Is the UK university system broken ?

I am bloody fantastic at bringing everything together, proof reading and rewriting the shit out of semi literate nonsense and staying up all night to polish a turd.

What would this course be if you could package and teach it at uni? Seems flippin useful!

Sounds like we went to the same sixth form, Walleater. Was the rocks man D. J. G. ? I went to the Tech too; for typing and French. STW is witness to how bad my touch typing is, my French got better. I hitched to Morocco with the French assistante.

Is the UK university system broken? Not yet.

Universities are still one of our strengths as a nation. All those international students paying high fees are doing so because they see value in getting a qualification from a UK university and they do wonders for our balance of trade.

But the financial model is broken and in time that will wreck what has been a strength.

Fees of £9,250 pa sounds like (and is) a lot, but they haven’t increased in god knows how long. Meanwhile the cost of everything else has gone up. The “deal” from the government was basically “just bring in lots of foreign students” and use their fee income to plug the gap. That was never a great model. If the survival of the university depends on bringing in ever more students to cope with inflation then there is always going to be a temptation to lower entrance requirements and make sure they all get good grades, which devalues the product over time. But now the government is getting spooked by immigration figures and want to restrict the student numbers anyway, effectively cutting off the revenue stream that many universities rely on for survival.

If you want to return to a situation where universities offer high value courses with high standards then you need to come up with a model where their income doesn’t depend on the number of students that they accept.

Wife is a prof at Manchester teaches 18thC Eng Lit. The Eng Lit course on average 200 students in 1st year, effectively subsidising the smaller courses, and being a Russel Gp uni can attract students from all over Amazingly enough some of our friends (also English or film studies) are reducing head count as they’re losing money hand over fist, A friend of ours has been invited to take a 20% pay cut or risk losing his job.

The work load for senior lecturers and profs needs looking at though, my wife, alongside her teaching and student support roles has admin roles, PhD supervision and is require to actually produce research (articles and book) on top of that work load, it’s unsustainable.

We’ve got an arty farty artisan cafe / food shop place close to us, their advert for a shelf stacker listed having a degree in the essential criteria. The worlds gone mad and stuck up it’s own arse.

The whole education system is defunct and based on an industrial revolution model and doesn’t reflect modern methods of learning, intellect or neurodiversity and it doesn’t teach kids about the income streams they need to be aware of and generate these days.

Having 30 kids satin chairs on a shitty classroom with a teacher droning on about stuff they can’t relate to only turns kids off of education. It’ll suit the 5-10% of academics in the class but the rest it will disengage.

Like me, my son had had enough of school at the time of his GCSEs he’s 2 years into his 4 year electrician apprenticeship and is living it. I’m happy for him and it’s a good move for him. He’s earning and saving, he paid for his driving lessons, car & insurance at 18.5 years old. He’s eyeing up a self funded year out once qualified.

We need a different approach focusing on academic, technical and vocational and delivered in a manner fit for 2024.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong but I get the impression as universities have become businesses their whole approach has become transactional and so it is the case with the students. The thirst for reading, learning and self-improvement has been replaced with ‘if I do this or cut and paste that will I get a 2.1?’

One of the issues is Uni’s have been plugging the gaps with Overseas Students, but the Government has imposed restrictions on Immigration and is stopping students coming over with families. This has had a massive effect on the numbers coming over, and Russel Groups are far more at risk. We’re also seeing a general down turn un UK Undergraduate and Post Graduate applications across the board.

I get the impression as universities have become businesses

Manchester is obsessed with both its position in the league tables (to attract students) and how much money it has. Depts. are very much encouraged to take on as many students as they can, especially foreign applicants for Masters and Phd courses, for my wife that means wading through suitcases of barely legible applications from Chinese and Indian students who can just about string a sentence together in modern English, let alone study the 18th version of it.

All the while hoovering up the local UK students from miles around, I mean after all, would you rather study at Manchester or Preston? No offence to Preston obvs.

