Why UK Universities are Going Bankrupt
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- čas přidán 27. 04. 2024
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UK universities are currently facing a major funding crises that puts some institutions at risk of bankruptcy in the next few years. So in this video, we'll explain what's happening, how the government exacerbated the issue and why it needs to be fixed.
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1 - www.ft.com/content/0aca64a4-5...
2 - www.ft.com/content/089832f5-c...
3 - migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk...
4 - www.gov.uk/government/statist...
5 - www.ft.com/content/9f5bdf46-4...
6 - www.ft.com/content/71b4c6e0-a...
7 - www.ft.com/content/4fa23203-2...
00:00 Introduction
01:07 Lack of EU Funding
01:44 Inflation
02:39 Overseas Students
06:18 How to Solve It?
07:29 Ground News
_"Universities are still one of the few things the UK does well"_
Westminster: _TARGET ACQUIRED!_
UK universities also have a terrible reputation for bad free speech, so its already going down the drain
Oo
If it isn’t in London, they don’t care…so make sure to choose yourself a London University 😂
Tories*
@@theweirdsideofreddit3079 King's College London over King's College Cambridge? With regrets to Henry IV, yes, I suppose it's moving that way.
In rushing to blame the government, you miss out a very important issue. Universities have become huge managerial bureaucracies. They pay insane salaries to the people at the top who don't even teach or research, and they have been taken over by administrators who create reasons for their own existence and interfere with the teaching by the faculty. Academics are pushed to work long hours and produce several poor quality research papers a year, whereas previously they would produce one good paper every two or three years. The reason it's suddenly so expensive to 'teach' students (who actually receive less teaching than ever before) is that universities have become corporations rather than institutions, with all the nonsense that comes with that.
Here in Australia Prime Minister Gough Whitlam made ALL university courses completely free in 1974; I received a free teaching degree. The govt. funded everything, overseas students studied fee-free too. In 1990 (also under the ALP) the HECS contibution scheme charged for all courses, students from overseas were charged more than Aus. citizens. Gradually, Unis have developed charging into a science and rely heavily on overseas full-fee paying students. Overseas student enrolment has now dropped sharply, consequently unis are crying poor...their "science" was wrong and greedy. Education in Australia is in crisis at every level....I finished high school teaching before the crisis....Tertiary Education in the future will be as it was in the pre-industrial era; the reserve of those who can pay with the majority pop. working in the "cottage". It's a bleak prediction, but based on current trajectories both here and the in the UK, is sadly, the only plausible final outcome.
agreed. Maybe high school graduates should seriously think of trades and vocations. Or even start a business.
They have also become unelected semi political bodies, almost like a voice piece for the equally as unelected NGOs, to influence government decisions.
Spot on
This is true, but I dont see how it absolves the Tories as they have damaged Universities in a completely different way in terms of day to day operating costs.
When you have to buy your own books, have limited printers available to print and none for free, accommodate yourself, feed yourself, and have say 100 people on your course, how the fuck does it cost £5000 per student per year in the first place. I'm baffled.
easy. privatise the whole venture, reduce government funding and bring in 'managers' who demand a high-paying salary for 'managing' the 'business'
Why do teachers accept printed assignments? All teachers should just accept that students submit their work through email and/or digital kiosk.
Students will save money on the cost of printers and the paper and as well as the ink and and it will be much better for the environment.
On my course, e-books are enough - most students don't buy a single book and they do fine - they can access an e-book from anywhere via the library site. None of them print anything elther - it's all electronic submissions. How it costs that much - staff. There are teaching staff, but also technicians, librarians, admin staff, student support staff... 100 students would bring in £1 million a year, which doesn't go that far if lecturing staff are on an average of, say, £50k (plus employer pension and NI, etc.), not to mention utility costs, software licenses... and there are lots of courses with fewer than 100 students.
then you graduate somehow and learn your degree is useless because you need experience to enter job market.
@@gayakola3 A degree from one of the "lesser" universities is almost worthless and a complete waste of money! Those "universities" or rather "doss houses" should be allowed to declare bankruptcy! However, there are too many "managers" who need employment, for that to happen!
It's becoming like the international students are the full-fee paying customers and the British students are the "scholarship" students.
so what is wrong with that? Always gonna have some sort of previlges for home students and if they are meritorious they can do easy avail
@@optus7113 well if they have priveliges then there won't be much international students lol
and those will be bankrupt. its the intl students are paying your tuition@@optus7113
another angle - they want international tuition money but wont accept international cultures in the society, that's hypocrisy of the right.
its more like the other way round. Internationals can get scholarship as there are more range and less range for home students
Is there anything in the UK which isn’t in crisis?
Pensions
@@matt5347not exactly. There was a bit of a scandal recently covered by metro
Millions of things in the UK are working well. Maybe you spend too much time on social media.
@@matt5347Give it a few months
@@Ok_yes_its_meLike what. Go on. Name some. Because I can't get a house, a train, a bus, a gp appointment, a job. Can't afford to rent or have a kid, can't get a decent education. Cant rely on the police to protect me from criminals.
The worst thing the government did to universities was to stop subsidising tuition fees for nursing students. We'll always need nurses, but what exactly are the incentives for young people to become a nurse? Back in 2010 when I did my degree, the only benefit I could see of studying nursing (as opposed to another useful degree like psychology) was the lack of debt at the end of it.
If most of the nurses didn't leave immediately then you'd have a point, but we were mostly just providing the world with nurses, while we got ours from other countries.
Sorry to break it to you but the psychology job market is a horrid uphill battle: postgraduate psychology jobs are extremely competitive for several reasons but you need experience to go and do any of the professional doctorates so it's a classic Catch-22. To offer myself as an example, I had been trying for years to progress to becoming a clinical neuropsychologist but the opportunities I needed to progress simply weren't there even after I spent years working as a healthcare assistant and even did a 9 month stint as an honorary (unpaid) assistant psychologist. I now work in data science for the Defense & Intelligence sector with much better pay, conditions, and employee benefits. I would really caution anyone reading this against investing all your career hopes into psychology as a field. (Edit: I hope you appreciate the irony of how hard it is to become a chartered psychologist at a time when we've been in a mental health crisis for at least 10 years too...)
@@SaintGerbilUK 1. That was only a fraction of total nurses. "Most" is a comical overstatement.
2. That could have been fixed by improving working conditions. It's not like people uproot their lifes just for trivial reasons.
3. "while we got ours from other countries" Well yes so what exactly is the issue anyways? The UK trains some nurses that leave and gets some nurses that were trained abroad.
Why do nurses need degrees they didn't until Tony Blair decided making it degree only would make it more prestigious
Psychology isn't a good choice these days: the postgraduate job market is extremely competitive for several reasons but the problem with that is that you need experience in order to be admitted to any of the professional doctoral training courses that allow you to become a full practitioner psychologist in your chosen specialism. If I may offer myself as an example, I spent years working as a healthcare assistant and even did a 9-month stint as an unpaid honorary assistant psychologist to try and break through the experience ceiling but I never got anywhere. I and many of my classmates from my cohort have noted that the field seems to seek out specific demographics (can't help but notice that most psychologists are middle class women) for doctoral training and everyone else can go to hell. Thankfully I now work in data science for the defense & intelligence sector with much better pay, working conditions, and employee benefits, but I like many other psych grads struggled for years in low paid and overworked jobs to try our best to progress, but the opportunities needed simply aren't there for a lot of hopeful psychologists when we need them. I hope the irony isn't lost on you all regarding how difficult it is to become a psychologist at a time when we've had a mental health crisis for years! In a nutshell, I caution anyone reading this against choosing psychology as your career because no matter how hard you work or how much effort you put in, a good degree and work experience isn't a guarantee of success and you're probably better off choosing a different profession, at least until the situation improves. (Reposted since my first comment got deleted somehow while I was editing it)
What they did over COVID was a joke. 9 k for a online and no face to face lessons...
Costs for universities didn't really go down during COVID. Staff costs (which are most of the costs) were the same, even empty buildings have to be maintained, and more licenses for online learning platforms had to be paid for.
@@IntrovertnetBut these are all fixed costs, whereas since it's online, there's no limit to the number of students they can admit, so they could've just lowered prices and offset it by admitting more students.
@@me-myself-i787 No
@@Kalenz1234yes
Online degrees cost very little to run compared with face to face, but they still charge top dollar.
