Thank you for watching, you can find our work on education and skills here: ifs.org.uk/topics/education-and-skills Timecodes: 00:00 Introduction: University Failures? 00:26 Education policy 01:30 Key challenges facing the government 02:00 Financial Trouble in UK Universities 02:55 Deficit and Insolvency Risks 04:00 Impact of Deficits on Universities 05:14 Why Are Universities Struggling? 06:20 International Students and University Funding 07:10 Squeeze on Further Education Colleges 09:10 What If a University Goes Bust? 13:00 Government's Dilemma: Bailout or Not? 15:00 Tuition Fees vs. Teaching Grants 19:00 Reliance on International Students 22:00 Post-16 and Further Education Challenges 27:10 NEETs and Long-Term Unemployment 29:30 Education and opportunity 39:00 Realigning Funding for Growth 40:30 Skills Policy and Inequality
This makes me extremely happy knowing the heinous price tags that's been placed on education. Those institutions were making great money, it sounds like financial mismanagement
It’s really not it’s the product of more government mismanagement. The entire tuition fee scenario was brought about as Universities had tuition fees fixed in c.2018 since then rampant inflation has eaten at the cost to such a degree it’s worth 2/3 of its value today that it was 6 years ago. Imagine running a business and not being able to raise your prices to keep up with inflation. That’s the situation they’re in and universities warned the previous government for years and years but it fell on deaf ears.
As a former lecturer at an ostensibly high-quality UK university, I can confirm that the majority of my students had no real reason to be in higher education. They had no intellectual curiosity and no passion for their chosen subject. I saw the shift in the quality of education when students became consumers of education paying 9000-pound fees. In the meantime, one year, we had our departmental research budget diverted away from research to pay for a "research impact consultant". My colleagues and I were largely on zero-hour contracts, leaving us relying on benefits to pay rent even as we took on full-time teaching loads. The money goes to a bloated bureaucracy, not to equipment or supplies.
I think a large issue is the idea that education is a panacea towards all issues in life. Are you poor? Education will solve that. Are you middleclass? Education will make you rich. Do you have issues with not finding friends? Education will give you friends (even if it hasn't so far). Are you unable to find a job? Education will give you a job. Do you not know what you want to do with your life and is missing life goals? Don't worry. Just pick a major at random and education will give you one. I can very much understand why students lack intellectual curiosity. They are not going to college because they are curiosity. It is a mandated thing imposed by the government that think education solves EVERYTHING when it does not. When you are in high school the people who you listen to all recommend getting educated. Only issue is that they themselves are teachers. And no direspect meant to you personally, but teachers are people who failed to leave the school system themselves. Most of them are not qualified to guide students towards what they need as all answers to them lead to school. It is the only answer they knew, and will tell children that as well while they lack perspective from other fields and paths. The fact that more and more jobs demand educations in order to even apply to a job doesn't help the situation. Today you do not get an education because you want to learn. You get a education in some BS field only so you can tick a checkbox on some application as it has an artifical requirement imposed on them.
@@Cloud_Seeker I agree with you, particularly on the zombielike way that high school graduates drift into university for entirely the wrong reasons. However, on teachers "failing to leave the school system", this is only a failure if you expect every course to lead to employment outside the university sector. That is not the purpose of university. The teachers are not there to "guide them to what they need", but to impart a body of knowledge and skills. It is not a failure of your dentist that he or she only treats your teeth. If you need an appendectomy, you should go elsewhere. It should not be the responsibility of specialist academics to train people for the workplace. The British model of university education is basically vocational training for academics, in the humanities at least. If you do not want to go into research or teaching, there is no need to get a degree in, say, literature or history. The fact that a history graduate does not have the skills to work in an HR department (whatever those might be...) says absolutely nothing about the quality of their education, just its (mis)application. And choosing to stay in (or in the case of me and many of my colleagues, return to) the academic world is by no means a failure!
@@scolexuk "However, on teachers "failing to leave the school system", this is only a failure if you expect every course to lead to employment outside the university sector. That is not the purpose of university." - But that is what high school students are told. It doesn't matter what the purpose of University is. That purpose is not the advertisement and not the information that reaches the students. What students are told is "unless you go to university, you can't get a job". This means the purpose of university IS to help people get a job, because that is why most people go to Uni. They are fed a lie, and the Unis are not correcting them on that lie. Nore is the school system itself. "The teachers are not there to "guide them to what they need", but to impart a body of knowledge and skills. " - Isn't that literally a contradiction? You say that their job is to impart knowledge and skills. But fact is schools can not give all those skills and knowledge. Which means that the job of a teacher is to prepare a student with what they need for life. This is how it is treated in reality. Students think the tearchers are there to guide them. Many of them also think that is what they are doing. But when the miscommunication is there, teachers hide behind this bureaucratic definition of their job and hide from the fact they have mislead their students. You can not expect that children know that teachers, adults and authority figures are not there to prepare you for life. It is in fact hardwired into them to think like that, and the more and more handholding of society does not help that idea. The more schools handhold the worse expectations students get. "It is not a failure of your dentist that he or she only treats your teeth." - My dentist is also not supposed to impart me with knowledge and skills that I need in life. When I leave their office, they do not care about me. Teachers have a very different behavior. "It should not be the responsibility of specialist academics to train people for the workplace." - But that is the role schools, governments and the advertisements to Uni have placed on schools and academics. You can't blame the students for not understanding they have been fed lies their whole life when they had nothing by lies and propaganda fed into them since they were small children. If you have been told a lie for 18 years and you are 20 years old. Are you really to be blamed for believing the lie? Especially when it comes from people you are supposed to tust? How exactly is someone supposed to know it is a lie when they have not yet learnt it is a lie? "If you do not want to go into research or teaching, there is no need to get a degree in, say, literature or history. The fact that a history graduate does not have the skills to work in an HR department (whatever those might be...) says absolutely nothing about the quality of their education, just its (mis)application. And choosing to stay in (or in the case of me and many of my colleagues, return to) the academic world is by no means a failure!" - Apart from when YOU get the job of telling young children and adults on how to succeed in life. Which is what governments do. Even if you do not agree with that role. Governments want EVERYONE to be highly educated because they think humans are blank sheets of paper and stats on a Excel sheet. That is why they are heavy on the propaganda from a young age, which teachers is part of distributing. Then when they are in their 20's and believe that the only way to success is havng a degree, and corporations require a college/university degree because of some government mandate. You have students that do not care about the subject matter. They do not want to be there and they have not even considered other options. They are just doing what they have been told to do since kindergarten and by every single teacher they have had up until they reached YOU. Just because you have not participated does not mean others haven't.
I hate paying for over saturated degrees to pay someone’s wage and appease some HR brat who will just use ATS to ghost me anyways. If it weren’t for HR I would have just tossed the idea of expensive job training, aka. a degree.
@@Cloud_Seeker The commercialisation of the higher education system does not constitute a failure on the part of those who teach. I agree with much of what you're saying. Nevertheless, my job as a university lecturer is not to tell my students how to succeed in life, but how to excel at the subject I teach. Period. Don't blame ME (the capital letters are yours) for wider cultural failures of which you will note I am also critical. Students and academics both are let down by a system that mistakes education for career preparation. I never blamed students, YOU will notice, though YOU seem to think I did. I merely said that most of them don't belong at uni, which you seem to agree with. Thank you for your diagnosis (accurate if incomplete) of the cause of the problem faced by both university lecturers and misguided students who would be better off elsewhere.
