It gets worse; I did a BSc and three post-grad quals, all with decent grants. And got sponsorship from Rolls-Royce Aero that entailed me working for them over the summer holidays but getting paid for summer, xmas and easter hols.
Making students pay directly for education is insane. There are two basic scenarios
a) student is doing ‘practical’ course that leads to a profitable career and they earn much money and thus should pay much income tax.
b) student is doing a course that leads to what I can best characterise as a ‘cultural’ course (fine arts, drama, writing, the things that make a bunch of people something akin to a civilisation) and never makes any money. They couldn’t pay back a loan.
So how about funding education a bit more sensibly and saving the admin costs (which apparently are large) of stupid loan programs?
Canada and Europe seem to be currently enjoying a reverse brain-drain as a combined result of out-of-control U.S. tuition fees and the xenophobic “MAGA” policies of the alt-right regime in Washington.
Just be warned that only Canadian residents pay cheap tuition. Foreigners pay upwards of three times as much (though still lower than many US schools).
I was on the faculty of one of the aforementioned three great British universities (Hull) during the Thatcher years, and one of the problems with the model is that because the government didn’t fund the universities at required levels, they were always just scraping by, and many good faculty left the country (and many universities - even redbricks - had to stop offering degrees even in core subjects, like chemistry, physics, and maths). The tuition model was supposed to fix this, but of course as revenue came in from tuition, the government cut back on their own share. There is a lesson in this for the NHS.
Right, and this highlights the problem with nationalised industries; the government of the day will use funding or not to further their agenda, regardless of the public need. A case in point is the woeful underfunding of the rail system (both infrastructure and rolling stock) in the later years of British Rail.
Say what you like about privatised rail (and there are serious problems), it’s so much better than 1980s British Rail. Anyone advocating a return to nationalised rail needs to explain how a state monopoly is going to be handled better than any other kind of monopoly (including keeping trains running after 6pm, which my experience of France would suggest is not a given).
The last tine I was in the UK buying a ticket at waterloo, there were people by the ticket machines who are necessary to figure out the amazingly complex pricing schemes for when you want to go to the next town over. Taking a day trip should not be like planning a trip abroad.
You’re right, the Swiss system is excellent, so clearly it’s possible. BR pre privatisation was certainly not excellent, I distinctly hope we never go back to anything like that.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully aware there are many problems with the current private sector semi-monopoly we have. Farcical ticketing strategies is one aspect of that.
[quote=“heng, post:28, topic:101592”]
Say what you like about privatised rail (and there are serious problems), it’s so much better than 1980s British Rail.[/quote]
I completely disagee, from a fair bit of firsthand experience. Like everyone I had occasional problems with the rail in the 80s, but it was a thousand times easier to figure out how to get from point A to point B than it was post-privatisation.
If you’re trying to argue that the problems I mentioned in my post arise from universities being public and not private, then you are massively uninformed about how university budgets work.
Ditto, likewise and similar.
The idea that something will inevitably be better run if it is privatized is nonsensical. Even if one hews to the childishly simplistic view of people being motivated solely by money it is entirely possible to use that mechanism in arranging the pay of management etc for a publicly owned service. Indeed one might argue it is possible to impose a longer term approach than the stockmarker’s inane quarterly dash.
I didn’t say it is necessarily better. Many of the problems at have with the railways now can be traced directly back to many years of under-investment during public ownership. I mean primarily infrastructural. As an avowed trainophile, I’ll be the first to point out the problems with the current system (notably the really crappy ticketing system), but equally apparent to me is it isn’t going to be magically improved by taking it back to BR, which is what i fear might happen.
Systems are always run for some group. The question is how we make that some group most closely aligned with the users.
Personally i really like the idea of the lines being run by users cooperatives.
[quote=“heng, post:34, topic:101592”]
Systems are always run for some group. The question is how we make that some group most closely aligned with the users.[/quote]
I think that’s the major problem in the UK, thinking essential services will get cheaper if your privatise them, that’s not how business works. If you have control over an essential service, you can charge what you like. Brits have to pay to work now, then fork out the rest they earn for shelter. The couple of hundreds in taxes saved since thatcher have cost us so much more in living, transport and education. Screw living in the UK, it’s for idiots now.
Honestly I think it’s turning into an economic east berlin, we’re so proud of speaking english we won’t educate the kids in other languages till it’s too late, so all the kids will be trapped in britain, paying off all their earnings for a tiny house, forever beholden to their mortgage payments. It’s an older conservatives dream now, none of those awful young people can go out and enjoy life anymore, they’re doing what they should be doing, paying off the house. Hard work is owning property, lazy living is working, should have been smart and bought a house twenty years ago.
The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of
exercise.
Socrates
“The “Me” generation in the United States is a term referring to the baby
boomers generation and the self-involved qualities that some people
associate with it.[1] The 1970s were dubbed the “Me” decade by writer Tom
Wolfe;[2]Christopher Lasch was another writer who commented on the rise of
a culture of narcissism among the younger generation of that era.[3]”