1. Tuition was originally paid for by fees (to the tune of around 50%) until the after WW2.
2. It was only in the 1960s that it became fee free (covered by local councils).
3. As manufacturing declined in the UK, Polys and HE were slower to react to changing circumstances and more people started to go to university
4. Labour introduced partial Fees in 98.
5. The conservatives raised it in 2012
6. It hasn’t risen since then (not really) – 12 years without increase, but 12 years of inflation for the universities to swallow
7. The real cost of tuition is around £12k/y.
8. The only way universities can make up this shortfall without compromising teaching (which is far more structured than at any time in history) or research is to raise international fees and numbers as that’s all they have to play with.
9. The vast majority of junior research staff at universities are woefully paid for the amount of work they do.

Germany is fee free (to the student), but only around 28-32% of people go to university vs. 45%+ in the UK.  Germany also has far less of a service based industry than the UK.  General taxation in Germany is around 10-15% higher than the UK to cover this and other things.  One way or another, someone has to pay.

As for apprenticeships.  Every company I’ve worked for (with the exception of directly working for Universities) has ran an apprenticeship scheme.  Almost every year, they’ve failed to fill all of their available slots and in subsequent years have either upped the package offered or decreased the slots and ran more graduate places*.  This is both the UK and France.

Apprenticeships (even degree apprenticeships) aren’t viewed well by the vast majority.  They can be long, tie you in for a long period and have substantial commitments…I’d argue they’re harder than a university education in many regards, but are seen as less, despite in many cases being equal or better…

*they have also taken people below entry requirements, but this doesn’t often end well.

The thirst for reading, learning and self-improvement has been replaced with ‘if I do this or cut and paste that will I get a 2.1?’

Sadly I find this very true.

Yep NickC I graduated from Manchester in the 70s and felt like I’d had a thoroughly good education and really put through it by some great academics. Other family members were also happily there for PGCE and medical school. Sad to see it under those unwelcome pressures.

We are running quite a number of Degree Apprenticeship schemes, possibly one of the leading Universities. The down side is these are not cheap to run and have an additional ‘costs’ over traditional degree courses, and OFSTED regulations. The plus side, is employers are ‘taxed’ so really need to move to using the Apprenticeship Levy they pay. The NHS have cottoned on to this and we’re seeing programmes move from Degree to Degree Apprenticeship.

Like the rest of us, energy costs have rocketed, and whilst staff are hybrid working, the buildings are open, heated and lit for student’s to use. Staff space is being rationalised (professional services staff in shared spaces), which can maybe accommodate them in the office 2-3 times a week.

Universities have been pushed to diversify income, and International is one way, but the market has crashed with a change in Government Policy.

Research never makes any money – it costs.

Foreign students at Russell Group unis should be capped at 15%.

Pourquoi?

Parce qu’il est totalement absurde que le Royaume-Uni subventionne et entretienne un groupe d’universités d’élite à grands frais, et que l’État permette ensuite à ces universités de donner 34 % de leurs capacités totales à des étudiants étrangers. Il existe d’énormes subventions publiques, manifestes et cachées, aux universités – les frais de scolarité ne couvrent rien comme le coût réel. il s’agit d’un transfert massif et caché de richesse des contribuables britanniques ordinaires vers les étudiants étrangers (dont la plupart appartiennent à l’élite ou à la classe moyenne de leur propre pays).

Laissons les établissements d’enseignement supérieur privés et non élitistes servir le marché d’exportation. si la capacité des universités d’élite nécessite un si grand nombre d’étudiants étrangers, alors les universités se sont trop développées et ont oublié leur mission publique.

To be fair, the shambles of group work at uni has been exactly like the shambles of group work in Highly Efficient Private Enterprise imhe

Is the UK university system broken ?

No, the entire education system is and has been for 30+ years.

Lack of primary school funding requires secondary schools to do catch up with students in basic subjects, maths and English standards seem to be dropping. Secondary schools are fixated on GCSE results & college acceptance. Colleges are obsessed with university places. Every part of the system from secondary school onwards is geared towards the next level of education – not the workplace.