£9000 a year with students having very little contact time in most unis. I don't know where the money is actually going. My view would be to let a few go bust if they can't run with that sort of income. We've got a few too many institutions, too many worthless degrees, losing a few won't be a big deal.
@@casusbellio Loads of degrees are worthless not ALL of them which is what he said. My daughter is also starting a degree in Maths with my full blessing.
Many British universities are able to deliver degrees with overseas partners for a fraction of the 9k they charge UK students. They are in financial difficulty not because the student fee is too low but because of massive borrowing for unnecessary infrastructure projects and bloated payrolls.
A good uni charges 30k to foreign students. Avantage cost of a student is 11k. Also, remember that Universities are the life lot of many UK cities. Cities that don't have a universities suffer tremendously from a lot of business
My question with this situation is, “are we serving our children best by sending almost all of them to universities so they carry on learning into their 20’s and leave with huge debt?” My generation sent a tiny minority of students to uni and most left school between 15 and 18. Is the current generation happier, more productive, or more knowledgeable than we were? Is there a case for drastically reducing the number of students and banishing degrees that are aimed at the less able?
There is not just a case for it, it's a necessity. This kids are being treated like a cash cow and being misled that a degree will lead them into employment. I graduated from my masters in 2000 and my student loan was pretty small really but out of all the people I went to university with I was one of two who actually went into a field that required my degree and I was ridiculously over qualified. Trade schools and apprenticeships are worth their weight in gold. We should change these 'degree's to being 2 year vocational degrees similar to the old polytechnics and leave a small number of academic universities for the subjects that require so some study. I'm sorry if 'lecturers' have to lose their jobs but it shouldn't be my children taking on vast amounts of debt just to keep them in a job.
You're more productive because you've had time to build wealth and achieve promotions. You're likely not less knowledgeable than a generation of more educated people, that's in the definitions. If you're happier, it's because you're the last generation able to achieve housing at a reasonable price without having two economic crashes affect your saving
Break up the farming mega companies like John Dear and let more people gradually return to farming. Oh year and bring back the trades while give a subsidy for retraining.
@@evanmcarthur478John Deere is a farming equipment company, they sell and rent equipment to “farming companies”. They absolutely need to be sued for their right to repair fiasco though.
I suppose that the people at the top creaming off the profits doesn't help! The annual salary of the UK prime minister was £166,786 in 2024. In 2012-2022, the vice-chancellor of Imperial College London received a huge salary of £714,000-why, what did they do to earn that much? During 2023, average vice-chancellor pay was £325,000 despite a crisis in the sector, and their remuneration typically increased by 5 per cent.
This is what people always tend to focus on and it's not the real issue. I would say though there needs to be a link between pay and performance, but Imperial's a success story - unlike many unis which offer worthless courses just to fill the lecture theatres
@@IanSmith465 with that logic, everyone earning over £150k in the public sector is fleecing the people. When a lot of the time they could earn double that or more in the private sector
when I was in the UK, I noticed that the board and the president had insane pay, sometimes even secret, with a third administrative roles. this, while everything was not digitlized but paper!!!!
I got to where I am today through adult education in the 80s. I wasn’t very academic so decided to do the infamous “Youth training Scheme” at a local college. While there I enrolled in a computer programming class, learned to code and then went on to get a job as a coder. My workmates were stunned that I’d got a job as a computer programmer. Ive worked all over the world including the US. I no longer code instead i manage development projects. But it all started with adult education.
Today that’s called community college or internship .. Most companies want people w certification and don’t want to train people Your generation is retiring and leaving a bunch of gaps everywhere so miss me with this cause your generation doesn’t even want to teach either
@@patrickchan2503 my local village social club was registered as a charity!! I suspect it was to benefit the (business owners) committee members. Ridiculous that a “pub” is a charity.
@@aficio698 from my understanding, setting up a charity requires paperwork and it's not always easy, it is hard work to maintain the charity status. But I don't know the ins and outs, was told by someone who researched this as they were thinking of setting up a charity. But maybe the pub did a cost analysis and deemed it beneficial, don't know, sorry to hear about the dodgy practice. Why don't you ask them about it? Or why don't you volunteer for them and be a spy?
I am surprised by the complete lack of understanding by some of the comments. There seems to be a complete ack of acknowledgement that UK universities are one of the only industries left worthy of anything in the UK today. They not only provide income for cities that have lost all industry providing retail, housing and other Industries of income, they provide the whole of Britain a global image. Just look at the number of Peer-Reviewed papers, Publications and public profiles of many academics. I'm not only talking about Cambridge and Oxford or even the Russell group institutions, but the entire UK higher education ecosystem is of tremendous importance of keeping Britain alive.
Education is an industry where the merchant thinks they have the inalienable right to force customers to purchase products that they are not interested in. It is an industry where fear and shame and mockery are used when a customer has demonstrated that they currently do not see the value in one of the industry's products. This fundamentally needs to change because it is such an obvious repudiation of everything we know about economics and how to interact with value seeking entities. But, I do agree that every citizen must have basic literacy, mathematics, and science knowledge in order for them to function.
@PolicyFailureIsExpensive so,your are suggesting turning universities into digesteable fast food joints or making them into techo centers to build the robots that make universities redundant. Where will be thinking take place in either of those worldviews? Who or what remains when consumerism or techno determinism takes over?
Having been taught in Germany and having taught in the UK, I just have to say the UK universities are a complete scam when it comes to teaching (my comments do not concern the research though there are major issues there as well). Simply put, having a UK degrees means nothing. You could be amazing or horrendous and still end up with good grades at the end. In Germany this is impossible, most students fail and don't finish their degrees, and even amongst those who finish you know that a first actually means something. Exams are actually hard unlike in the UK, because the money the university has at its disposal, has almost no correlation with the amount of the students it has. In the UK you can't fail a student because on one hand it's kinda unethical given the ungodly amounts of money he has spent and on the other you'll get into trouble with the administration because they want that student to keep on spending his money. Beyond that the terms are much shorter here leading to less material being covered, and the completely useless one-year masters programmes.
Meh... Grades are irrelevant once you work your first job. University has become a scam throughout the world. Most degrees used to be paid traineeships. Now youre training for free without the guarantee of a job. And I'm not sure it prepares you any better for the workforce than the old way.
I remember when I did my final year BSc project and was partnered with a German exchange student from Ludwig Maximilian. Despite being a 3rd year Physics student, like myself, he was sitting 4th year or even post-graduate level theory modules (intended for theory students who didn't have to do experimental work), such as General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory, in addition to the BSc project work. When I queried how he was able to do GR as a 3rd year student, he said that he'd studied Differential Geometry (a requirement for GR) in his 2nd year! The difference in the level of education between us shocked me. And this was at Imperial.
Problem is self learning doesn’t get you a piece of paper that HR can look at and tell them you are qualified. So unless you are in the creative industries you need Uni to get work.
The question to ask with all this is what do we want the purpose(s) of academia to be? To develop technologies? To consider the world in new, somehow better ways? To develop a cohort able to make good decisions? To provide the best value to society as a whole? And does academia as it is today do those things effectively? Remember: Whoever pays the piper names the tune. Will that tune be one you like?
Unis should have skin in the game. If student getting govt loan, then uni should be responsible for 5% of monthly repayment if the student hasn't achieved a salary premium within 2 years of graduation.
Student accommodation construction, extensive hospitality services, offering the wrong types of courses, maintenance overheads, utilities for these massive corporate facilities is staggering and all the leisure facilities is where the money goes only a small fraction actually goes on education. There’s numerous universities with golf courses.
