Universities face cash ‘catastrophe’ with threat of mergers and course cuts | Sian Griffiths
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- čas přidán 7. 09. 2024
- "I think some academics would say that universities have been extremely badly managed."
To attract foreign students paying higher course fees British universities have "overextended themselves" and are now facing a cash "catastrophe", says Sunday Times education editor Sian Griffiths.
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My entire city has been destroyed, replacing commercial, residential and industrial with one thing: student accommodation.
They say town would be dead without the students, but town is dead now - unless you own a greasy chicken joint; there's nothing else.
Same here. I used to live in Bangor, Gwynedd, North Wales. It was originally catering for the local people. Now, it takes people from all over the world. They pay much more for their education. Some pay £30k per annum...!!! Thay are not coming in large numbers now.
Let them sink...
In 2008 we should have let the banks in the UK slide away and not given them huge loans.
@@alungerrard792 You're right about Bangor, Alun. Once they started taking in hundreds from Arab countries and more especially from China, it all went downhill. Such a shame.
@@ChristineRead-ck1uq About 20 years ago the Uni had a closed meeting that changed their constitution. They wanted more foreigners in...ie China and Muslim countries. By law if you are Chinese you MUST spy for the state. Some Muslims hate us .... in the near future we will have huge problems with them...our enemies are through the gate...we invite them in !!
In Bangor many muslims are kicked out or they like 85,000 others just disappear.
It is frightening....
Varsity own 435 dwellings in Bangor alone. A couple of large accommodation blocks owned by India...I am not sure who owns the big accommodation zones which were leased for 25 years initially by the builders to the Uni...Dean Street,Ffriddoedd, 2 on High Street etc.
@@ChristineRead-ck1uq did the sight of none white people hurt your feelings?
My council has given hundreds of millions of support to the local university and their non-council-tax paying students whilst infrastructure/services for council tax payers is falling apart. Now they want bail-outs.
When tertiary education has become a business, when the number and size of universities has increased considerably, when the number of students has increased dramatically, when universities have become dependent on foreign students, when administrative units (incl. DEI) have been inflated to a ridiculous extent - then market forces are bound to become active. This includes universities becoming bankrupt. It is not a matter of "adequate funding". One cannot have it both ways: being a business, but not being subject to market forces.
Very well said!
Universities charging over £9k per year is like McDonald's charging £20 for a burger and STILL losing money! That doesn't sound like a good business plan to me. And the way universities are going, soon even international student fees will not be enough. Are there no academics in their business department that can develop a better business plan?
Not from the sounds of it. They will teach business studies but fail to administer those self same studies themselves.
Those who can't, teach.
mc Donald's has human dna how anyone can still eat it ekk
Pssssst..... secret for you. Management 'Sciences' are not Degrees nor Sciences.
If you want to learn management, go to work and manage a business.
Oh and get a competent Management Professional Qualification - ACIS, ACMA etc.
@@fedup664They've apparently merged with the Soylent Corporation.
ALL academics would say that ALL universities have been extremely badly managed. UK HE is a total disaster of managerial corruption and incompetence.
And the very people who claim to be enlightened
@@GG-hi5if There is nothing enlightened about UK HE management.
Sounds like also work in the sector. I endorse what you say.
I have worked in HE for 30 years and you have no idea what you are talking about
@@advocate1563 Of course. I have seen these people in action. They work for themselves only and destroyed the sector for personal gain.
Threats of job losses? Keep up. There's been redundancies across the board.
@@TheToonMonkey About time.
@@WilliamJeffs-vu7nr It's never in the right places. Executive leadership teams remain highly paid and secure while cleaners, porters, catering staff, admin staff, etc. are paid the bare minimum, and fundamental programmes and research are scrapped or cut-down significantly.
Universities selling pointless degrees for jobs that dont exist who'd of thaught it was unsuitable 😂😂😂😂😂
I can't believe BS majors like gender studies exist.
Was fine until 2010
@@NeonVisual Until Blair upped the target to 50%. Twoo hundred psychology students for every job and we needed to bring tradesmen from Europe as we were not training our own. One of the many ways Blair ruined the UK.
@@A190xx Drivel.