Jobs that should just require a couple GCSEs now have ‘degree necessary’ on application.

I did my degree 25+years ago, on completion I was asked to do a masters, I declined, went into the workplace to find 2 others in my office who had left school at 16, worked there way up and we’re on significantly more money than my starting wage and we’re also 2 years younger with 4+ years experience. I’ve found this to be the case at every step of my career. And it took 10years to pay of the dept I’d incurred at uni.

I didn’t go to Uni, worked from 16 and studied for 7 years part time. Qualified Accountant at 23 and I now work at a University – we’ve got a big job on our hands balancing the books ! We’re in a pretty good position, but the Government Policies have really hammered recruitment.

yes, I accumulated this in the last 5 years,  although I’m 44 this year so they won’t see much back, the balance will only increase as the interest rate will far outstrip any payments, so yes a graduate tax as you were. However the last 2 years have been an MSc, of which, I’ve had to complete 1000hrs on placement, 900 or so of which have been 2x 12 week placements since September, I’ve paid £9k for tuition for the 2nd year, for at best, 40 contact hours, sure background work setting up placements and so but still, and for all this work, I’ll qualify as a band 5 on £14.53 an hour.

@Edukator ha ha I can’t for the life of me remember. It was Shrewsbury Sixth Form College.

I mainly remember riding my bike up and down the stairs by the bike storage area, and going to the snooker hall 30 seconds away quite a bit.

I lived in Shirley for my sixth form years so went to Solihull Sixth Foom College where brummies have snobby brummy accents and think they’re posh. It was new and “experimental” which meant the head master had decided that the students run their own common room which was soon trashed and smokey. I played table tennis and occasionally spent free periods in the library rather than venture into the common room. The experiment didn’t last long.

I’ve just dug out a report and found I also did “engineering” at the Tech and modern political thought. Quite varied our educations back then. The rocks man was D.G. Gobbett the ex-head of geology at Malaysia uni. He had this to say on my report:

“His exam work relects Edukator’s ability, his work during term time is erratic and frequently shows the effects of too much cycling and not enough geology”

Geology at Aberystwyth uni back then was a 40h week between lectures, tutorials, the library and lab work with weeks in the field in the holidays on top. I’d been working before going and maintained the same routine. A niece did history in York a few years ago and had  6h a week of contact time for her £9000.

I lived in Shirley for my sixth form years so went to Solihull Sixth Foom College where brummies have snobby brummy accents and think they’re posh. It was new and “experimental” which meant the head master had decided that the students run their own common room which was soon trashed and smokey.

Oi! I resemble that remark! I loved the common room, but then I was one of the ones making it smokey.

Really interesting reading this – MCJnr is today taking his final exam to finish his 3 year degree on one of those Mickey Mouse degrees Sunak probably wants to abolish, and (NoLonger)LittleMissMC is off on the rounds of uni  open days next week.

Jnr’s uni experience is undoubtedly different to most other students as he’s at Cambridge. He didn’t know what he wanted to do as a career so took the place to do music there and study the thing he loved. It’s paid off – he’s a natural “doer” and organiser and by running various musical and student groups he’s got good people and organisational skills and has got a graduate position with one of the so-called Big 4.

His girlfriend didn’t want to go to uni and got a degree apprenticeship in the software/project field she was interested in, so has one more year of her degree to go, but no debt, has been living independently away from home since 18.

So both those options have worked out well for the two of them.

Eldests mate was an “average” A level student, is doing mechanical engineering degree at Trent. His third year was a placement. Unusually for him he got his shit together early and applied for all the “dream” employers early, and he is just finishing 12 months placement designing bits of the 2026 Red Bull F1 car.

Again, the right uni route for him, but also, he had to be a self starter to make the most of it and get what he really wanted.

I can see unis having to scale back/consolidate to keep providing quality education. More vocational courses may need to fit better with degree apprenticeships. It may be that some unis won’t survive, sadly. I’ve no problem with tuition fees being covered by grants to make tuition free for all, realistic maintenance grants/loans, and maybe a 1-2% graduate tax on income perhaps.