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I'm finding it hard to feel sorry for them. They have made being a student miserable and the cost simply can not be justified anymore when postgraduates STILL cant even find work. It's seen as an investment, but they have turned it into a high risk investment. People aren't willing to take that risk, not to mention the ramifications it has on student's lives. If you go to uni, you cant afford to save money, you cant afford rent, let alone a mortgage, you cant afford to feed your family or even start a family..... so is it really worth it to a lot of people?
I actually think the universities should be co-signers for student loans.
Yes that would be worse for them, but then they will be selective about who they take on.
You're over exaggerating tbh. You don't have to pay back any of the loans. It gets written off after 30 years. Once you get a job it's just treated like an extra tax so you can forget about it. It doesn't actually impact your life much.
I'm not planning on paying back any of my loans bar the minimum amount that gets taxed out of my salary automatically.
@@chickenmadness1732 "written off" means payed for by tax payers.
The money has to come from somewhere.
@@SaintGerbilUK...So they'd only accept rich people?
@@SaintGerbilUKThat's fine. It should be free in the first place like it is everywhere else in Europe.
I think the focus of the debate should be why it's so expensive, and not trying to come up with ways fill the shortfalls.
I'm baffled as to how it remains so expensive while lecturers are on strike several times a year about their pay and conditions. Plus some universities are massively cutting their budgets for degrees in the arts and history. Where is the money actually going?
@@bassetts1899the higher ups
🤫 Or they'll realise you're right and start slashing staffing costs, building maintenance quality and frequency, along with tools and equipment, so we end up with the education equivalent of hospitals.
On the actual point you raise, I don't know that it is "so expensive". A lot of people are involved in such institutions, some of the most critical won't do it for lower wages as they're able to work for businesses instead, likely making far more money and not having to put up with a bunch of "meddling kids".
They need to keep equipment somewhat up to the date, for the training to be relevant for what they're training in, they take up a fair bit of land and their "customer base" (so to speak) is highly limited. Their only potential for *significant & sustained* income that's not tied to how many they're able to enroll is through patents and to a less extent, cooperative development agreements with industry.
Just some thoughts, I'm not well informed on the topic though (dunno I'm sharing from a position of ignorance, but ... here I am)
@@bassetts1899 Administration
It is 11000€ in Germany per student. I am not so sure about it being expensive. We are not talking about really high numbers compared to the uk wealth.
If you want it cheaper, it can only be done by making studies worse, e.g. not investing into essential equipment and buildings, getting competent staff etc. That's simply wrong. In Germany, the state pays for the university costs, so it's much cheaper (you only need money for rental, food etc, not for education). So you can either raise the fee or put some tax money to keep prices low.
The video does not once question why it costs the university over £11k per student.
A few hours of lectures and the rest of the time reading from books (paid or at additional expense to the students).
Instead of suggesting more money needs to be spent, how about an explanation as to how the university needs over £11k per student just to break even... Where is this excess money going? Wages? Pensions?
Also, a sleight of hand from the presenter here. When he compared tuition fees increase against inflation, he neglected to mention that the year before his comparison, tuition fees were under 4 grand. So the inflation picture looks a lot different... This is how to lie with statistics.
I agree with the point around questionning why it costs so much per student, particularly for non-lab based students. However the reason that tuition went up from 4 to 9k in one year was due to the fact the English government withdrew funding and shifted the costs to students via student loans instead. So it isn't really relevent to compare the two years for this argument.
agreed the math doesnt add up and this video is super misleading about it
I used to work at the university of Essex which of course is in the UK. In 2018 during a meeting with management the head of the university said to other managers," I don't care what you have to f*cking say or do just get the f*cking tuition fees off them!" He was of course refering to signing up new students. If you're a parent and you are thinking of sending your son/daughter to Essex university then don't. If you go to their open days the management instruct staff and researchers to lie to you about job prospects for graduates in the hope they can get those tuition fees. What they never tell you are where graduates end up after leaving with their piece of paper and the reason they don't readily tell you is that the numbers are so shocking. Essex uni has one of the lowest job prospects for graduates.
Oh and they use the same exams year in year out in a desperate bid to raise their rankings. Oh and don't even get me started on the dyslexia scam. The more dyslexia students they say they have the more money they can get. It's total bullshit!
Hi. I was working on a site with a group of tradespeople near Essex university a few years ago, right near where many of the students live. I saw so many young people walking by, I presume going to and from the university. So many young people, paying so much money (or getting into debt). In about ten minutes over 40 people must have walked by. Such a huge debt there. There was a young bloke on site who took the trades option and I said to him "Just think about the debt they are getting" he took a different path and avoided this. So sad for so many of these people, sold a dream which in many cases is a deception.
@@homegardens7682 that young chap will out earn all of those people. The problem is with getting a degree is that they have no value as virtually everybody has one. In fact even higher level qualifications such as a masters of a phd aren't much better. I had a friend at Essex who had to exclude her phd qualification ( biologist) just to get a job as a receptionist in a school.
Yes, sold a dream is exactly how i would describe it. At the open days, staff would be instructed that Pfizer and GSK regular come to the university to identify potential students to work on blah blah blah. This is a total lie but like you say, "they are selling a dream"
Totally agree, Essex is a diploma mill. I am an ex staff member. Multiple bars and a nightclub on campus, there was nothing for the students to do but drink. Some would come to class drunk at 9am. Truly heartbreaking. Of course, Anthony the VC is making £200000+ per year, all expenses including private chef paid for, about to retire with a nice pension. Meanwhile, admin is abusing both the instructors and the students . The students very quickly realize that they do not have a future post uni, with data science MS graduates working as waiters in Colchester.
Amazing British universities have given us big brains like Boris Johnson (Oxford), Liz Truss (Oxford), and Kwasi Kwarteng (Cambridge)
oh I don´t think Johnson´s thick, just an appalling human being.
Those 3 are nobel peace prize winners for sure 😂😂😂 more like nobel protest prize winners...
@@DDSizeBra , the Un-nobel prize winners
there are more than one reason to close them down..!
Savage.
It’s almost like education works better as a public good, not a for-profit industry. Totally inconceivable…
Universities are not for profit.
Tony Blair wanted half the population to go through university, which was obviously unaffordable. He took away education as a way out of poverty by diluting its value.
Everything works better with a lot of money, but the question is whether the state has the capacity of providing the service or not. It is easy to think that the state has infinite amounts of money, but it is more likely that countries have to have an extremely good economic condition to invest in education. Even France has had to undergo some cuts in education budget.
Besides, those universities are extremely politicised.
The corporatization of higher education (chancellor salary and bonuses) is a key reason.
Did you even watch the video? The reason universities are losing money isn't to do with them being for profit.
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Halting prospects of international students when you want them in your university to pay those insane prices. A lot of parents don't think it's worth it to send them to the UK, when there are better options such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The UK has been on a high horse for too long in terms of so called academic prestige, that is very much replaceable.
Universities in NZ and Canada are a huge disaster. Australian universities have much better reputation but I do not know if this good reputation is justified.
all of campuses in countries you mentioned in your comment are all money eaters, and they are the example of what commercial-oriented education looks like. They got reputation because of their name only.
@@iljaviktorov1799 I think the idea here is that they can have decent prospects within the country, upon graduation. Instead, the UK has a much harsher immigration policy for their overseas graduates.
One thing that i think is important to mention is that in 2012 the cap for UK student fees was raised from £3k to £9k a year, whilst at the same time central government funding of universities was slashed (due to austerity) so whilst at first it looks like universities were getting 3x more money per student, in actuality it stayed the same and over time actually became less (because of the cap being frozen and not keeping up with inflation)
i am sure, you love the Tories for that... there is no need for working class kids to go to university!
Tuition fees were introduced by Labour in 1998.
Funding used to be anywhere up to 80% funded from central gov. But there was also a numbers cap. Contrary to what would make sense I.e removing the cap for more students=more money. Without a predictable allocation of resources each year Universities may spend aggressively in an ‘open market’ and fail to recoup costs if numbers drop the following year. Universities have to essentially ’grow or die’ at the expense of each other
It was pretty obvious to everyone that that was the entire point of increasing tuition fees, Peter Mandelson who would have been tasked with implementing it had labour stayed in power admitted to rigging the "independent" report they'd timed to be released after the election to recommend a rise in tuition fees to fill the hole left by the cuts he wanted to make to university funding.