In Scotland UWS became an amalgam of Paisley, Ayr, Dumfries, Bell College. There is a vast distance between some of the colleges. Universities are also making placements abroad, so having u iversities merge within the UK is an option.
Excellent comment. Ultimately the GOvt should consider what this country NEEDS. I could tell them ; Doctors, Engineers, Scientist and TRADESEMEN. Qulifying as the former should be fully supported by central Government. As for the latter, Apprenticeships needs a full re-launch - with an obligation on teachers of 15-17 year olds to inform their students that Tradesmen earn very good money indeed !!!
What i dont understand, is how a educational institution cannot square its finances, and yet they are apparently training and teaching people to be better citizens and manage their own finances. Also the idea that once again the wealthy institutions are asking for another bail out.
They are speaking about higher education expenditure, but they did not discuss what it is that they would like it to do. Do they want the UK to build infrastructure? Do they want the UK to build ships or planes or trucks? Do they want the UK to increase agricultural yields? Would they like the UK to produce more minerals? Perhaps they'd like the UK to lead in metal recycling? Maybe they'd prefer to be able to draw and store more electricity from various sources? What is it that you would like your labor force to be capable of doing? Are you making this possible through reliable frameworks and institutions? What is your vision for the UK, and what financial resources are you ready to commit to making it become reality despite potential short-term resistance from entrenched players? Opening a shop, getting a marketing degree, or creating another social media site is all very impressive and helpful, but an entire nation needs more than just these types of options in employment.
There is a lot that happens that students don't see, including continuing curriculum development and updating. However there has also been a lot of spending on quality of student life like estate, support services, but also internal bureaucracy
Universities have been in a race to the bottom for a decade now. My friend's clever daughter went to Durham, but was offered Unconditional Offers from a big city University - that he felt de-motivated her. "Come HERE - we have even lower standards than the University 15 miles up the road !", seems to be the message. Oh for a return to the top 15% going into H.E., not the top 50%. As a country we do not need limitless amounts of Sociology Graduates thanks. My friend worked in the Accouints Dept of a well-known Midlands University and I was shocked to discover 6-7 years back that their Income was the size of a mid-sized PLC. If these Unis want to act like big Private Sector businesses competing , then they must accept the concequences of failure. No £100,000 Bonus for the Vice Chancellor THIS year, eh !?
No, it hasn't . I think the average is about 10 to 15 students per academic. That's what I remember from the guardian ranking lost. Why bring up this question? Is it rhetorical?
@@patrickt49 A college degree was a guaranteed ticket to success back in the 80s and 90s. Then everyone started going to college and now it isn't anymore. We're going to really have to get away from this one-sized-fits-all approach to post-secondary education.
" Very worried university leaders" is music to my ears. Overpaid academics are an overhead that has finally outpaced student revenue. The prima donnas of academia have walked too far out on the plank of entitlement.
Lot of fat in the UK University System. Most universities have no more than 30% of the staff as full time research active staff. More than 50% are administrators than manage the 30%. Think on that.
If they go bust then bye bye the younger generations job prospects which has already been windeled very low. This will also reflect on accommodations which is essentially housing stock but shared utilities for example bathrooms & kitchens also this would affect cities with universities significantly negatively, in Nottingham (East Midlands) for at least the past 10 years nearly 50% of the housing stock was made solely for student accommodation so that should worry you. 🙄
Mist Universities have increased land purchases and construction - these new capital assets they have invested in. Can they not just sell this off - why should tax payers effectively pay for their investments.
increasing foreign students defeats the objective of providing further education for UK residents. We also need to move focus away from this idea that everyone should go to uni. Vocational training should be improved and not stigmatised.
The Conservative government has added many barriers to deter people from going to university and this is the result. I was lucky and was the last year to get 3k tuition fees and I relied on the maintenance grant to pay my rent. If I hadn't got that I would have never gone to university. You could argue a lot of degrees aren't needed anymore because we have the internet. Even Computer Science, which I studied, is years out of date by the time you graduate.
do you want to send your child to school at a university where they have "equity" profs? or do you want to send them to opportunities where they can earn money and have a good life.
Why you say equity prof when it’s full of greedy boomers A lot of professors are usually there after they have been in the private sector or they just like easy jobs security If only you knew how bloated certain academic departments are Also like to add the UK isn’t business friendly so even with degree access where are the jobs ??? All in London !!!
Only 20%of the population need a pure academic education- select them and keep the fees low-60% need tech/ skill / trade training with in work or college based , hand in hand with industry- 20% will inevitably be low skilled- 50% University educated was plucked out of the sky by politicians With a very narrow view of the world- these consumer Universities should close or reinvent themselves as skills centres-
My daughter went to a British university to do a masters. From what I could make out from her experience, they were indoctrinating her to be an activist for climate change... It wasnt what she signed up (and paid) for.
My duaghter is currently sitting a Teaching Degree - FOR PRIMARY SCHOOLS. One of her modules was LGBTQ. Why the hell is she expected to be even teaching any of that to 8-9 year olds ?!?!? The good news is that she told me that most of her friends thought the module was " a waste of time".
Lets be honest, Most university students don't take university seriously. To them its just an excuse to flunk off for three years and avoid doing work.
the reason unis are in trouble for the most part in the west is demographics and a failure to have a relationship between unis and the jobs available to students.
You are showing your ignorance. If you are teaching science to world class standards with leading scientists and equipment, it's not, "just a room with a person in it". Please engage your brain if you want to be taken seriously.
Books? Computers? Lab equipment? Experts? Even a motel amounts to slightly more than a person in a room. If I went on another YT video and said that about prisons, I'd get a furious deluge of criticism from prison guards, probation & rehab officers, etc. Yet that is much closer to the reality of a prison than to that of a university.
@anonUK Indeed, if you were teaching physics, let's say quantum and related technologies or chemistry or you were doing nuclear engineering, medicine or environmental sciences. This requires the best specialist kit and leading experts plus supporting staff. The research is then needed to ensure that you are at the forefront etc. Huge amount to universities barely touched on.
Do you know how much university has to pay for lab , data , resources etc . For example , for finance and math students, most top universities directly connects with Bloomberg tick data ( live data ). If you are an individual without university account , one has to pay 13000 pound per person annually for this data access. Many poor countries education is cheap because they don’t have access to top notch equipments for research which is why many move to USA for cancer research.
Told my kids and my mates kids to go out and get an apprenticeship. All are doing well, got knowledge in their heads and can turn their hands to any problem. University teaches you nothing, only to whine and moan and get a job flipping burgers at McDonald's .. Great career choice and debt! 😂
Exactly. My friend's daughter got a History Degree from a pretty good University - 16 months on, she is STILL working in an Indian Restaurant - she cannot get a proper job - perhaps because she never had any idea what she wanted to do in the first place....other than NOT find a job at 18/19 !!!
I believe that the loans should be means tested as to only be available to those on low family incomes . Middle class parents should be able to pay for their childs education and if absolutely not able to having a third or half subsided
How many parents have an extra 1800 per month laying around (per child)? Remember that students also need to live and eat. Reality is that many parents already don't have enough and many students work compromisingly high amounts of hours.
Means testing should not just look at parental income but also their expenses. We might look like we earn above average but our bills are high and there is nothing leftover at the end of the month. Our council tax alone is nearly £4k pa.
