. That is a really stupid idea, since you should train your countries best students to maximise your job markets productivity, not the ones who can pay for it the most, because their parents are rich. It is better to tax the successful then after it to finance it from those that have enough to spare. And before anybody says, that would not create an incentive to finish university, let alone successfully so, I think you are a. leaving in a dream world if you think any student is not keenly aware of wanting to get a good job, but b. that should clearly be managed by tight checks on students progress in an educational sense, not a monetary one.
Also, you should have a working non-university model for getting the knowledge for many jobs, which I feel the UK is also lacking. That at least is less a just UK issue, but there are better models out there that function even in our modern world. Heck in Germany there are even hybrid models between learning a trade and going to university, to address the rising need for non-academic, but university level engineering, IT, specialised STEM or business graduates. They have been super successful and are significantly paid for by the companies, just like trades are.
The UK has degree apprenticeships. Probably need more of them.
will university’s be free if your a uk student who applies to a country with free university
@@Purple_flower09 Why would you need a degree to work in trade? Older generations were managing just fine.
I fully concur that universities should primarily serve as institutions of learning, emphasizing selectivity based on academic merit rather than functioning as mere facilitators of visas for foreign students.
@@unidentified5390 No, but only since you left the EU. Most EU/EEA citizens can study for free, and the fee for non EU citizens is between 1500-3500€, so still less than in the UK. You need to be accepted first of course.
And while the UK may rank more highly for its 3 most elite university by some measures, the rest are at best comparable to decent public universities here.
There are elite private universities that can charge whatever they want, but they are fairly few, most for very highly specialised topics.
The b b c is not for direct entry, that was for pathway course. Which is known as foundation year before getting into main course. And if student can't secure certain mark typically 2:1 they do not get progression into main course. So that doesn't affect domestic students.
So, they even get to charge the international students for a whole extra year??
They're going bankrupt because I told them to
good job bud, can you ask the banks to clear my debts next if you have a spare minute
Can you cause house prices to fall to a reasonable level next please?
The power of a bourbon is truly impressive
I reckon a Bourbon could do a better job than the Tories tbf
9k GBP is cost of a poor city college in the US.
11,000 us dollars wow
I'd love to be able to go over the books for some of the universities, it would be interesting to actually see exactly what money is going in and out. I feel that the perception is that universities are generally not very good at managing their money and would love to actually see if its true or not.
The univerisity I go to do not even have in-person lectures anymore, just some bland recorded mini lectures that usually don't make much sense. The only in-person sessions are seminars. In other words there is no in-person teaching at all. And due to strikes and teacher absences those seminars do not operate properly either.
Going to uni clearly hasn't helped with you grammar.
What University?
@@keysersoze1522 "Going to uni clearly hasn't helped with you grammar."
your*
@@keysersoze1522 Did you know that people actually communicate differently depending on the context? You may notice that we're in a youtube comment section, if you have anything valuable to say, please say that instead. :)
@@alphasword5541 Oh, you do passive aggression as well as illiteracy. It's clearly working well for you.
Some important points here about international students:
A lot of intl. students came to the UK, because the UK was a connection point to the EU and the US. So even if the way they were treated was shite (high visa prices, being scapegoats when they can’t even vote), it was worth the high price of admission.
Now, the UK is isolated. Not only that, they insist on putting a minimum floor for skilled visas (38,000 pounds), which is well in excess of most fields. Which means, most are being kicked out after finishing their education. Not only in broadly useful fields, but also in law and finance.
They also get double taxed: NHS surcharge is in excess of 1000 pounds per year, on top of paying for national insurance. So… a person earning 38,000 pounds is paying taxes like they are earning 48,00 pounds.
So, looking at those circumstances… why would an international student want to study in the UK?
"putting a minimum floor for skilled visas (38,000 pounds), which is well in excess of most fields."
If you look at the average salary in the UK 38k£ cannot be considered high for a skilled visa.
I was making 35k£ on a STEM field with zero experience in 2019. It is almost impossible to find an offer in the same field in 2024 that is below 40k£ (and you have to be very desperate to take it).
If you do not have an offer above that threshold is because you do not bring enough value to the company (and therefore the country) to make it economically profitable to issue you a visa.
Let us take into account someone on a 38k£ salary pays around 4.8k£ in taxes and 2.9k£ in NI per year. All it takes is for that person to have 1 child in the school system and is almost costing the country more than they pay in. One visit to the doctor and is a negative contribution.
£38k is the break even point when your tax contribution covers public expenditure on you - any less and you cost the state money
@@rafaelcosta3238 I'm a postdoctoral research scientist at a UK university and I get paid considerably less than £38k. Standard postdoc pay outside of London is ~£36k though some universities will pay quite a bit less than that (e.g. mine). You could argue that a postdoctoral scientist in academia is less valuable than someone in industry, but I'd still class it as "skilled work" considering a PhD and demonstrable research output is a pre-requisite.
A lot of Postdocs in the UK come from all around the world because the UK still does have some very prestigious institutions that conduct world-leading research, but the £38k skilled visa now requirement basically precludes international applicants from postdoctoral research jobs. For a government that claims it wants to make the UK a "science superpower" this is a very odd decision.
Universities could of course get around this problem simply by paying their researchers more, but we all know this is not going to happen.
@@TheWiseSalmon
" I'd still class it as "skilled work" considering a PhD and demonstrable research output is a pre-requisite"
You do, but the job market doesn't.
We cannot give "skilled work" visas to people earning barely more than the average wage.
@@rafaelcosta3238 but what about nurses and teachers? Both undoubtedly skilled jobs that are necessary to have a country that functions well. Both careers where many jobs pay less than £38.7 k a year.
I didn't know about the difference in admission criteria. I think this is really bad, also as I suspect it will also force lecturers to lower the overall level of what they will be teaching (since failing students is rather unpopular nowadays).
Like the Orange Man said, everything woke turns to sh!t.
4:06
I wonder how The BBC would react to that.
Verify with Ms.Spring
This is absolutely spot on!
Everything is falling apart in UK
😂
Take a break from social media, my friend.
Seeing all the stuff Brexit has caused makes me wish the UK had a double majority system like Australia does
What I never understood is why such an important decision like brexit was decided by a simple majority of votes. A decision whose impact can span into generations. Just incredible.
@@ramses4321Right? F*#& democracy!
@@sagunsingh7415 Is it democracy if the brexit advertised before teh vote is different from the brexit delivered after the vote? More like a bait and switch no?
@@Me0wish Are you allowed to return something you bought just because it wasn't as nice as you thought it would be?
@@sagunsingh7415 eh yeh if you have the receipt?
For all the intellectual brains running a university they still could not figure out how to run a profitable education system. Overpriced and still going bankrupt is a sign of inefficiency. Scary to pay money to learn from these smart people.
You may have missed another high impact point - the pandemic. These university businesses kept all the fees despite low standard online learning. This upset a lot of families, siblings, and other relations