@@davidlegrice4207 good ole’ Mandy
It's almost like university fees are a fucking stupid idea.
As a student myself...I genuinely don't know what else they can do, if they are already struggling with £9k tuition fees.
How would you expect universities to operate if they cannot charge for the courses they run?
I guess the professors should just work for free, or maybe they should stop having courses which don't pay for themselves like "underwater basket weaving", "why white people are literally satan" and "listening to Taylor swift as a degree".
@@CommonWealthSnowstate funding as schools are potentially. I’m not saying we absolutely should do that but that’s how other countries fund higher education and lowers fees on students.
@CommonWealthSnow
In germany (and most of the EU), universities are free or really low cost (and even in italy, the most expensive in europe, there are still big deductions if your family can't afford the full price)
At 9k a term and providing only a few hours tuition per week for that. HOW THE FUCK are they losing money ?
sometimes I forget how good we have it up in Scotland, free tuition for every Scottish citizen really is a privilege
Im sure the "patriotic" first minister will change that and ensure immigrants get that money
@@vanguard8889 bro the term is literally "no true scotsman"
Tbf though paying back the student loan isn't really that much of a problem in the uk. It's a small tax
@@SASMADBRUV7 ye tbf we probably end up paying the same when you take into account the difference in tax
Paid for by the people you despise - the English. Nothing is free in this world.
Uk student here paying £9250 a year for an average of 6-8 hours of lectures and about the same in pre recorded lectures per week. The university terms are basically oct-may with breaks for Christmas and Easter, so about 7 months total.
So assume 32 hours per week for 30 weeks, that totals to 960 hours a year. Just over £9.50 an hour.
This is per person in an engineering degree, with almost no practical work to speak of. Its all lectures and theory.
Recently the university invested millions into a new tech building featuring all sorts of high end stuff prominantly displayed for passers by to see. These get used by a handful of people doing research.
So I highly doubt the university is losing any money on your average undergrad, rather it wastes the majority of it on stuff only a few people will see in their entire uni experience.
My experience as well. We go in and some guy at the front of the classroom talks at us for a couple hours.
£9k per student for that and they're going bankrupt?
They should stop wasting money then because they're not spending it on the students.
when you were at secondary school that cost £6.2k a year per child for the government. Engineering costs more than humanities etc, your course probably costs much more than £12k per student to run. Your teachers are super qualified academics who also do research - they are going to be paid much more than secondary school teachers, although lots of their pay will come from grants for their research.
Your facilities are expensive. 9k does not go very far at all. Of course some of the university and its buildings are research orientated - you shouldn't expect that every building is made for you. Your contact hours are actually on the high side for the UK and self-directed study is a huge part of what Uni actually is.
A lot of people on this chat seem to see universities as just a super-college, and that they are paying a transaction for a service. Universities are knowledge and research centres that also provide degrees that lead to jobs. Your loan is structured as a graduate tax that you don't pay back if you don't succeed / 30 years later. If your course does not lead to many job prospects then you chose the wrong course.
30 months in a single year? That's all 3 years in one not per year. Each term is only about 11 weeks long and the 3rd term is always shorter so total about 25ish weeks each year of 8 hour lectures is 200 hours a year that's about £46 per hour. Way higher if you do your maths right
@@AshleyDownTranmissionSociety my point is, you receive a fraction of the time you would in secondary school, and with next to no practical work, there are barely any costly experiments for us to run. Multiply the £9.50 per hour by 80 students, and you get £760 per hour. I haven't added how many of the lecturers are extremely poor teachers compared to other schools (confirmed by them). And the idea is you shouldn't aim to not earn enough to pay back the loan
Lectures are pretty cheap. It's practicals and the like that are expensive to unis.
The issue here is not really overspending. UK unis definitely spend a little more than they should but if you compare internationally it's not that significant. The issue is the lack of government funding.
The fees haven't risen since 2012!? Well neither have wages
But costs have rocketed
Students can borrow more 🎉
This isn't, for universities which are part of national pay agreements (nearly all) there has been a percentage increase nearly every year. For example for the first university i looked at just now, the lowest lecturer salary was 33k in 2020 (the earliest they have online) and this year it is 37k. While it can be said staff aren't paid enough, and many other issues, they have had a pay rise.
they have received a pay rise but in real terms with inflation and higher rents/mortgages considered, it's a pay loss@@chriskeene
Well, since 2011, tuition fees have more than tripled. In 2011 they were under £3500 per year, and the following year they went to £9k. The presenter did a sleight of hand by starting from exactly 2012, with no mention of the 250+% jump in fees only the year before.
So as a graduate who worked for my university and befriended a Ph. D Student who told me all about it.
The government stopped basically subsiding student capacity and instead gave money based on research. So the fees were brought up to the cost of teaching and the more research the uni pump out (and supposedly influences the research field) the more they!d get for facilities for teaching and research.
THIS is why universities pretty much employ lecturers on a ‘if you don’t pump out research papers and teach your specialism and play a role in your subject here, you get booted out’ basis. So they work long hours, universities don’t pay them for ALL of their time, publishers make huge profit on the publishing (lecturer see none of it btw). The uni money is also stretched to fund their marketing and admin teams which no one knows is there but their jobs are to pump out ‘come here!’ propaganda and steal students (paying customers) away from the competition.
More students = more grants = more staff = more research = more money = more buildings = more students and it goes on.
That’s also why universities seem to take up whole city centres now. It’s not until you’ve been there that you see how influential the ripple effect from a student population is. They fill jobs, they stimulate the local economies. Universities as a whole are worth billions from all these cycles of money and influence.
It's mostly a waste of time. I am convinced that you could cut the bottom 70% of UK courses and it would have no impact on UK productivity - it would probably go up as people would work for another 3 years. University used to be for the academically elite, now it is for anybody. 95% of jobs can be done with the teaching up to A Levels - only a few STEM and vocational jobs need further academic training. The government needs to push apprenticeships - on the job experience and learning is far more valuable
40+ years of stripping the copper out of the walls of the British estate will do this.
Blair. Yes, him again. Thanks to him a University Degree is now a commercial commodity and a lot of bright young people have decided that learning a trade is a better option than spending 3 years running up £50k of debt.
Dropping out of uni and getting a degree apprenticeship was the best decision I ever made 😅
Absolutely if only more people realised this.
@SaintGerbilUK not that easy. A lot of people realise but degree apprenticeships are even more competitive and significantly harder to find. A lot of the schemes are also severly lacking in the course material with students pretty much just learning on the job rather than also being given the theory leading to them being stuck in the company specific role. This with the students also being denied the same training as full time employees at the company leads to people usually ditching the apprenticeship for an entry level job role where they can get the training and theory they need. Only benefit is no debt, but its pretty much the same as for e.g. in the IT sector, working in a low tier help desk role then transitioning into your desired role, with this role usually having you earn more money and there being more positions available so a higher chance of getting in your desired field/role.
Get woke. Go broke! 🤷🏻♂️
trades where always as valuable as uni degrees. except to posh nonces who think use of hands is bad for their image.
The thing that always got me as a student is how a 30-per-year engineering class with 20 hours of lectures and labs every week and 10 plus full-time staff was able to be run at a net positive for the university while a 200-per-year psychology course with 10 hours of lectures and labs every week and 6 full-time staff was a net loss for the university. It never made sense.
Truthfully, it will be the research departments. Universities currently have a two pronged role as places of education, and places of research. Its entirely up to you if you agree with that or not, but thats the way it goes.
And research is fucking expensive. It sounds like your uni's psychology department was far bigger than your engineering department, so while the psychology undergrad course would make money, the sheer amount of researchers would have eaten away at that number and more.
And in my experience, universities would rather be seen as amazing at one thing, than "pretty good" at everything, so they'll keep subsidising their huge psychology department while making their engineering departments foot the bill, meaning that the profits of engineering are siphoned off to psychology research
@@xenon8342
"Universities currently have a two pronged role as places of education, and places of research"
What do you mean by currently?
It was always like that.
University Professors doing research has been around since European Universities were founded (possibly the same elsewhere, I do not know).
If it has always been like that it needs to change. We should have two types of institutions. One an undergraduate teaching institution and one a research institute. That way the undergraduate is just being charged for his or her course.