Many could become POLYTECHNICS again! Just as they were originally supposed be, c.f.:- "Another major educational change was that presaged by his (Anthony Crosland's) speech at Woolwich Polytechnic (now [of course!] Greenwich University) establishing a 'binary system' of higher education, in which universities would be joined by polytechnic institutions which concentrated on high-level vocational skills." Just one lot of rokit cyantists wiv degrise might have been a better such organised, i.e. with the other set comprised of those skilled in how to actually engineer solutions? Oh well, too late now... Sad really (:-) Never mind...
It technically already does this, just in a roundabout way; Student Loans Company (SLC) loans the student their maintenance grants which go direct to student, and tuition fees which go direct to Institution. Student only starts paying off when they earn a certain amount of money and it has a maximum term (for new students, this is about 25k and 40 years on Plan 5) Up until plan 5 student loans, only approximately 25% of all UK students are expected to repay their loans. That means, the vast majority of students have their debt completely wiped out by Government. Student loans are essentially pointless - they are a means by which Govt pretends that students pay for their own tuition, when in reality, for the majority, the Govt pays for it. TL;DR Student loans are all but meaningless, aside to recoup some costs to Govt. They are barely expected to be repaid. It's just a front for those who don't believe in Free Tuition.
It already does... The universities filled their own pockets and mismanaged their organisations, because they've never had to run a business, and businesses don't have unlimited money when you mess up your management
@@mikedudley4062 Tbf, it's not all their own fault, the market they operate in is unlike any other with prices fixed at below cost for their primary customers (British students). Because of that, they need to attract higher fees from int'l students and they've spent huge amounts of capital (marketing, new facilities etc.) trying to attract them, only for their numbers to drop off post-COVID. They're also incentivised to offer poor quality / cheap to run courses as the fees they get will be the same no matter what, which is crazy. Needs to be some kind of link between what they get paid and the employment outcomes for their graduates.
The demographic cliff has been reached as Western European liberal policies have resulted in less children being born. Simply put, there are less children to educate and eventually less young people entering the labor market.
one third have uni degrees -yes I know but only because geting degrees is easier , same for multiples of GSE/O levels . The continuation of lower standards can get everyone with a degree until we meet the George Carlin limit ( and if you dont know it - look it uo , uh ok , you pass uni degree if you turn up with a pencil - even then some will still fail ! ) .
Look none of you got to the heart of the problem. Universities spent all their money on hotel building and hospitality. Instead of investing in their own staff and spin offs and saving for a rainy day, it is corrupt to the core. Letting it fail will not teach it a lesson and only drive away the best people.
No there is no need to bail out just close them go to old tech colleges like we use have no more Micky mouse degrees which their no our economic system.
What if they go bust? A whole heap of overpaid neoliberal airbrains and a sack of marshmallow soft subjects swirl redundantly around the academic ether.
Why does any company or government go bust? Because they keep spending money that they don't have. Cut costs, and wind up useless courses that do not prepare people for meaningful jobs.
Let them fail. Restructure and get them running up again on essential courses a lot fewer numbers. Either this Or get more students from out of the UK and watch Brits complain about immigration numbers again.
basically allow only honours high school students in. University is just a suck on resources unless you are a doctor, lawyer or want high connections in government where daddy isn’t going to get you the job.
Why should the tax payer bail out private business? I guess because loads of labour votes depend on maintaining weak universities & subjects and weak graduates who are future labour voters👍🏻
the title is misleading, we are talking about university misspending or people's wellness? C'mon IFS.. don't change the topic or I'll change the channel.
Bail out the degrees the nation needs, we don't need more psychology degrees and business/management degrees. We need more engineers, scientists and frankly a lot don't need an academic degree but first hand experience as skilled workers.
There was suppose to be business and medical backing for psychology because people don’t like mental asylums You want management degree or work in management …u better know how to figure out revenue cycle and actually how to move money Most companies are not accepting people out of high school your generation ruined that along time ago
Get rid of useless propaganda degrees. Focus on STEMS and trades. Everything else unless you're going to be a doctor, lawyer, or accountant or any specialized profession is useless.
Yeah but most higher degrees like med require stem A lot of engineering requires heavy stem and experience …. But you must have a market to hire these individuals So until you boomers retire this market will remain effed
@@Shineynsparkles honestly you really only should give tenor to amazing smart good profs. That way you can fire or move people that you do not want or need.
@@reneprovosty7032 but the remaining professors are retiring at an alarming rate and all you got are adjunct profs whom are on contracts So this is going to be interesting
If you think government can rid society of inequalities in ability and drive and enterprise, then I’m afraid you don’t understand life and the UK’s diverse society as it is.
So nothing about what the universities can do for themselves? Cut costs is as legitimate as make more money but it would mean fewer people going to university
Only 20%of the population need a pure academic education- select them and keep the fees low-60% need tech/ skill / trade training with in work or college based , hand in hand with industry- 20% will inevitably be low skilled- 50% University educated was plucked out of the sky by politicians With a very narrow view of the world- these consumer Universities should close or reinvent themselves as skills centres-
Thank you for watching, you can find our work on education and skills here: ifs.org.uk/topics/education-and-skills
Timecodes:
00:00 Introduction: University Failures?
00:26 Education policy
01:30 Key challenges facing the government
02:00 Financial Trouble in UK Universities
02:55 Deficit and Insolvency Risks
04:00 Impact of Deficits on Universities
05:14 Why Are Universities Struggling?
06:20 International Students and University Funding
07:10 Squeeze on Further Education Colleges
09:10 What If a University Goes Bust?
13:00 Government's Dilemma: Bailout or Not?
15:00 Tuition Fees vs. Teaching Grants
19:00 Reliance on International Students
22:00 Post-16 and Further Education Challenges
27:10 NEETs and Long-Term Unemployment
29:30 Education and opportunity
39:00 Realigning Funding for Growth
40:30 Skills Policy and Inequality
This makes me extremely happy knowing the heinous price tags that's been placed on education. Those institutions were making great money, it sounds like financial mismanagement
or a scam
It’s really not it’s the product of more government mismanagement. The entire tuition fee scenario was brought about as Universities had tuition fees fixed in c.2018 since then rampant inflation has eaten at the cost to such a degree it’s worth 2/3 of its value today that it was 6 years ago. Imagine running a business and not being able to raise your prices to keep up with inflation. That’s the situation they’re in and universities warned the previous government for years and years but it fell on deaf ears.
No bailouts.
Interesting conversation. Interested to hear the extent to which administrative cost bloat has contributed to this as is alleged in the NHS
As a former lecturer at an ostensibly high-quality UK university, I can confirm that the majority of my students had no real reason to be in higher education. They had no intellectual curiosity and no passion for their chosen subject. I saw the shift in the quality of education when students became consumers of education paying 9000-pound fees.
In the meantime, one year, we had our departmental research budget diverted away from research to pay for a "research impact consultant". My colleagues and I were largely on zero-hour contracts, leaving us relying on benefits to pay rent even as we took on full-time teaching loads.
The money goes to a bloated bureaucracy, not to equipment or supplies.
I think a large issue is the idea that education is a panacea towards all issues in life.
Are you poor? Education will solve that.
Are you middleclass? Education will make you rich.
Do you have issues with not finding friends? Education will give you friends (even if it hasn't so far).
Are you unable to find a job? Education will give you a job.
Do you not know what you want to do with your life and is missing life goals? Don't worry. Just pick a major at random and education will give you one.