Education and aspiration need to be free for everyone.

I don’t think the fees need to be free for everyone. Like benefits and tax they should be based on needs and ability to pay. A very simplistic model could be

Parental income £50000, one child, no fees no grant. Below 50000 a grant rising to a full grant at <20000. Above 50000: £1000 fees for every £10000 of extra income up to £200000.

Two children in higher education £70000 no fees no grant and then as above and so on.

A parental obligation to pay with free legal aid to students to take on recalcitrant parents and the ability to sieze and sell the parents’ house if needs be. Make it clear to parents that if they have kids they are obliged to fund their kids’ education if their income is above a threshold.

Make it clear to parents that if they have kids they are obliged to fund their kids’ education if their income is above a threshold.

Is that not what parents pay tax for?

A parental obligation to pay with free legal aid to students to take on recalcitrant parents and the ability to sieze and sell the parents’ house if needs be.

That’s going to make it a bit frosty during Christmas holidays.

I wonder at what age parents should be able to (legally) consider themselves no longer on the hook to support their children?

I was the last year of student grants. My dad had just been made redundant so he had no income and I got a full one. Luxury! All worked out well for me but I really don’t know keen I’d have been to start out in adult life with a 50-100k debt and a career path of moderate income ahead of me (I was always likely to go into science/academia in some form).

Parental income £50000, one child, no fees no grant. Below 50000 a grant rising to a full grant at <20000.

Sounds simple.  But real relationships are messy.  Alice and Bob get married.  They have a child Charlie.  Alice and Bob get divorced.  Bob gets remarried.  Charlie lives with Alice.  Bob earns more than Alice.  Bob and new wife have another kid together.  Alice moves in with Dave they aren’t married, he has two kids of his own, they come and stay every second weekend.

Above 50000: £1000 fees for every £10000 of extra income up to £200000.

And once again their is a motivation for those on high incomes to divert it to bikes/evs/pensions etc.

Two children in higher education £70000 no fees no grant and then as above and so on.

what if the second child is doing an apprenticeship living at home on £2.80 hr, or is disabled so not working but has significant costs?

A parental obligation to pay

I can’t recall exactly how it’s worded but there is already an expectation of parental support; OK – I’ll pay your fees, but you pay me rent for the summer!

with free legal aid to students to take on recalcitrant parents and the ability to sieze and sell the parents’ house if needs be.

Presumably by the time any legal process has concluded the kid will have graduated anyway.

Make it clear to parents that if they have kids they are obliged to fund their kids’ education if their income is above a threshold.

for how long?  What notice would you give?

Jnr’s uni experience is undoubtedly different to most other students as he’s at Cambridge. He didn’t know what he wanted to do as a career so took the place to do music there and study the thing he loved. It’s paid off – he’s a natural “doer” and organiser and by running various musical and student groups he’s got good people and organisational skills and has got a graduate position with one of the so-called Big 4.

This highlights the problem with the government’s mission to cancel ‘low value’ or ‘mickey mouse’ degrees. Plenty of studies have been done to find the offending courses, but the fact remains – put intelligent, hardworking people into almost any course, and they’ll end up with a good job and earn reasonable money.

The terrifying return of the UK’s worst higher education courses

An interesting nugget from the above link:  PPE graduates of Oxbridge tend to earn about the same as Pharmacy graduates from Brighton

I can’t recall exactly how it’s worded but there is already an expectation of parental support;

Yes, the maintenance loan is (parental) means tested, and starts tapering down from a starting point of a household income of £25,000 per year

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-tuition-fees-changes/

A parental obligation to pay with free legal aid to students to take on recalcitrant parents and the ability to sieze and sell the parents’ house if needs be. Make it clear to parents that if they have kids they are obliged to fund their kids’ education if their income is above a threshold.

A university student is (usually) a legally independent adult. Why should one adult be legally responsible for funding a choice made by another adult, just because they have a familial relationship?