@@rafaelcosta3238Most of that research was done either independently or thanks to goverment/elite patronage, not thanks to the university itself
@@samfyfe2949 It isn't really that simple, as many undergraduates also do research and are expected to have some research experience for postgraduate courses.
40% of graduates won't pay back tuition fees AND the universities are "taking a loss" on tuition fees? Seems like 50% of the university places need to vanish. Not one of my nephews or nieces with a degree is doing "a graduate job". They were all scammed into doing unnecessary degrees and are now saddled with huge debts. They all agree they should never have gone to university, they were conned by the lies about career opportunities.
I have to agree, I did a film production degree thinking it would open doors to the industry, but honestly I would have been better off working a part time job for 3 years and making independent films on a camera I could have saved up for and learnt how to use via youtube.
But in school they kept telling me the only way I would be able to get into that industry is via university as they would have so many connections. But the connections they had were from people who were basically retired or were no longer working in the industry.
I mean the one person who actually had connections was so up his own arse. He graded everyone the lowest score he possibly could and in his lectures he only spoke about himself with no important details and this one time he just spoke about how JFK was killed by the fucking mafia then tried to sell us his book, which was like £60.
The only thing my degree has been good for is it helped me work abroad for a few years so I could do a bit of travelling. It also made me abandon my ambition to work in that industry
This has been coming for a long time. I studied in the UK at a smaller uni and about 70% of the students in my class where international students from the EU. Back then the extraa fees where paid through EU programes. Pretty shure there is no way for smaller institutions to replace all that lost revenue with people from outside of the EU.
Who would have thought, that the Tories would not match the EU's funds for British Universities?? About 52%, in 2016.
Another Brexit win.
@@passais lol
@@passaisthe money is going to migrants instead of university. Same is being done all over the eu though.
@@duanebailey6253 i know, it's the immigrants, always the immigrants. Sigh...
💯@@Langstrath
Bold introduction! “Like everything else in the UK, universities are loosing money” 😳
*losing
as shown on this channel multiple times in the past few months, they are not wrong lol
Nothing wrong with this statement.
Losing
@@imtiazalam8187You would think this would’ve been rectified after the comment was edited, too. Yikes.
Well, if you try to run an educational institution as a business, this is what you get.
Tuition fees were not 'Introduced at 9000 pounds in 2012' they were introduced at 1000 pounds beginning 1997.
...They were, in fact, introduced in 1998, and only applied to students beginning their degrees in that year, which meant 2/3rds of students didn't have to pay them. This dropped to 1/3rd in 1999, and then everyone was getting soaked by 2000. It was the usual divide and rule tactic, and to be expected from the Labour right.
@@TruculentSheep announced 1997 I should have said.
Universities are one of the few things the UK still does well. Brutal😭😭😢
That's just a lazy social media lie.
@@Ok_yes_its_me its literally a fact.
@@Ok_yes_its_me name something else that Britain is doing well in nowadays?
@@TedThomasTTyes if you want degrees in media, dance, drama etc, entry requirement is a cycling proficiency test grade B
But if you want engineering etc go to south east Asia, where you need decent grades in science based subjects.
Brexit is the gift that never stop on giving lmaooo
Funny when you think back 40 years, everything worked ok, but now everything is broken.
The people studying this problem were part of creating it in the first place, they will never find the real cause.
UK and EU had much less immigrants. less no-go zones. less stabbing and less grooming gangs.
Are allowed to say the quiet part out loud? 🤔
Now one can perhaps ask the following question: which party has been in government for most of those 40 years? The Greens? Liberal Democrats? I'm having memory trouble...
@@pritapp788
C: 1979-1997
L:1997-2010
C:2010-present
Greed. Power. Short-term thinking.
When a society incentivizes and rewards these traits, any wonder why the elected representatives mirror that society?
From the inside: huge salaries mainly for admin, nepotism, high and rising fees, high cost of living for students
It's incredible to me that, over the last 6 years, I don't think a single positive piece of news or information has come out of the UK. It is really incredible how the country continues to get worse and worse
It turns out when you treat a country that only leads in like a few industries (Publishing) like a business then it starts to go bankrupt. Add the fact that it abandoned it's closet trading partners to be closer to a nation that's a literal ocean apart and this is what you get.
@@TheJonesdude Not to mention just how much of the nation is overdependent on the finance industry, which has continued to struggle through recent years, and is getting walloped by new fintech companies. The UK has like, zero notable tech companies
@@moomie1634 No tech companies, no leading car manufactures, no Software and a weak video game industry. The UK use to lead the world in ship building, some people seem to be under the delusion that it still does. But how many ships leave Sunderland and Manchester?
British companies aren't even British anymore. Cadbury is American. BP is mostly owned by American shareholders. We have to buy our energy from the French.
Corrupt politicians have destroyed this country.
We shouldn't ignore the role which university managements have played. UEA, for example, has spent a fortune on new buildings while failing to maintain the old ones which now need emergency repairs.
The incentives from this comes from students and the "marketisation of universities" - ie The Tories. Students are "paying" 9k for their university and expect state of the art facilities. So universities invest in capital to entice good students and good staff. once they're here they can be bumped to the bad buildings.
If you don't invest in this way the students wont come, and if they don't come then all the other questions stop mattering.
Same at my uni. Useless, unnecessary building projects being prioritised over underpaid staff doing work essential to the running of the university. Absolutely shameful.
Most degrees have become redundant anyway, my girlfriend has a Masters degree but hasn’t been able to fine a job for 4 months
Out of curiosity what field is that in? It's particularly bad in a few fields right now.
Four months? That’s kind of on her, you can get a basic office admin job in a week anywhere in the country. She is clearly being too picky
@arnoldpuodenas8221 That's what I was thinking. Master's degrees are usually for people already working and wanting to be more qualified (e.g. engineers, medical workers, lawyers) or those in academia (especially A-Level or university researcher).
Master's in these fields will have gotten a job almost immediately. Either her Master's are outside of these subjects (e.g. arts, literature, history, business...etc) or she's expecting a high paying job with very little work experience (if she did a Master's straight after Bachelor's degree).
The lifetime graduate premium is still 130k for men and 100k for women (after accounting for taxes and student loans). The median salary for someone without a degree is 25k, the median salary for someone with a degree is 36K. There is still a big lifetime financial incentive to get a degree. Will you graduate and walk into a great paying job on day 1? Unlikely, but over your lifetime you're getter off.
This is across all subjects, there are subjects that are higher paying, but a study in 2015 found that 50% of graduate jobs didn't mention a subject.
@@paddy8254 The graduate premium has been plummeting and is negative for some humanities subjects. It's only the high quality degrees from good universities that are worth the time and money these days.
I just can't imagine universities making a loss on charging undergrads 9K a year. I just finished a phd in science, my bench fees (which we wouldn't always spend all of) were 4.5k a year and I probably did 200x more experiments a year than your typical undergrad. Now I get that my teaching fees from lecturers are vastly reduced but unis have giant lecture theatres where 1 lecturer teaches 300 students. So hard to see how that can cost 11k each per year.
I think university only really makes sense now if you are going into STEM or a higher value field that requires it to enter the industry, such as Law or Medicine.
As a naive 17 year old back in 2009, I signed up for a Bachelors in Advertising, mainly because it was drilled into us at the time that it was essential to go.
It absolutely wasnt and there is no way I would do the same today, given that the cost of comparable courses are almost 4 times as high.
60-80k Debt for a degree that is, at best, an extra box tick on your CV, is not worth it.
STEM or the other fields you mention will become saturated too.
@@pritapp788 I'd rather saturation in high skill areas instead of hoards of people with generic media or business studies degrees.
@@pritapp788 Not at any time soon. UK is short of over 800,000 skilled electrical, electronics and mechanical engineers by 2030!
I was an international (EU) student in London for 5 years, in late 90s; studied for undergrad and two post-grad degrees and paid ZERO for tuition. All I had to do was to submit a form yearly, which the Uni authorities then forwarded to the local council in order to receive the EU grant funds for my tuition. That was it! Students, back then, were admitted on the basis of academic merit, not their ability to pay tuition fees. Anyway, another reason why Brexit was such a bad idea..