I can very much understand why students lack intellectual curiosity. They are not going to college because they are curiosity. It is a mandated thing imposed by the government that think education solves EVERYTHING when it does not. When you are in high school the people who you listen to all recommend getting educated. Only issue is that they themselves are teachers. And no direspect meant to you personally, but teachers are people who failed to leave the school system themselves. Most of them are not qualified to guide students towards what they need as all answers to them lead to school. It is the only answer they knew, and will tell children that as well while they lack perspective from other fields and paths.
The fact that more and more jobs demand educations in order to even apply to a job doesn't help the situation. Today you do not get an education because you want to learn. You get a education in some BS field only so you can tick a checkbox on some application as it has an artifical requirement imposed on them.
@@Cloud_Seeker I agree with you, particularly on the zombielike way that high school graduates drift into university for entirely the wrong reasons. However, on teachers "failing to leave the school system", this is only a failure if you expect every course to lead to employment outside the university sector. That is not the purpose of university. The teachers are not there to "guide them to what they need", but to impart a body of knowledge and skills. It is not a failure of your dentist that he or she only treats your teeth. If you need an appendectomy, you should go elsewhere. It should not be the responsibility of specialist academics to train people for the workplace.
The British model of university education is basically vocational training for academics, in the humanities at least. If you do not want to go into research or teaching, there is no need to get a degree in, say, literature or history. The fact that a history graduate does not have the skills to work in an HR department (whatever those might be...) says absolutely nothing about the quality of their education, just its (mis)application. And choosing to stay in (or in the case of me and many of my colleagues, return to) the academic world is by no means a failure!
@@scolexuk "However, on teachers "failing to leave the school system", this is only a failure if you expect every course to lead to employment outside the university sector. That is not the purpose of university."
- But that is what high school students are told. It doesn't matter what the purpose of University is. That purpose is not the advertisement and not the information that reaches the students. What students are told is "unless you go to university, you can't get a job". This means the purpose of university IS to help people get a job, because that is why most people go to Uni. They are fed a lie, and the Unis are not correcting them on that lie. Nore is the school system itself.
"The teachers are not there to "guide them to what they need", but to impart a body of knowledge and skills. "
- Isn't that literally a contradiction? You say that their job is to impart knowledge and skills. But fact is schools can not give all those skills and knowledge. Which means that the job of a teacher is to prepare a student with what they need for life.
This is how it is treated in reality. Students think the tearchers are there to guide them. Many of them also think that is what they are doing. But when the miscommunication is there, teachers hide behind this bureaucratic definition of their job and hide from the fact they have mislead their students. You can not expect that children know that teachers, adults and authority figures are not there to prepare you for life. It is in fact hardwired into them to think like that, and the more and more handholding of society does not help that idea. The more schools handhold the worse expectations students get.
"It is not a failure of your dentist that he or she only treats your teeth."
- My dentist is also not supposed to impart me with knowledge and skills that I need in life. When I leave their office, they do not care about me. Teachers have a very different behavior.
"It should not be the responsibility of specialist academics to train people for the workplace."
- But that is the role schools, governments and the advertisements to Uni have placed on schools and academics. You can't blame the students for not understanding they have been fed lies their whole life when they had nothing by lies and propaganda fed into them since they were small children.
If you have been told a lie for 18 years and you are 20 years old. Are you really to be blamed for believing the lie? Especially when it comes from people you are supposed to tust? How exactly is someone supposed to know it is a lie when they have not yet learnt it is a lie?
"If you do not want to go into research or teaching, there is no need to get a degree in, say, literature or history. The fact that a history graduate does not have the skills to work in an HR department (whatever those might be...) says absolutely nothing about the quality of their education, just its (mis)application. And choosing to stay in (or in the case of me and many of my colleagues, return to) the academic world is by no means a failure!"
- Apart from when YOU get the job of telling young children and adults on how to succeed in life. Which is what governments do. Even if you do not agree with that role.
Governments want EVERYONE to be highly educated because they think humans are blank sheets of paper and stats on a Excel sheet. That is why they are heavy on the propaganda from a young age, which teachers is part of distributing. Then when they are in their 20's and believe that the only way to success is havng a degree, and corporations require a college/university degree because of some government mandate. You have students that do not care about the subject matter. They do not want to be there and they have not even considered other options. They are just doing what they have been told to do since kindergarten and by every single teacher they have had up until they reached YOU. Just because you have not participated does not mean others haven't.
I hate paying for over saturated degrees to pay someone’s wage and appease some HR brat who will just use ATS to ghost me anyways. If it weren’t for HR I would have just tossed the idea of expensive job training, aka. a degree.
@@Cloud_Seeker The commercialisation of the higher education system does not constitute a failure on the part of those who teach. I agree with much of what you're saying. Nevertheless, my job as a university lecturer is not to tell my students how to succeed in life, but how to excel at the subject I teach. Period. Don't blame ME (the capital letters are yours) for wider cultural failures of which you will note I am also critical. Students and academics both are let down by a system that mistakes education for career preparation.
I never blamed students, YOU will notice, though YOU seem to think I did. I merely said that most of them don't belong at uni, which you seem to agree with. Thank you for your diagnosis (accurate if incomplete) of the cause of the problem faced by both university lecturers and misguided students who would be better off elsewhere.
£9000 a year with students having very little contact time in most unis. I don't know where the money is actually going.
My view would be to let a few go bust if they can't run with that sort of income. We've got a few too many institutions, too many worthless degrees, losing a few won't be a big deal.
Agree, and so many of these courses aren't giving the skills employers want so you can't even justify the cost as an investment
I'm doing a math degree so I wouldn't call it worthless.
Huge money going in wages! Look at the money chancellors are paid..
@@casusbellio Loads of degrees are worthless not ALL of them which is what he said. My daughter is also starting a degree in Maths with my full blessing.
@@marktynan6820 and pensions
Many British universities are able to deliver degrees with overseas partners for a fraction of the 9k they charge UK students. They are in financial difficulty not because the student fee is too low but because of massive borrowing for unnecessary infrastructure projects and bloated payrolls.
A good uni charges 30k to foreign students. Avantage cost of a student is 11k. Also, remember that Universities are the life lot of many UK cities. Cities that don't have a universities suffer tremendously from a lot of business
My question with this situation is, “are we serving our children best by sending almost all of them to universities so they carry on learning into their 20’s and leave with huge debt?”
My generation sent a tiny minority of students to uni and most left school between 15 and 18. Is the current generation happier, more productive, or more knowledgeable than we were?
Is there a case for drastically reducing the number of students and banishing degrees that are aimed at the less able?
There is not just a case for it, it's a necessity. This kids are being treated like a cash cow and being misled that a degree will lead them into employment. I graduated from my masters in 2000 and my student loan was pretty small really but out of all the people I went to university with I was one of two who actually went into a field that required my degree and I was ridiculously over qualified. Trade schools and apprenticeships are worth their weight in gold. We should change these 'degree's to being 2 year vocational degrees similar to the old polytechnics and leave a small number of academic universities for the subjects that require so some study. I'm sorry if 'lecturers' have to lose their jobs but it shouldn't be my children taking on vast amounts of debt just to keep them in a job.
Absolutely no point going to university if you’re not going to get a very good job at the end of it.
You're more productive because you've had time to build wealth and achieve promotions. You're likely not less knowledgeable than a generation of more educated people, that's in the definitions. If you're happier, it's because you're the last generation able to achieve housing at a reasonable price without having two economic crashes affect your saving
Break up the farming mega companies like John Dear and let more people gradually return to farming.
Oh year and bring back the trades while give a subsidy for retraining.