I don’t disagree on fees being means tested (although we would disagree on the boundaries), but equally I believe admissions criteria should be higher all round. University should be for the academically elite, and be used to push human knowledge further. They should not be about preparing people to do jobs, that should be the responsibility of employers and vocational training.

I see we’ve drifted a bit from the “are universities in trouble” to “are they good value”, which is fair enough I guess as the two are linked.

I’ve seen a few comments equating value with contact hours and as someone who designs postgraduate courses I find this quite interesting. Do people generally think that the more contact the student has with the lecturer the better? A lot of the evidence in the literature would suggest that isn’t the case, but it is still a commonly held view.

Lets’s take an example: In a “traditional” course (one of a number that they take simultaneously) I would stand in front of the class and deliver content for, say, three hours each week. That’s basically me at the front giving the lecture and the students showing varying levels of interest. I’m not too bad at that, I’ve been doing it for long enough but still I doubt I really have the attention of more than half the class by the end and that’s being generous. Now I tend to use what is called the flipped-classroom model. So I’ll generate content for the students to engage with before the live session. That may be a recorded lecture, exercises, directed reading or whatever. The live session is then more of a tutorial style (exercises, group work, polls, discussions etc). These are much more interactive and designed to consolidate the knowledge, but I’ll probably only have a couple of hours a week rather than the three contact hours I had with the traditional method. It takes a bit more work on my part and has certainly required me to learn some new skills, but there will still be those that say that there are fewer contact hours and therefore it is a worse deal.

Contact hours is a weird one and probably very subject dependant. For me at masters level I only had one to one tutorials for a grand total of maybe 4 hours a term, and you do get to the end of it and wonder quite where the tuition fees have gone. A couple of working days worth of quality 1-1 max. And yet at the same time – at that level – if one’s work was not entirely self directed then the student probably shouldn’t have been there, most of the things learnt I taught myself… and in roundabout ways one wonders if with the right attitude the same could equally be achieved outside of the institutional system… and no, this was not a subject that anyone would ever learn anything about in the workplace. Even 25 years ago, three quarters of the intake were foreign students paying vastly more tuition fess (I hear 4/5 times more nowadays not uncommon). As a fun fact, if it weren’t for the foreign students paying extortionate fees for the institutions kudos then many courses wouldn’t be financially viable to educate their domestic intake, so to that extent then the system is very broken and has been for a while.

Parce qu’il est totalement absurde que le Royaume-Uni subventionne et entretienne un groupe d’universités d’élite à grands frais, et que l’État permette ensuite à ces universités de donner 34 % de leurs capacités totales à des étudiants étrangers. Il existe d’énormes subventions publiques, manifestes et cachées, aux universités – les frais de scolarité ne couvrent rien comme le coût réel. il s’agit d’un transfert massif et caché de richesse des contribuables britanniques ordinaires vers les étudiants étrangers (dont la plupart appartiennent à l’élite ou à la classe moyenne de leur propre pays).

Deux glass du vin rouge sil vous plait

As my mate once said to much hilarity in a cafe in France…

Son1 has a student loan that has accrued to about the same as @dirtyrider. He graduated with a degree and masters, earned not enough to have to start paying, did another masters and is now reading for a PhD in another country. I doubt he’ll be repaying the loan at all before he is 30. By contrast, Son2 graduated with a BSc in Aviation with a Commercial Pilot’s licence from a Irish University, for about the same total debt, and has a first job that pays 40% above median UK salary. Three of my nieces are studying some form of Communications/Media Studies. If I look at the size of my company’s Communications department, I can see there will be no shortage of employment there.

I’ve never understood why as an adult over the age of 18, parental income should have any bearing on funding for university. A graduate tax always seemed much fairer, but the student loans scheme looks a typical (i.e., poor) very British compromise. Reliance on foreign fees  has been the net result, and with the hostile immigration, that’s coming back to bite institutions.

I’ve never understood why as an adult over the age of 18, parental income should have any bearing on funding for university.