Perhaps this is the reason why the UK has failed its citizens. Did you pay back the tuition through post-grad income tax? Does your country offer free education to foreigners? Im sick of non-Brits taking advantage of national resources and thinking Brexit was a bad idea when resources are spent on people the gov isn't elected to represent. This is why China will win. Put your own first
@@vanguard8889 You' re totally wrong! British universities cannot cover their operational expenses without EU grants; that was the whole point of the video! The EU paid my tuition, not the British taxpayer! Only non-EU international students had to pay tuition fees, back then. At the beginning of each academic year, non-EU students had to pay their tuition and EU students had to do this EU paperwork, so that the Uni can get their grant money from the EU. I thought all this was common knowledge.. The UK economy benefitted significantly by the EU students; these were people that had costed the UK nothing and each one of them spent thousands of pounds of their own money per month in the UK, for 3 or more consecutive years. And to answer your question, yes my country does offer free education to foreigners; Universities here are public bodies and are funded exclusively by the state.
@@zix_zix_zixUnfortunately your responses are wasted on that lot. The average anti-immigrant pro-Brexiteer has little care for facts or reality. Most of these people railing against foreign-students have zero knowledge on how immigration laws or international admissions processes work. Attempting to correct them is a fruitless endeavour - populist leaders have already convinced them that foreigners of all types and 'woke leftists' are the greatest existential threat to Great Britain.
@@zix_zix_zix "The EU paid my tuition, not the British taxpayer! " lol Where do you think the EU got its money from? Was it the taxpayers from the EU countries maybe? Which 3 countries paid the most into the EU coffers? Was the UK one of them? You still have a lot to learn.
@@egastap Well if you really want to get into it, then most of that money came from the imperial periphery, but I don't expect you to know much about that
My mother works for one of the big unis that's run out of room now to juggle funding gaps which began way back in the 2010's. They've already gutted out a lot of their high-paying jobs with voluntary redundancies over the past 12 months, and now it's likely that mass layoffs will happen come summer. So if you ignore the general mess that the UK's higher education model is (fees, funding, etc), the impending pop of this bubble is also going to cripple local economies when a large portion of their workforce suddenly finds themselves unemployed.
Notable that the universities in serious crisis at the moment are former polytechnics. Seems the problem to me is that there are too many universities, does the UK really need 166 universities? There are only 76 cities.
@@ryank3321 Agree! A degree from the former polytechnics is worthless. The level of student they attract would not compare to a group 1, 14 year old attending high school. Far too many universities, providing well paid jobs to high earning middle management.
It is refreshing to hear that high-paying middle management jobs with little accountability and no measurable output have been removed. The local economies will have to re-invent themselves to survive! The function of a university is to provide academia, not to support the local economy.
My very close friend move to london 7 months, he is there to accompany the wife as she has scholarship to study there for 3 years, my fren followed, he is allowed to work.
1st month is a real test to him, getting a place to stay , looking for job makes him cried.
2nd month he get a full-time job, the may is minimum but good enough for him, but the tax is 25%. Shocked him.
3rd month the wife pregnant, the landlord ask them to move.
Another test trying to look for a place to stay when you have a pregnant wife. He said every month is a test, if it wasn't becos of the wife, he would go back to work in SEA anytime. Life is hard there even the pound sounds great!
In the US, it's the opposite. Governors have cut support to state universities, causing record high prices in tuition, creating the student debt crisis.
That's not really the opposite though is it, as our government has also cut support to universities, and has also massively increased the interest rate applied to student loans which contributes to our cost of living crisis.
A degree is not worth the paper it's printed on. It's the biggest impediment to finding a job in the UK. I was part of that mass exodus of further and higher education teachers who left the UK from the early 2000s when the work dried up. Take your knowledge and skills abroad where it's valued.
This. I emigrated in 2015 to Europe. Business-friendly, quality of life is phenomenal.
how do you extort people and still go bankrupt
Biggest problem in the UK is share holder to many of them sucking all the money out of the business
Two big universities in South Australia are currently merging - it might be an interesting case study.
Don't really need to look to Australia for case studies, some of our own universities are the result of mergers. London Metropolitan University is a merger between the University of North London and the London Guildhall University in 2002, and the University of South Wales was formed in 2013 from a merger of the University of Glamorgan and University of Wales, Newport.
Universities mostly own the buildings so no mortgage/loan for buildings.
Most universities charge a lot of money for accommodation (a small room with bed and desk sharing kitchen and often bathrooms)
They basic and expensive.
You know this
Maybe universities are just chronically overspending, my uni had nearly 30k students; meaning nearly £270million a year. If they can't find a way to budget that I kinda think that's on them...
How many staff members? How much real estate? All the overheads that are often not thought about when equating one thing to another?
But I do agree with you, budgeting is a nightmare
I guess they can cut off some of the cleaning staff and make students clean their own classrooms and dormitories for free. That should save some money.
The solution is actually quite simple, either increase fees for the local students or increase the ratio of foreign students to make ends meet.
Universities can also auction off antiques they had in possession that cost money to maintain, I am sure there are lots of portraits and silverware that can be sold off to collectors
I don't understand how for example economics/finance/maths degrees justifies c. £9k per year where all you'll get in return is someone reading off slides they found online.
that's assuming UK students only the total Is likely to far higher with internationals paying more
@@MrL702😂😂😂
You work for 40yrs to have $1M in your
retirement, meanwhile some people are putting just $10K in a meme coin from just few months ago and now they are multimillionaires.
I’m celebrating a $30k stock portfolio today. I started this journey with 6k. I have invsted on time and also with the right terms now I have time for my family and the life ahead of me
Wow, this is really amazing. How do you come about it
@@Noel.Kirk.I’m looking for something I can venture into on a short term basis, I have $15k sitting in my savings
Assets that can make you rich
*FX
*Btcoin
*Stocks
*Gold
*Real estate
You’re right but a lot of people remain poor due to ignorance
This is a load of nonsense. Students pay 10k a pop say 6 students band together to pay 1 professional (a 50k salary & 10k premises rent) to teach them you would have a student ratio of 1-6. slap some 20-year-old slides and you have a university experience. in universities, the average ratio is 17-1 they are not losing money they are mismanaging cashflows. More money doesn't solve poor managment.
Education should not be run like a business and it is not something we should be paying for with tuition fees. Further and higher education are essential for the betterment of our society. It makes a smarter, more productive population and helps with social mobility. I'd even go as far as saying that industries where we have a shortfall, there should be a stipend to encourage people to study in those fields. The stipend should also be means tested so if a mature student with a mortgage wants to become a doctor, we should have systems in place to allow them to do this.
We have nearly doubled the percentage of people who go to university since 2006 and things have only gotten worse since then.
So how do you justify that more people in university is better?
I think the point is that going to university is an investment in having a smarter, more knowledgeable society all round. I´d say to have any kind of functional democracy, it´s important that people are reasonably well educated.
And also, the economic problems we have now, are clearly not caused by more people going to university, or getting another form of higher ed (I´m all for vocational diplomas). If anything, Brexit probably wouldn´t have happened if the electorate were better informed, most students voted against it, most people with no GCSEs voted for it.
@@SaintGerbilUK
@@SaintGerbilUKwhy are you assuming that every problem in the country stems from university rates?
Who will pay the lecturers and staff?
@@adridaplague-boi9382 I don't, I'm asking Mikey to validate his assertion.
How are universities running out of money when the quality of lectures has decreased significantly since covid.
Decline in home students and end of chinese students going abroad in large numbers
The problem is that they haven't hired enough HR and DEIB staff. If they would just lean further forward into the Frankfurt school critical theory praxis they require students to accept I'm sure they'd be more productive.
Over expansion and a ballooning of costs.
It takes up to 10 times as much time and work to put together a good lecture for distant delivery than in a standard lecture. That would be fine if lecturers were not being rated on their research output and not teaching, or having to teach more lectures than there is time to prepare these.
Some of them were shit well before Rona, tbh.
British unis are a rip-off. The level of edu is not worth the terrible tuition fees, in particular when they charge unacceptable fees "overseas" students. Majority of the young see the study in the UK as a chance later to stay there and find a job. As for the edu, the UK provides the average level of edu.
Look at the renumeration of a lot of the top admin people. A LOT are in the 250K plus bracket. Some 480K +. Thta's where the fees go. Not to those who actually teach.
Two points: Why should a foreign student even consider attending British universities when he can study free of charge in Germany where universities are just as good as any other university listed in the Russell Group. Secondly, there is a bias against universities where the media of teaching are other languages than English. Universities of English speaking countries always score higher perhaps because those who conduct the ranking survey hardly speak any other foreign languages. We all live in an English centric world.