@@evanmcarthur478John Deere is a farming equipment company, they sell and rent equipment to “farming companies”. They absolutely need to be sued for their right to repair fiasco though.
I suppose that the people at the top creaming off the profits doesn't help! The annual salary of the UK prime minister was £166,786 in 2024. In 2012-2022, the vice-chancellor of Imperial College London received a huge salary of £714,000-why, what did they do to earn that much? During 2023, average vice-chancellor pay was £325,000 despite a crisis in the sector, and their remuneration typically increased by 5 per cent.
you use the wrong example.... IMPERIAL is a top business
This is more a fact of our PM having a very low salary given the position
This is what people always tend to focus on and it's not the real issue. I would say though there needs to be a link between pay and performance, but Imperial's a success story - unlike many unis which offer worthless courses just to fill the lecture theatres
@@GlitchNectarhe is supposed to be serving the people not fleecing them.
@@IanSmith465 with that logic, everyone earning over £150k in the public sector is fleecing the people. When a lot of the time they could earn double that or more in the private sector
when I was in the UK, I noticed that the board and the president had insane pay, sometimes even secret, with a third administrative roles. this, while everything was not digitlized but paper!!!!
I got to where I am today through adult education in the 80s. I wasn’t very academic so decided to do the infamous “Youth training Scheme” at a local college. While there I enrolled in a computer programming class, learned to code and then went on to get a job as a coder. My workmates were stunned that I’d got a job as a computer programmer. Ive worked all over the world including the US. I no longer code instead i manage development projects. But it all started with adult education.
Today that’s called community college or internship ..
Most companies want people w certification and don’t want to train people
Your generation is retiring and leaving a bunch of gaps everywhere so miss me with this cause your generation doesn’t even want to teach either
@@Shineynsparkles Agree
I went to university from 2013 to 2016. The teaching I received was only worth the 3000 and certainly not the 9000!
Which uni? 2:1?
@@Marenqo Queen Mary UoL. Yeah I got a 2:1.
@@melindagallegan5093 they should stop giving ppl 2:1s. Most are inflated. 2:1s are thirds
Why should the tax payer bail out wat r essentially private businesses? Maybe the salaries paid to top heavy boards should be looked at first.
It still amazes me how Leaders of COuncils - let alone University Vice Chancellors - earn more than the Prime Minister.
because universities are a charity, they have a charity number which is a scam IMO
@@rjw4762 PM has notoriety and dodgy money
@@patrickchan2503 my local village social club was registered as a charity!! I suspect it was to benefit the (business owners) committee members. Ridiculous that a “pub” is a charity.
@@aficio698 from my understanding, setting up a charity requires paperwork and it's not always easy, it is hard work to maintain the charity status. But I don't know the ins and outs, was told by someone who researched this as they were thinking of setting up a charity.
But maybe the pub did a cost analysis and deemed it beneficial, don't know, sorry to hear about the dodgy practice. Why don't you ask them about it? Or why don't you volunteer for them and be a spy?
I am surprised by the complete lack of understanding by some of the comments. There seems to be a complete ack of acknowledgement that UK universities are one of the only industries left worthy of anything in the UK today. They not only provide income for cities that have lost all industry providing retail, housing and other Industries of income, they provide the whole of Britain a global image. Just look at the number of Peer-Reviewed papers, Publications and public profiles of many academics. I'm not only talking about Cambridge and Oxford or even the Russell group institutions, but the entire UK higher education ecosystem is of tremendous importance of keeping Britain alive.
Education is an industry where the merchant thinks they have the inalienable right to force customers to purchase products that they are not interested in. It is an industry where fear and shame and mockery are used when a customer has demonstrated that they currently do not see the value in one of the industry's products.
This fundamentally needs to change because it is such an obvious repudiation of everything we know about economics and how to interact with value seeking entities.
But, I do agree that every citizen must have basic literacy, mathematics, and science knowledge in order for them to function.
@PolicyFailureIsExpensive so,your are suggesting turning universities into digesteable fast food joints or making them into techo centers to build the robots that make universities redundant. Where will be thinking take place in either of those worldviews? Who or what remains when consumerism or techno determinism takes over?
Having been taught in Germany and having taught in the UK, I just have to say the UK universities are a complete scam when it comes to teaching (my comments do not concern the research though there are major issues there as well). Simply put, having a UK degrees means nothing. You could be amazing or horrendous and still end up with good grades at the end. In Germany this is impossible, most students fail and don't finish their degrees, and even amongst those who finish you know that a first actually means something. Exams are actually hard unlike in the UK, because the money the university has at its disposal, has almost no correlation with the amount of the students it has. In the UK you can't fail a student because on one hand it's kinda unethical given the ungodly amounts of money he has spent and on the other you'll get into trouble with the administration because they want that student to keep on spending his money. Beyond that the terms are much shorter here leading to less material being covered, and the completely useless one-year masters programmes.
Meh... Grades are irrelevant once you work your first job. University has become a scam throughout the world. Most degrees used to be paid traineeships. Now youre training for free without the guarantee of a job. And I'm not sure it prepares you any better for the workforce than the old way.
Right, because the purpose of a university should be to fail you as a student. What a stupid POV.
@@adtastic1533yup it’s employee paid training instead of employer paid training.
I remember when I did my final year BSc project and was partnered with a German exchange student from Ludwig Maximilian.
Despite being a 3rd year Physics student, like myself, he was sitting 4th year or even post-graduate level theory modules (intended for theory students who didn't have to do experimental work), such as General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory, in addition to the BSc project work. When I queried how he was able to do GR as a 3rd year student, he said that he'd studied Differential Geometry (a requirement for GR) in his 2nd year!
The difference in the level of education between us shocked me. And this was at Imperial.
@@adtastic1533Making up fake history to prove a shitty point I see.
Self learning and books 📚 are cheaper than running to and from classes and dorms at an university
Problem is self learning doesn’t get you a piece of paper that HR can look at and tell them you are qualified. So unless you are in the creative industries you need Uni to get work.
The question to ask with all this is what do we want the purpose(s) of academia to be? To develop technologies? To consider the world in new, somehow better ways? To develop a cohort able to make good decisions? To provide the best value to society as a whole?
And does academia as it is today do those things effectively?
Remember: Whoever pays the piper names the tune. Will that tune be one you like?
Unis should have skin in the game. If student getting govt loan, then uni should be responsible for 5% of monthly repayment if the student hasn't achieved a salary premium within 2 years of graduation.
Student accommodation construction, extensive hospitality services, offering the wrong types of courses, maintenance overheads, utilities for these massive corporate facilities is staggering and all the leisure facilities is where the money goes only a small fraction actually goes on education. There’s numerous universities with golf courses.
In Scotland UWS became an amalgam of Paisley, Ayr, Dumfries, Bell College. There is a vast distance between some of the colleges. Universities are also making placements abroad, so having u iversities merge within the UK is an option.
How about promoting technical colleges too....
Excellent comment. Ultimately the GOvt should consider what this country NEEDS. I could tell them ; Doctors, Engineers, Scientist and TRADESEMEN. Qulifying as the former should be fully supported by central Government. As for the latter, Apprenticeships needs a full re-launch - with an obligation on teachers of 15-17 year olds to inform their students that Tradesmen earn very good money indeed !!!
People need to realise the arts are necessary not just a cost
What i dont understand, is how a educational institution cannot square its finances, and yet they are apparently training and teaching people to be better citizens and manage their own finances. Also the idea that once again the wealthy institutions are asking for another bail out.