I get the technical difficulties but the reality is that most parents that can afford to will pay for their kids to do better through school and higher education (from school fees to tutors to extracurricular activity to paying rent so they can study and not work to new laptops etc), and there’s a huge (but complicated) link in this country between family wealth and educational attainment. That’s undeniable and why it has at least some bearing.

An interesting nugget from the above link:  PPE graduates of Oxbridge tend to earn about the same as Pharmacy graduates from Brighton

…and pharmacists haven’t yet wrecked British society or the economy (although one did give birth to the current PM, which is a close second).

@Edukator ha, yes Solihull>rest of Birmingham, in the same way that Shrewsbury looks down on Telford 😀

I lived in Acocks Green for a while and temped in Shirley. Bought a Kona from Red Kite in 1999.

And yet at the same time – at that level – if one’s work was not entirely self directed then the student probably shouldn’t have been there, most of the things learnt I taught myself… and in roundabout ways one wonders if with the right attitude the same could equally be achieved outside of the institutional system…

Thanks @endoverend that’s very interesting (to me at least 🙂 )

Maybe it’s a postgraduate rather than an undergraduate thing, but a lot of what I’m trying to achieve is moving students from being passive to active learners. One of the challenges with that is that even when it works well the student can still be left feeling that they did it all themselves and they often don’t recognise the role the tutor may have played.

It’s certainly easier and safer for me to just pitch up for lots of hours each week and deliver content. I’ve taught some of this stuff for over 20 years so a lecture takes hardly any preparation. I don’t have to deal with all the other stuff (marking formative tests, moderating discussion groups etc) that I have to do with the “modern” methods and the students are happy as they are getting lots of contact hours, which they see as good value for their fees.

O.W.Hopkin’s was where most of my bike bits came from, Red Kite was after I’d left.

End of university or 25 in answer to the generalist’s question. I was quite happy to pay for junior’s keep (pension alimentaire) during his education as the law demands of me here, and then some. He ended uni with no debt.

I brought him into the world I didn’t see why he should live in anymore hardship than myself until in a position to earn good money himself. I just see it as a transfer of wealth between generations. He’s been financially independant for a year now. We chatted on the phone yesterday about his plan for cycle touring this Summer, discussing bikes I sensed the one I suggested was a bit more than he wanted to pay, so I told him to order it and send me the bill. 🙂

Different country, different approach, but I think the approach would work just as well in the UK.

Universities have become finishing schools for the middle classes. I graduated from Manchester Met in the early 90’s  , (It was a Polytechnic when I went in and a Uni when I left) and by the time I left you could already see the focus had shifted from being a place of learning to that of being a business.

I studied the most Mickey Mouse subject of all (Fine Art) and many of my compatriates and friends went on to work within the University system  as lecturers or otherwise. Looking back to when I went to college, many, if not most of the students were working class or at least lower middle class, people who these days couldn’t afford (or wouldn’t take on the financial burden) of going to University

Another thing that occurs to me is that students from previous generations used to live in ‘diggs’, some might have spent a term or a year in a hall of residence but then they were out and had to find a place to live, usually amongst diverse, mostly working class communities  learning a bit about how he other half lived and a little more about themselves to boot.

Now all the students live in extortionally expensive student specific accommodation and their only engagement with the unwashed masses is transactional. That interaction between University and local populations that had been so influential and creatively productive for generations has vanished.

As a consequence, working class talent doesn’t get the opportunities it once did and middle class students get a much more sheltered experience than they once did. Culture as a whole suffers. Going to University used to be about more than what you studied, it was much a journey of engaging with the world and of self development.

It seems to me that the University experience the days isn’t that much different from Sixth Form, all be it one with exorbitant accommodation (and tuition costs).

An interesting nugget from the above link: PPE graduates of Oxbridge tend to earn about the same as Pharmacy graduates from Brighton

If I had to pick one useless degree that doesn’t benefit society at all, PPE at Oxbridge would be the winner!