Status
Yet UK universities are packed with foreign students and they are queuing up.
When demand is high and supply is low price rises it economics101.
Imperial College is definitely not better than the Technical University of Munich@@user-op8fg3ny3j
I agree, I would not advise people to go to study in the UK for undergrad and to only do postgrad if they get a scholarship.
So the reason I got from a German friend who came to the UK for uni boiled down to wanting to be taught by the German education system. Basically there experiences with it in there childhood made them feel like the german universities would be overly harsh and bad for their mental health. A lot of Germans I know seem to have really bad perspectives on the German system, to the point they would rather for to other countries than engage with there own unis. This might have a selection bias though within by friend group. Anecdotal, not scientific. :)
Education should not be a for-profit commodity. It is a public good.
But then this country has privatised every other human right so far and they're working on healthcare too so what else would I expect.
But the universities aren't profiteering. That's the point.
The UK teaches their own students at a net loss to the economy as £9000 is not enough to cover the operating costs of the university.
Nationalising universities just means that the government has to now pay for it. With the fiscal headroom being very tight in current times like the aftermath of COVID or the ongoing Ukraine war, it would hard to make a case that this won't come with huge economic tradeoffs.
I don't buy loss of EU funding as a reason. Britain was a net contributor, all the EU did, was act as a middle-man for our own funding to pass through. The real reasons are a combination of demographics, foreign competition, poor policy, economic factors, and degrees too often offering poor value and not keeping pace.
Good. The 9K a year is rip off for what they actually provide. I calculated when I was at uni that for every 1 hour of teaching I was paying almost £250 for the privilege. Likewise the amount of bogus degrees worth nothing and international students being passed with fraudulent degrees is abhorrent.
tuition fees were first introduced in 2006 at £3000 and went up to £9000 in 6 years, well beyond inflation over the 6 years...
Yeah, this video was worded in a way that suggested tuition fees went from 0 to 9k in one motion... I was personally at the student protests in 2010 against the tripling of fees! (A broken lib dem promise but I won't get into that here)
Yes but funding per student/overall grants direct from the state were reducded dramatically to account for this. It wasn't the case that Universities suddenly had triple the budget, the government just transitioned the costs onto students as debt rather than paying for it through state funds.
Yea it's typical TLDR only mentions stuff that is ideologically convenient, which it's why it's hilarious they are sponsored by ground news 😂😂
And at the same time the percentage of people who go to university has nearly doubled.
So it's not like the universities should be short of cash or short of students.
Tuition fees were in place for some time before 2006. I started uni in 2003 and was paying £1200 a year. They simply increased in 2006
"British Universities can't afford to keep opperating with the money they get for UK students and have to make up the difference with politically controversial forigen students who pay the full cost." is literally a Yes Minister script from the 1980s. That show truely never gets old. Just Remember what Sir Humphrey said, Britian needs, "... a system to protect the important things in life, and to keep them out of the hands of the Barabrians. Things like... the Universites. Both of them."
Sure Berg
A fabulous and comprehensive analysis!! Well done!! I would love to see a similar analysis done for US universities as well ❤
Sounds like bs, Manchester uni has an average of 40,000 students, times that by 9k and theyre making £361,800,000 each year.
The trajectory for UK universities is looking, in general very bleak. As an academic at a medium-sized university, everything that has been said is enitrley true. Since brexit, the number of international students (EU) has rapidly declined, and the public spending for universities is at an all-time low this century. It is around 15-20% currently, and compared to Germany/France/other EU countries, their respective % is at 60%+. What wasn't mentioned, which I believe should be, are the conditions of academics, and the fact more pressure is being put on teaching and ensuring a strong student satisfication. If this continues, more and more academics will be leaving academia completely, and that will provide a huge-shortage on teaching, and as a result students. As the lack of funding is increase, more is the dependency of international students, and less of a focus on research for academics. I do not think Labour will do much, my honest 2 cents is that public funding will increase (slightly, just) and that tuition fees will go up, it's inevitable.
Why don't they start work aged 16 and work their way up?
Running up massive debts on useless ology ''degrees'' ...yet another Blair, Blair, Blair disaster.
@@KILKennyLaDa9898-js2nr that will definitely work for many jobs but a) we still need doctors and nurses, and b) employers would need to be prepared to train new starters and take on apprentices much more than they currently do.
@@bassetts1899not enough students doing apprenticeships instead of degrees
The trajectory for the UK itself is looking quite bleak tbf
It's the fundamental approach that is broken. The UK is obsessed with fancy prestige unis like Oxford or Cambridge and even the ones that aren't anywhere close to that level are still obsessed with getting there. Yet this leads to overall worse education outcomes. Noone needs a handful of highly prestigious unis. What is needed is good education and research. Across the board.
The introduction of the £9K cap in 2012 sparked considerable controversy, particularly as it was initially intended to apply primarily to prestigious universities. Moreover, it seemed to be motivated by a subtle political maneuver against Clegg, which proved to be quite effective, I must admit.
Useful stuff to know, thank you for making this video
In my experience as a university tutor, I am never surprised that International Students in general do not perform as well as local students. Simple reason is because they don't perform well academically enough to be accepted by their own nation's universities. However, they are able to pay the large fees and as long as the university turns one blind eye to their performance and stamps their degree - everyone is happy. They get their degree and the university gets their cash and any staff who speaks out is going to be silenced very quickly.
Its almost as if Brexit was the world's worst idea..
That's because we got remainers leading the country you know the bunch of economic terrorists terrorism supervisors
SQR(FA) to do with Brexit, which was a necessary step to maintain our Independence as a Nation. This is to do with Tony Blair who also had a lot to do with Brexit.
@@paullarne Thanks for destroying the lives of younger generations. Thank you old man.
Nah, Brexit itself wasn't the worlds worst, but the implementation's gotta be well up there.
Remoaners can't help pulling Brexit into everything.
The fees are still too high, Universities must be wasting huge amounts of money.
Speaking as someone who has worked in the University sector my whole working life I recognise all the things being mentioned here. The sector has expanded massively in my 40 + years, and huge sums have been spent on new buildings to house and teach the huge numbers of students. We are heavily reliant on foreign students now, so if that collapses we are in dire straits.
ever considered the possibility that this is just a very basic economic problem of demand and supply? Maybe we don't need 200+ universities and 40% of the population to have gone through higher education?
When "Saying 'the most qualified person should get the job' is a microaggression, Britain's top universities insist" is a thing, you know your educational system is circling the drain...
4:00 There's another point here which rarely gets discussed. Universities are incentivised to bring international students regardless of their ability, meaning any shortfall can frustrate the daily workload of academics by having to find ways to work around low levels of English, critical thinking, and essay writing. Therefore it costs more in the long run, unsurprising considering short-sighted governments are in charge.
But they bring some sweat $€£¥ to the bank account of some Administrators, sorry I mean the University.
Even if it were true. Those students pay x 3 the tuition fees compared to home students.
Oh I forgot to mention visa fees, NHS fees and living expenses.
As far as I know, this only 'benefits' international students at the point of admission. After that it's the student's responsibility to make sure their academic skills are up to expectation, they're not given an unfair advantage in grading. The only extra resources you're talking about are generally limited to a few academic writing classes, which are a drop in the bucket compared to the much higher fees these students pay AND most international students do not need or use those classes. It's also not always looked at in admission to begin with, so even British students with poor academic writing can be admitted, as long as their subject grades are high enough.
As an international student, I can also tell you that converting grades between countries isn't that straightforward. In some countries, what the UK considers to be an A would require near perfection on harder tests, in other countries the equivalent of an A is much easier to get. Some countries cover advanced materials that others don't. I.e. someone could be better academically overall than an AAA student and still only get BBB when applying. Once they're taking the same tests as their British peers, they score higher.
they are Tories....they cant even short sighted!
@@jidec3165 We are talking about dragging the level of teaching down, and the cost of living up for all students and young workers.
LOL 700,000 international students and they're still running short of money. They've been fiddling the standards for years and years. I wrote to BBC Panorama about my experiences teaching pre-sessional courses; they weren't interested because it wasn't PC to say it
This!