It’s called corporate welfare.
They are speaking about higher education expenditure, but they did not discuss what it is that they would like it to do.
Do they want the UK to build infrastructure? Do they want the UK to build ships or planes or trucks? Do they want the UK to increase agricultural yields? Would they like the UK to produce more minerals? Perhaps they'd like the UK to lead in metal recycling? Maybe they'd prefer to be able to draw and store more electricity from various sources?
What is it that you would like your labor force to be capable of doing? Are you making this possible through reliable frameworks and institutions? What is your vision for the UK, and what financial resources are you ready to commit to making it become reality despite potential short-term resistance from entrenched players?
Opening a shop, getting a marketing degree, or creating another social media site is all very impressive and helpful, but an entire nation needs more than just these types of options in employment.
There is a lot that happens that students don't see, including continuing curriculum development and updating. However there has also been a lot of spending on quality of student life like estate, support services, but also internal bureaucracy
Universities have been in a race to the bottom for a decade now. My friend's clever daughter went to Durham, but was offered Unconditional Offers from a big city University - that he felt de-motivated her. "Come HERE - we have even lower standards than the University 15 miles up the road !", seems to be the message. Oh for a return to the top 15% going into H.E., not the top 50%. As a country we do not need limitless amounts of Sociology Graduates thanks. My friend worked in the Accouints Dept of a well-known Midlands University and I was shocked to discover 6-7 years back that their Income was the size of a mid-sized PLC. If these Unis want to act like big Private Sector businesses competing , then they must accept the concequences of failure. No £100,000 Bonus for the Vice Chancellor THIS year, eh !?
The government forced them to act as private corporations, unfortunately not a question of "wanting".
Let me guess. The number of employees per student has ballooned over the years just like in USA. Am I right?
not sure because the ratio was imbalanced. 1 lecturer and 100+ students in a lecture theatre
No, it hasn't . I think the average is about 10 to 15 students per academic. That's what I remember from the guardian ranking lost. Why bring up this question? Is it rhetorical?
All of these university degrees but so little being invented or discovered.
Because they have no value. And a lot of people take these fluff degrees and give themselves a pat on the back for doing so.
@@patrickt49 A college degree was a guaranteed ticket to success back in the 80s and 90s. Then everyone started going to college and now it isn't anymore. We're going to really have to get away from this one-sized-fits-all approach to post-secondary education.
The current funding per student in real terms is the lowest it has ever been. This is why there are issues.
" Very worried university leaders" is music to my ears. Overpaid academics are an overhead that has
finally outpaced student revenue. The prima donnas of academia have walked too far out on the plank of entitlement.
Lot of fat in the UK University System. Most universities have no more than 30% of the staff as full time research active staff. More than 50% are administrators than manage the 30%. Think on that.
It would be helpful to publish the evidence you have to support your statement.
If they go bust then bye bye the younger generations job prospects which has already been windeled very low. This will also reflect on accommodations which is essentially housing stock but shared utilities for example bathrooms & kitchens also this would affect cities with universities significantly negatively, in Nottingham (East Midlands) for at least the past 10 years nearly 50% of the housing stock was made solely for student accommodation so that should worry you. 🙄
Somebody should give them a lesson on adjusting to the latest changes in the marketplace. Like every business does.
Case in point. If everyone has a degree then how does that make you more employable than the rest. I don’t care about access, I care about ROI
Mist Universities have increased land purchases and construction - these new capital assets they have invested in. Can they not just sell this off - why should tax payers effectively pay for their investments.
Which universities?
Universities will not go bust if they get into trouble the government will step in and the education authority
With what money? They are already deficit spending to the tune of 120 billion pounds a year.
increasing foreign students defeats the objective of providing further education for UK residents. We also need to move focus away from this idea that everyone should go to uni. Vocational training should be improved and not stigmatised.
The Conservative government has added many barriers to deter people from going to university and this is the result. I was lucky and was the last year to get 3k tuition fees and I relied on the maintenance grant to pay my rent. If I hadn't got that I would have never gone to university.
You could argue a lot of degrees aren't needed anymore because we have the internet. Even Computer Science, which I studied, is years out of date by the time you graduate.
Time to let them go!
Sounds like they wont have that rock wall
Have universities been over paying for buildings on top
do you want to send your child to school at a university where they have "equity" profs? or do you want to send them to opportunities where they can earn money and have a good life.
Why you say equity prof when it’s full of greedy boomers
A lot of professors are usually there after they have been in the private sector or they just like easy jobs security
If only you knew how bloated certain academic departments are
Also like to add the UK isn’t business friendly so even with degree access where are the jobs ??? All in London !!!
Only 20%of the population need a pure academic education- select them and keep the fees low-60% need tech/ skill / trade training with in work or college based , hand in hand with industry- 20% will inevitably be low skilled- 50% University educated was plucked out of the sky by politicians With a very narrow view of the world- these consumer Universities should close or reinvent themselves as skills centres-
I think it'll cause a lot of savings because students won't get into debt.
My daughter went to a British university to do a masters. From what I could make out from her experience, they were indoctrinating her to be an activist for climate change... It wasnt what she signed up (and paid) for.
Yup those are called optional elective courses. You need them to graduate. At least call them compulsory electives, which is an oxymoron itself.
My duaghter is currently sitting a Teaching Degree - FOR PRIMARY SCHOOLS. One of her modules was LGBTQ. Why the hell is she expected to be even teaching any of that to 8-9 year olds ?!?!? The good news is that she told me that most of her friends thought the module was " a waste of time".
@@rjw4762 funny thing is if she passed grade 12 and her gcse and A levels she is more the qualified for K-8.
The way out is a graduate tax of 2% for life.
Tuition fees high.
Lecturers on pittance.
Methinks, something don't add up.
Lets be honest,
Most university students don't take university seriously.
To them its just an excuse to flunk off for three years and avoid doing work.
No more bail outs on the backs of the working poor.
they should, correction should come
Useless places. No longer teaching.
Mere Self Esteem Clinics.
Foolishness
the reason unis are in trouble for the most part in the west is demographics and a failure to have a relationship between unis and the jobs available to students.
Maybe some universities should merge. The government have no money and i certainly dont want my taxes going to any UK universities.
What are university costs?
It’s just a room with a person in it. The GP must be about 90%.
You are showing your ignorance. If you are teaching science to world class standards with leading scientists and equipment, it's not, "just a room with a person in it". Please engage your brain if you want to be taken seriously.
Books? Computers? Lab equipment? Experts? Even a motel amounts to slightly more than a person in a room.
If I went on another YT video and said that about prisons, I'd get a furious deluge of criticism from prison guards, probation & rehab officers, etc. Yet that is much closer to the reality of a prison than to that of a university.
@anonUK Indeed, if you were teaching physics, let's say quantum and related technologies or chemistry or you were doing nuclear engineering, medicine or environmental sciences. This requires the best specialist kit and leading experts plus supporting staff. The research is then needed to ensure that you are at the forefront etc. Huge amount to universities barely touched on.
Do you know how much university has to pay for lab , data , resources etc . For example , for finance and math students, most top universities directly connects with Bloomberg tick data ( live data ). If you are an individual without university account , one has to pay 13000 pound per person annually for this data access.
Many poor countries education is cheap because they don’t have access to top notch equipments for research which is why many move to USA for cancer research.