@@A190xx Absolutely spot on.
I remember when you had to be in the elite top percent to get into a university. Now people are getting degrees for watching Harry potter.
I went back to uni after years in the IT industry. Easy for me after all that experience, but after being largely self-taught at the start of my career, every module in this degree was about on a par with reaching chapter three of your average teach yourself book. Then we got to the final exam and it was the exact same paper as the mock. Result: a load of 'graduate' know-it-alls who couldn't competently write a single line of code.
congratulations for writing one of the least informed comments out of a pretty good bunch of candidates
@@benetvincent1 Deny that university courses have expanded into some ridiculously nonsensical courses, some of them just ONE YEAR long (often filled 100% with FOREIGN STUDENTS), many of then "online only" not even requiring a professional to teach lectures, yet offering a "degree" the same as a 4 year course. Go ahead - lie to my face.
YOU are the "ill informed" one.
That was wrong. I did pretty badly at school, went to work for a few years and then went back to education and got a first class engineering degree. I now make a lot of money because of that qualification
Education should never be restricted to the elite
@@stevec6427 People doing further education when they are older is different than straight out of school. It also depends on the course.
He also didn't mean "the elite" he meant people with better grades and education which is 100% true, Universities used to be a LOT more discerning about who they took because having a lot of failures in a course looked bad, now it seems if you can manage to walk upright, they'll take your money.
If universities borrowed too much money why should the tax payer have to foot this to keep them in business. The graduate job market is so saturated in some fields that only the top 10-20% actually get graduate jobs in their subject area. Universities are now profit driven and do not care about their students. All they care about is making more and more money.
These comedy degrees would not be missed.
As someone from across the pond who has just finished 37 years of reviewing people for company jobs, the problem is the corporations. In the USA until 2021 if you did not have a university degree of some sort you could NOT even be considered for a job, even if the job could be done better by someone trained out of secondary school. Most US companies got rid of internal training departments in the 1980s and shifted to using university degrees as an indicator of suitability for all positions, even clerical. No degree, even the comedy ones, no job interview.
Degrees that cause division.
I have a degree in floral design and a PHD in hand embroidery. My girlfriend has a degree in puppet design and performance.
@@lervish1966 ha ha, love your SOH.😂
@@gregorybiestek3431 The answer is to cut the university system by 85%. Then they'd have to consider people without worthless degrees. Like we did in the 70s and 80s before Bliar ruined everything.
Over the last thirty years, it's basically been an educational race to the bottom with quantity over quality being the mantra.
Thanks to Blair's insistence that at least 50% of school leavers should do degree courses. That most of those courses are worthless seems not to be relevant to unis these days. They're just interested in the numbers and the money.
It's a bloated sector that needs to see a reckoning.
..... it all comes from.one simple source: Greed. On the scent of money, they've put a raft of totally useless courses on their offer list. No money for these Universities I'm afraid. Let those who are teetering.... fail. Like any other business, no bail-outs. If they fail, they fail. Let the strong survive. Have a moments silence for those who die.
so what are these 'useless courses'? How do you decide whether a course is useful or not? I don't think this is a constructive way of thinking about the situation. It's a lazy response
Sorry to disappoint you. The Universities are registered as charities and are not profit making ventures. The UK government is not funding the Education system properly. Period
Except plenty of teetering business get public money bailouts. Just look at the state of UK water and rail, least we forget the Banking crisis. Privatisation has ruined the economy on all fronts. Assets stripped, Execs failing upwards, just so long as the shareholders are happy.
Universities have made a lot of money over the years where has it all gone.
@capri2673 This, my uni has been building more buildings but not parking lots. The result, the parking lot is always full, even at 7:30 in the morning. The ammount of times I have nearly wet myself after a 45 minute drive and a hour and thirty minute wait for a space to open up. It has got to stop.
I thought the money went back into help the UK financially to help with our economy, the whole purpose of fee paying foreign students for the betterment of our country , no wonder we're in the mire
@@moosky7344 We always believe in endless growth, capitalism is a legalised Ponzi and everyone knows it. Only that's not how reality works, is it? In fact, it's the worst economic model unless you are wealthy or an employer, as then you just shift the losses of financial shocks onto workers and consumers, so they end up paying twice. Once to grow the profits, and again when the profits start to fall.