@@bigbarry8343 ELEVEN years ago my academic manager said to me "this will be a big scandal one day"
@@bigbarry8343 I don't know why but it's deleted my reply which said: ELEVEN years ago my academic manager said to me "this will be a big scandal one day"
I was a Ph.D. student at a top 10 global university in London, 20 years ago.
I taught some u/g classes full of foreign students from one country in particular. The students were lovely, but their written work wouldn't have been accepted at my prep school.
Anyhow, I emigrated to Europe many years ago. Thanks for the education, U.K., shame it isn't a meritocracy anymore.
@@threethrushes Behind the scenes at the University I worked for ten years ago, the lecturers were in open revolt at all the appallingly written work they had to mark
But the Vice Chancellor had their pension to think about!
Universities should be a social utility, not a business. Education is a society's means of social reproduction. University should be free, period. Universities shouldn't be able to go "bankrupt" because they shouldn't be a profit driven enterprise.
This was the argument in the 1990s. Unfortunately, the U.K. decided to go down a path of 'inclusion' rather than 'excellence'.
Polytechnics were given degree-awarding powers. Blair wanted 50 per cent of young people arbitrarily to have a degree (why not 40 per cent, or 60 per cent?)
Anyhow, I escaped the U.K. in 2015.
@@threethrushes - for sure, man. Not only the UK; the USA, and Canada and much of the Anglophonic world as well. University expenses are absurd. You are correct in blaming it on the Blairites. What Americans need to wrap their brains around is that the Democratic Party went through the same transformation. The rise of Trump and his idiot minions is directly correlative with the collapse of New Deal with Ronald Reagan / GH Bush, followed by the Clinton Admin, who, in reality, was a continuation of the idiocy from Reagan/Bush, and it was the Clinton Admin that threw the working class under the bus. So, when the Dems offered up Hillary in 2016, you wonder why there was a subconscious revulsion? Yes, she should have been president (Trump won an Electoral College victory, not a popular victory) but she was the wrong candidate for the times in that she was the proper candidate for a useless Democratic party.
And now, the USA is in the seriously compromised position of either electing the rot from the DNC, or, simply revoking the American Democratic Experiment in the form of deranged Trumpian fascism. And NEITHER of them are in favour of actual public education. Instead, education is being reduced to job training - which is actually a gift to the corporations, as they don't have to pay for the training of their workers - you get the workers and the state to finance that... basically, industry offloaded training expenses onto the public sector. It is a recipe for catastrophe.
Bankruptcy has little to do with being a profit driven enterprise. Individuals can go bankrupt, charities can, countries technically can. If they can get into debt, they can go bankrupt. Treating things as too big or important to do so is part of what's causing the problem - they generate more debts that they'll likely never be able to pay and the cracks of the pressure of dealing with them ripple out to everyone else.
@@dehn6581 - if it's a government service, it, by definition, can't go bankrupt. It can lose money, but it can't go bankrupt.
ESPECIALLY in the USA with its currency. So, no, you're wrong.
This feels like the episode of Yes Minister where Hacker receives an honorary law degree from Humphreys Uni in exchange for allowing a subsidy for foreign students to remain.
More and more I feel that the way to predict the future is to study the past. Because our current politicians can't come up with their own lies and just reuse the old ones.
UK also does panel shows well
Cancel universities! Fund panel shows!
Easy, when the Government gets cheap and does not pay for education with TAX payers money, and Unis are forced to take in anyone and everyone and they don't pay for their tuition in the end, this is what happens. We pay taxes for a reason, health, education and emergency services, it is about time the Gov't uses such money on these things. Education isn't a business it is to keep working standards up for a reason.
students fees are basically a roundabout way of taxing only graduates. it doesnt function as normal debt.
@@AshleyDownTranmissionSociety "taxing only graduates" makes no sense because at the moment they graduate, the person has made zero income whatsoever, only debts. How do you tax income that doesn't even exist? It's not a consumption tax either.
@@pritapp788 you only repay loans if you earn over a certain threshold. The loan system is a graduate tax. Graduates have higher incomes in the medium term, which is why they are subject to this, but only if you earn more than a certain amount
In Canada as well there was apparently a decrease in government funding (from provinces) for universities and colleges and so universities and colleges responded by greatly increasing the number of foreign students who pay far higher tuition fees than do domestic students.
This year there are about 900,000 foreign students in Canada though some estimates have that figure at over a million and there was a government forecast that by the year 2027 that figure would increase to 1.4 million foreign students.
I believe that at the University of Toronto for instance Canadian students pay about $10,000 a year and foreign students over $60,000 per year.
One thing that became especially apparent early in the pandemic when university courses were shifted online and students and those teaching them were staying home and not even going to campus was that very little of the money paid in course fees by all the students taking a class was going to the professor or lecturer teaching the class and the teaching assistants doing work for the class.
If there are 50 foreign students in a U of T course paying $13,000 per course that's $650,000 in tuition fees paid for that course not even including tuition fees paid by Canadian students in the course.
The University doesn't pay remotely that amount of money to lecturers and teaching assistants to teach one course.
The minimum stipend for a sessional lecturer to teach a course at U of T is about $20,000 and no doubt teaching assistants as well aren't getting rich from what they are paid.
Even if a small amount of tuition goes to pay a share of the salaries of the head of the department and the department secretary that still leaves a significant majority of the tuition fees left over.
It makes one wonder where the heck all the tuition fees go.
Universities might say that they have to spend a lot of money paying staff who do research or to write papers but I don't see why students taking courses should have to contribute to that - their tuition fees should go only towards the service they are receiving which is the courses they are taking.
I think that universities in any country should be banned from having foreign student fees more than 50% higher than that of domestic students so that the foreign students who come are picked based on their qualifications, not the wealth of their families or the willingness of their families to risk bankruptcy and poverty by taking out massive loans.
Having the best students from around the world instead of the richest is a good way for universities to improve their reputations.
And if countries want universities that have a great reputation for research and academic papers then the governments of those countries should provide adequate funding to universities for that work to be done.
A number of people have mentioned that tuition is free in Scotland for Scottish students.
However Scottish universities still heavily depend on foreign students as the Scottish government limits its costs by restricting the number of places it funds.
Thank god I live in a country without tuition fees. That is a really stupid idea, since you should train your countries best students to maximise your job markets productivity, not the ones who can pay for it the most, because their parents are rich. It is better to tax the successful then after it to finance it from those that have enough to spare. And before anybody says, that would not create an incentive to finish university, let alone successfully so, I think you are a. leaving in a dream world if you think any student is not keenly aware of wanting to get a good job, but b. that should clearly be managed by tight checks on students progress in an educational sense, not a monetary one.
Also, you should have a working non-university model for getting the knowledge for many jobs, which I feel the UK is also lacking. That at least is less a just UK issue, but there are better models out there that function even in our modern world. Heck in Germany there are even hybrid models between learning a trade and going to university, to address the rising need for non-academic, but university level engineering, IT, specialised STEM or business graduates. They have been super successful and are significantly paid for by the companies, just like trades are.
The UK has degree apprenticeships. Probably need more of them.
will university’s be free if your a uk student who applies to a country with free university
@@Ok_yes_its_me Why would you need a degree to work in trade? Older generations were managing just fine.
I fully concur that universities should primarily serve as institutions of learning, emphasizing selectivity based on academic merit rather than functioning as mere facilitators of visas for foreign students.
@@unidentified5390 No, but only since you left the EU. Most EU/EEA citizens can study for free, and the fee for non EU citizens is between 1500-3500€, so still less than in the UK. You need to be accepted first of course.
And while the UK may rank more highly for its 3 most elite university by some measures, the rest are at best comparable to decent public universities here.
There are elite private universities that can charge whatever they want, but they are fairly few, most for very highly specialised topics.
This important video needs to be broadcast all over the internet. Lots of people need to understand this right now. No politician can fix this issue no matter what they promise without raising home student fees and bringing in more foreign students regardless of how the UK hates immigration apparently. If not then expect university closures, simple as that.
The main reason overseas student numbers went down is that the government changed the rules and no longer let the students bring all their dependents into the UK with them.
@@Ok_yes_its_me Pay lots of money to come to our country and study then perform roles that we are desperate for people to do BUT you can't bring any family
I wonder how other European countries finance their university education - not with fees as high as in the UK, in Germany for example it isn't tuition fees, but admin and so on and not higher than about 300-400 Euro.