Told my kids and my mates kids to go out and get an apprenticeship. All are doing well, got knowledge in their heads and can turn their hands to any problem. University teaches you nothing, only to whine and moan and get a job flipping burgers at McDonald's .. Great career choice and debt! 😂
Exactly. My friend's daughter got a History Degree from a pretty good University - 16 months on, she is STILL working in an Indian Restaurant - she cannot get a proper job - perhaps because she never had any idea what she wanted to do in the first place....other than NOT find a job at 18/19 !!!
There's too much provision. Let them go. World is changing so fast ....
The best universities are going to be in Japan, China, India, Singapore, maybe Russia.
Too BIG to fail? Ask the Dinosaurs how that worked out.
Qatar for the rescue
Because they are spending a vast amount of money on things that have nothing to do with educating students. The bureaucratic bloat is real.
I believe that the loans should be means tested as to only be available to those on low family incomes . Middle class parents should be able to pay for their childs education and if absolutely not able to having a third or half subsided
How many parents have an extra 1800 per month laying around (per child)? Remember that students also need to live and eat. Reality is that many parents already don't have enough and many students work compromisingly high amounts of hours.
Means testing should not just look at parental income but also their expenses. We might look like we earn above average but our bills are high and there is nothing leftover at the end of the month. Our council tax alone is nearly £4k pa.
If Elon Musk ran Universities, how many administrators would he fire?
Many could become POLYTECHNICS again! Just as they were originally supposed be, c.f.:-
"Another major educational change was that presaged by his (Anthony Crosland's) speech at Woolwich Polytechnic (now [of course!] Greenwich University) establishing a 'binary system' of higher education, in which universities would be joined by polytechnic institutions which concentrated on high-level vocational skills." Just one lot of rokit cyantists wiv degrise might have been a better such organised, i.e. with the other set comprised of those skilled in how to actually engineer solutions? Oh well, too late now... Sad really (:-) Never mind...
The world will be a better place................
Because there are 2 many universities and 2 many pointless degrees.
Let the market sort out the university not the tax payer again.
What about the government subsidising university costs for British citizens?
It technically already does this, just in a roundabout way;
Student Loans Company (SLC) loans the student their maintenance grants which go direct to student, and tuition fees which go direct to Institution.
Student only starts paying off when they earn a certain amount of money and it has a maximum term (for new students, this is about 25k and 40 years on Plan 5)
Up until plan 5 student loans, only approximately 25% of all UK students are expected to repay their loans. That means, the vast majority of students have their debt completely wiped out by Government. Student loans are essentially pointless - they are a means by which Govt pretends that students pay for their own tuition, when in reality, for the majority, the Govt pays for it.
TL;DR Student loans are all but meaningless, aside to recoup some costs to Govt. They are barely expected to be repaid. It's just a front for those who don't believe in Free Tuition.
It already does...
The universities filled their own pockets and mismanaged their organisations, because they've never had to run a business, and businesses don't have unlimited money when you mess up your management
@@mikedudley4062 Tbf, it's not all their own fault, the market they operate in is unlike any other with prices fixed at below cost for their primary customers (British students). Because of that, they need to attract higher fees from int'l students and they've spent huge amounts of capital (marketing, new facilities etc.) trying to attract them, only for their numbers to drop off post-COVID. They're also incentivised to offer poor quality / cheap to run courses as the fees they get will be the same no matter what, which is crazy. Needs to be some kind of link between what they get paid and the employment outcomes for their graduates.
Universities and student accommodation companies are so high on international students.
They are like crack addicts, they just need more. Doesn’t surprise me since a lot of the leftoids love their illicit substances.
The demographic cliff has been reached as Western European liberal policies have resulted in less children being born. Simply put, there are less children to educate and eventually less young people entering the labor market.
We don’t care anymore … they did it to themselves
Being greedy has consequences
one third have uni degrees -yes I know but only because geting degrees is easier , same for multiples of GSE/O levels . The continuation of lower standards can get everyone with a degree until we meet the George Carlin limit ( and if you dont know it - look it uo , uh ok , you pass uni degree if you turn up with a pencil - even then some will still fail ! ) .
don't bail out universities
Higher ed became obsolete
Look none of you got to the heart of the problem. Universities spent all their money on hotel building and hospitality. Instead of investing in their own staff and spin offs and saving for a rainy day, it is corrupt to the core. Letting it fail will not teach it a lesson and only drive away the best people.
No there is no need to bail out just close them go to old tech colleges like we use have no more Micky mouse degrees which their no our economic system.
What if they go bust? A whole heap of overpaid neoliberal airbrains and a sack of marshmallow soft subjects swirl redundantly around the academic ether.
Because people can't afford to pay for these expensive school programs. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Why does any company or government go bust? Because they keep spending money that they don't have. Cut costs, and wind up useless courses that do not prepare people for meaningful jobs.
I havnt met a single person who has gone to uni who has any common sense about how the world actually works😅
Let them fail.
Restructure and get them running up again on essential courses a lot fewer numbers.
Either this
Or get more students from out of the UK and watch Brits complain about immigration numbers again.
Then what have few unis having a very high teacher to student ratio or limit admission to those with only a and above?
basically allow only honours high school students in. University is just a suck on resources unless you are a doctor, lawyer or want high connections in government where daddy isn’t going to get you the job.
Useless degrees have to go.
The UK is fkt
Why should the tax payer bail out private business?
I guess because loads of labour votes depend on maintaining weak universities & subjects and weak graduates who are future labour voters👍🏻
Always bailing out some capitalist failiure....
the title is misleading, we are talking about university misspending or people's wellness? C'mon IFS.. don't change the topic or I'll change the channel.
Talk about low budget films.
No data no graphs no animation
Just three idiots talking about their personal opinion unsubscribe
Why? They're badly run.
Not needed anymore! Learn from youtube and get your own texts.Teach yourself?
God, I hate neoliberal talking heads.
All things WOKE goes to SHIT.
Bail out the degrees the nation needs, we don't need more psychology degrees and business/management degrees. We need more engineers, scientists and frankly a lot don't need an academic degree but first hand experience as skilled workers.
There was suppose to be business and medical backing for psychology because people don’t like mental asylums
You want management degree or work in management …u better know how to figure out revenue cycle and actually how to move money
Most companies are not accepting people out of high school your generation ruined that along time ago
Rich people problem.
Get rid of useless propaganda degrees. Focus on STEMS and trades. Everything else unless you're going to be a doctor, lawyer, or accountant or any specialized profession is useless.
Yeah but most higher degrees like med require stem
A lot of engineering requires heavy stem and experience ….
But you must have a market to hire these individuals
So until you boomers retire this market will remain effed
equity is a joke, in my opinion reward merit.
Why you think everything is equity …half these universities barely keep enough tenured profs anyways
@@Shineynsparkles honestly you really only should give tenor to amazing smart good profs. That way you can fire or move people that you do not want or need.
@@reneprovosty7032 but the remaining professors are retiring at an alarming rate and all you got are adjunct profs whom are on contracts
So this is going to be interesting
If you think government can rid society of inequalities in ability and drive and enterprise, then I’m afraid you don’t understand life and the UK’s diverse society as it is.
It's NOT my problem.
Look in tory bank accounts you'll find out why and how.
So nothing about what the universities can do for themselves? Cut costs is as legitimate as make more money but it would mean fewer people going to university
Only 20%of the population need a pure academic education- select them and keep the fees low-60% need tech/ skill / trade training with in work or college based , hand in hand with industry- 20% will inevitably be low skilled- 50% University educated was plucked out of the sky by politicians With a very narrow view of the world- these consumer Universities should close or reinvent themselves as skills centres-