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Tuition increase in the UK | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Desacrator48 Groupie United States Joined 5117 days ago 93 posts - 127 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 9 of 64 13 December 2010 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In my state of California, it seems they have been increasing fees on the state universities and community colleges every year, even before the crisis started. It is always followed by student protests and the like, but they are actually quite small relative to the number of students who attend these universities.
With that being said, none of the increases have been on the sudden scale that just happened in the UK. And having it done to a population that has a much different expectation of universal access to things like education and health care, I can see why the protests are so serious over there. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5820 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 64 13 December 2010 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hmmm... All governments run on "the people's" money, so technically "other people's" money, and quite a few governments have run out of that money, regardless of their politics. It's something we like to call a "global recession", and in this case it wasn't caused by Sweden increasing the right to paternity leave or Venezuela nationalising the steel industry. In fact, what it was caused by was commercial banks who operated on theoretical funds and bad debts. And the biggest problems started with US banks, under-regulated because of a national free-market policy of non-intervention and non-regulation. Capitalists can run out of other people's money too. Edited by Cainntear on 13 December 2010 at 9:05pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5820 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 11 of 64 13 December 2010 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
The problem goes back further than New Labour. Like most of Europe, the UK had put a lot of investment into building an infrastructure for technical vocational education. Our polytechnics (technical colleges) produced well-trained workers with industrial skills on 1 and 2 year programmes for school leavers. Thatcherite policy saw industry as the past. Thatcher wanted a country built on professional services. You could say that she foresaw the information age. Or you could say that she castrated UK industry. Either way, she offered incentives to FE colleges to become HE universities. Most of the so-called "Mickey Mouse degrees" are in vocational subjects and delivered by former colleges, it's just that instead of entering at the age of 16 or 17 and studying for a year or two, they're now starting at the age of 18 and studying for 3 or 4 years. And the costs have not simply doubled -- FE colleges are pure teaching institutions, so all the costs were on teaching time and teaching resources. Universities, on the other hand, are research institutions, and employees dedicate only a small proportion of their time to teaching activities. Universities are therefore many times more expensive than FE colleges per student. This put immense pressure on university funding and it was the Conservative Party who introduced student loans at the end of the 80s when the student grant wasn't able to keep pace with inflation. The problem obviously didn't go away when the Tories left power -- there was too much pressure on the system -- and tuition fees was the obvious quick fix. It wasn't popular, and what do politicians do with unpopular decisions? Spin. The 50% target was simply a way of spinning the announcement to claim it was for the public good -- a way of claiming that they were increasing access to education rather than decreasing it. Student funding will always be a problem until and unless we go back to the root of the problem -- the loss of the polytechnics. Unfortunately there really is no-one to campaign for the reinstatement of the ´techs. The former polytechnics chose to change status, and would be reluctant to change back. The National Union of Students represents people on vocational degrees as well as people on traditional academic degrees, so can't and won't campaign against the Mickey Mouse degrees. In fact, the NUS will speak out against anyone who uses the term "Mickey Mouse degrees" in the media. For employers, the more training potential employees get at someone else's expense, the better. In fact the CBI, one of the biggest lobbying groups for the commercial sector, is constantly campaigning for more vocational degrees. Their line is that universities should teach "the skills that employers want". They would have all the intellectual and academic rigour stripped out of degree courses and turn them into one long training course in using industry-standard software packages to do industry-standard tasks. That was the polytechnics' job. For the political parties, access to universities is a great populist claim. Colleges play second fiddle in the public consciousness. Everyone's individual interests outweigh the public (both social and economic) good. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5154 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 12 of 64 13 December 2010 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Deeming it unfair how learning a new language requires so much time and effort while recognizing the value of multilingualism to society, a socially-conscious government could propose a law stating that learning a new language will henceforth take no more than ten minutes every other day for six months, seeing that to demand a greater commitment would clearly impose an unbearable burden to the prospective learner and violate his universal human rights to happiness, culture and ease.
Once this bill is signed into law (who would oppose such a boon?) we'll all be able to master the languages we listed in the 20 languages thread and still have time leftover to campaign for a reduction of tuition fees to $1. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5458 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 13 of 64 13 December 2010 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Our government forced banks to give loans out to pukes who couldn't afford a house in the first place. I never said a capitalist system doesn't run out of other peoples' money. A capitalist system is like a train heading towards bankruptcy while countries with socialist governments are a TGV.
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| HenryMW Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4983 days ago 125 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, French Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 14 of 64 13 December 2010 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
American Banks are hardly under-regulated. Google Sarbanes-Oxley. Self-interest does not drive banks to give out bad loans. Misguided social engineering on the other hand..... It seems to me (I was in Europe over the summer and spoke to some Europeans) that there is a big cultural difference between Europe and the US. A lot of people over here do not like taking money form one person to pay for the services of another (look at federal outlays and that is where the deficit is; it was the big issue in the midterm elections). There is no such thing as free, no matter how much you like it. Europeans seemed not to care where the money came from as long as they got what they wanted. Two sides of the coin. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| lloydkirk Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6222 days ago 429 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 15 of 64 14 December 2010 at 1:49am | IP Logged | |||||
Those socialists countries in Europe are doing quite splendid aren't they? Have you read about the PIGS? It never ceases to amaze me that socialism is even on the discussion table. When will the world understand that the only system that creates wealth is a capitalist one, there is not getting around that fact. The bigger the government, the higher the taxes, the greater the regulation, etc.. the less prosperity. The failure of communism beautifully illustrates this. A system not built on the pursuit of individual self-interest is a time bomb. Even the so-called mixed economy we have in Europe and the U.S has proven to be a failure. The result is what we see today, a lethargic, inflation/debt ridden economy. On the other side of the world, truly free market economies like singapore and hong kong are prospering. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4939 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 16 of 64 14 December 2010 at 2:02am | IP Logged | |||||
Actually, both Hong Kong and Singapore had negative GDP growth rates for 2009. They too were affected by the global financial crisis. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful |
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