The b b c is not for direct entry, that was for pathway course. Which is known as foundation year before getting into main course. And if student can't secure certain mark typically 2:1 they do not get progression into main course. So that doesn't affect domestic students.
So, they even get to charge the international students for a whole extra year??
As someone who works at a university; thank you for covering this and saying it exactly how it is. It is utter non-sense to try and bring down migration, but targeting people who are literally only here for a few years and very few actually want to stay for longer.
Because the primary purpose of a university is to train educate and train the next generation, as well as providing a hub for research. Whilst it's nice to have people from abroad study here it shouldn't be at the expense of places for UK students. If universities are reliant on hundreds of thousands of foreign students to pay the bills it's already broken. I'd be pretty annoyed to loose out on university because someone on the other side of the world has lower grades and more money.
Some important points here about international students:
A lot of intl. students came to the UK, because the UK was a connection point to the EU and the US. So even if the way they were treated was shite (high visa prices, being scapegoats when they can’t even vote), it was worth the high price of admission.
Now, the UK is isolated. Not only that, they insist on putting a minimum floor for skilled visas (38,000 pounds), which is well in excess of most fields. Which means, most are being kicked out after finishing their education. Not only in broadly useful fields, but also in law and finance.
They also get double taxed: NHS surcharge is in excess of 1000 pounds per year, on top of paying for national insurance. So… a person earning 38,000 pounds is paying taxes like they are earning 48,00 pounds.
So, looking at those circumstances… why would an international student want to study in the UK?
"putting a minimum floor for skilled visas (38,000 pounds), which is well in excess of most fields."
If you look at the average salary in the UK 38k£ cannot be considered high for a skilled visa.
I was making 35k£ on a STEM field with zero experience in 2019. It is almost impossible to find an offer in the same field in 2024 that is below 40k£ (and you have to be very desperate to take it).
If you do not have an offer above that threshold is because you do not bring enough value to the company (and therefore the country) to make it economically profitable to issue you a visa.
Let us take into account someone on a 38k£ salary pays around 4.8k£ in taxes and 2.9k£ in NI per year. All it takes is for that person to have 1 child in the school system and is almost costing the country more than they pay in. One visit to the doctor and is a negative contribution.
£38k is the break even point when your tax contribution covers public expenditure on you - any less and you cost the state money
@@rafaelcosta3238 I'm a postdoctoral research scientist at a UK university and I get paid considerably less than £38k. Standard postdoc pay outside of London is ~£36k though some universities will pay quite a bit less than that (e.g. mine). You could argue that a postdoctoral scientist in academia is less valuable than someone in industry, but I'd still class it as "skilled work" considering a PhD and demonstrable research output is a pre-requisite.
A lot of Postdocs in the UK come from all around the world because the UK still does have some very prestigious institutions that conduct world-leading research, but the £38k skilled visa now requirement basically precludes international applicants from postdoctoral research jobs. For a government that claims it wants to make the UK a "science superpower" this is a very odd decision.
Universities could of course get around this problem simply by paying their researchers more, but we all know this is not going to happen.
@@TheWiseSalmon
" I'd still class it as "skilled work" considering a PhD and demonstrable research output is a pre-requisite"
You do, but the job market doesn't.
We cannot give "skilled work" visas to people earning barely more than the average wage.
@@rafaelcosta3238 but what about nurses and teachers? Both undoubtedly skilled jobs that are necessary to have a country that functions well. Both careers where many jobs pay less than £38.7 k a year.
They're going bankrupt because I told them to
good job bud, can you ask the banks to clear my debts next if you have a spare minute
Can you cause house prices to fall to a reasonable level next please?
The power of a bourbon is truly impressive
I reckon a Bourbon could do a better job than the Tories tbf
9k GBP is cost of a poor city college in the US.
11,000 us dollars wow
I completed a bachelor's degree in UK as an Intl fees paying student.
Then I moved to Findland to do a Master's degree.
In Finland then (2011) it was tuition free. Finland universities pay their teachers and research students better and higher salaries, the Universities are better equiped with all modern,new,state of the art equipments.
Notice that,they do all of that in Finland while charging no fees but the UK universities that would charge the HIGHEST fees in Europe are going broke. They spend so much money in UK on buildings. In the UK they have all these futuristic buildings on campuses whereas in Finland you can walk pass a University and not even realise it is a University but when you walk into the University then you get the BEST, MOST MODERN of books and equipments.
Finland is doing its best to repeat other countries mistakes, including UK. So we'll see how long it takes until we get to the same situation as the UK.
@@mikkokahkonen9183 Could you please elaborate on that? I intend to apply for phd in Finland in 2-3 years
"Arrow goes up" is an interesting choice for a thumbnail about bankruptcies :D
The "business model" of universities is changing, the landscape is becoming more competitive internationally and domestically combined with rising costs and over expansion leads to (not for profit) universities losing money.
As a us citizen I find this conversation interesting. Because we are the complete opposite side of the spectrum, with just passing on the debts/insolvency to the students.
Harvard and yales endowments combined are the same GDP as Luxembourg or Guatemala.
Average EU tuition fees: Free for EU/EEA students at undergraduate level (with a fee of €3,000 for student services); from €9,750 (~US$11,400) per year for non-EU students at undergraduate level. From €4,000 year for EU postgraduate students, and from €4,000 (~US$4,700) per year for non-EU students at postgraduate level.
The number of EU students choosing to study in the UK has dropped by half since Brexit, according to new official figures. Data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) shows that enrollments by EU nationals dropped by 53%: from 64,120 students in 2020/21 to just 31,400 in 2021/22.
Universities shouldn´t be run as businesses, they are institutions that are supposed to be dedicated to research and education. Increasingly universities are a con, they charge exorbitant fees, they treat postdocs like absolute shit (i.e not offering stable positions, rotating people under the guise of "mobility") and in many countries lecturers get paid an absolute joke wage.
It´s ludicrous, pre-Thatcher, even the Tories didn´t have this mentality that literally everything has to be run like a business.
I also hate Erasmus, the idea that a brief stint on an "international" campus will teach you anything about the country you are living in is absolutely bonkers. It´s a waste of money, it´s more an initiative to sell the EU than to do anything actually useful in academic terms.
Indeed, universities are now selling visa with pathway to citizenship to international students.
50% of 18 year olds going to university was never a sustainable model. It was only done to reduce the headline figure for unemployment. The result has been a lowering of standards and a massive debt burden on those who go. When it was 10% not only were universities free, but you could get a grant to go. Furthermore the degree you got at the end made you sought after, with employers falling over themselves with job offers. At least that was my experience when I went in the 70s.
A lot of young people forget this and think it was just made expensive for no apparent reason other than "profiteering".
By the time I went to university in the mid-1990s we were given grants.
Polytechnics were given degree-awarding status.
Blair infamously said "education, education, education."
...and it has spiralled downwards ever since.
Most of my friends now do uni online, one dropped out of hall and the other dropped out of Surrey, they now do their studies in there room and buy the equipment they need off Amazon
This is absolutely spot on!
All because of populism and the people not having a clue about how to run a country 😡
i love my uni, im passing fine (obviously brain surgery would be harder than what im doing) and my uni it does amazing work. but damn...you do NOT get your moneys worth. it could be online, theyred be no difference that i could see. most lectures are just a dude stood there for 3 hour lecture thats one pre made powerpoint from 5 years ago (with errors that must be corrected live and explained how the course has changed since, because up to date stuff and learning materials is too hard?) and we all go home anyway to do the work. you dont do it AT the uni. again, you CAN use the huge libary that probably cost half the money to fund. but its useless...everythings digital from books to online hand ins....hmm....seems like a rip off from what i can tell....and im enjoying it ffs its just shocking whats happened to unis being dragged down to the point they can barely teach properly, let alone be worth the price of entry.
I graduated from UAL last year. Universities are corrupt and broken. We need universities to collapse to make way for a better system that’s free and promotes actual knowledge exchange and shared learning.
Tuition fees came in in England in the early 2000s at £1000 py increasing to £3000py and then jumped to £9k per year.
ah so that's probably why I thought the Universities were government funded.
@@michaelxz1305yes, they were once. I was a lecturer when the fees first came in fully in 2003/4. It was because there was an aim to get 50% of people attending university to increase skills. But the slippery slope to massive student debt was apparent even then