A lot of students never get jobs off the back of their degrees so they pay very little of the fees back. Also it's controlled by leftists so no doubt universities will have done all sorts of woke things with the money. Badly managed, is code for leftist corruption and idiocy. University at the end of the day is meant to provide skills for work. There should never be a system where it encourages the majority of the population to go. There should be far more in-work training and governments should provide cheap loans to people in work to study rather than just the fake middle classes.
@capri2673 do you work at Royal Holloway by chance?
They don’t deserve a bailout! I went to university 15 years ago the experience is nothing like what they made out in their prospectus and teaching was poor and totally inadequate - one technical course I did had only 1 teaching hour by a phd student every week. I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever.
Reduce student places to 10% to 20% of youngsters down from Blair's idiotic 50% target. Bring in 2-3 years diploma courses, especially for nurses. Let uni staff move to private sector where there is a shortfall. The 30% to 40% of students not going to uni will not have a huge debt and can be trained in trades to build the 1.5m homes, as we do not have the people to do it now.
Increase double the places for dentistry, medicine and nursing wich are strategic for the health sector.
If they wanted to work in construction they wouldn't have gone to university in the first place.
@zhivkaradeva4579 I agree to increase places for nursing sites not need a degree and indeed standards of candidates have broadly dropped since it was changed. And yes cancel degrees that do not lead to work or are not required to find those places we need.
@mickmegson6241 The education system and parents steer them away, but regardless we should only train where there is demand for employment. Most boys would love to be premier footballers.
@@zhivkaradeva4579
University is not the place for nursing
Maybe it's time University Vice-chancellors stopped kidding themselves they're equivalent to blue-chip CEOs
Unis are overpriced... rent overpriced ..life overpriced and all over rated !
Back in 1970 there were just 45. In 2024 there are 166 recognized universities in the UK. They sprang up like weeds, with government acquiescence. High time there was a cull.
Yeah because 2024 has the same population to accommodate uni students as 1970😂😂
You thick or something boomer?
@@ForDaCulture679 yes, but the population hasn't nearly quadrupled has it? Had it grown relative to the population increase, or even significantly faster, you'd expect the number to be between 50 something up to about 80. Nearly 170 is an extraordinary increase
@@tomthornton6259 We have a very different kind of economy... ~10% of people went to university in 1970... we had lots of jobs that didn't need high levels of education...companies used to train people, they had their own departments for staff development...now close to 50% of people go to university now and in that respect we are like most other modern economies...."Catch up with times!"
@@herbertdaly5190 But do those jobs need degrees? Sure, some jobs do, but how many people end up working in a career that's unrelated to their degree? It seems that piece of paper is just an arbitrary hoop to jump through, one associated with high debt and that acts as a barrier to students from poorer backgrounds.
Good. The lack of academic rigour has gone past a joke and fails everyone not least the of all the students who they've been rinsing for years.
If only there were clever people in universities who could plan finances.
Uni bosses pay themselves huge wages & pensions & get free homes & cars. Over £1M+ per year.
Which UK university is that? Please, do not say what you do not know anything about.
our uni boss is about to retire ,her salary is £256,000 pa , it would be interesting to see where you got those figures arjun
Yes. And when many were local Polys they got at best the equivalent today of an MP's salary - not that that isn't far too much - about £70k tops.
Our VC is on £426 thousand a year, it’s a small uni ex poly he’s the 4th highest paid VC in the country! How is it allows when hundreds of staff are being made redundant! how is that ok.
@@fionaknights3457 it isnt ,the wealth disparity is high isnt it , between staff and higher management ,
the uni im in the pay gap is less , but it exists as it does in all industries and buisnesses ,
its such a big question you ask that goes way beyond one university
the answer is to value the workforce more , ie pay them more as they are vital to your high salary too, management must look after the workers better
Tuff !!!! there are too many people going to university getting useless degrees that are pointless in the real world we need apprenticeships in all industries
YET THE UK INDUSTRY IS IN THE GUTTER HAHAHAAHAH WHATS YOUR NEXT COPE OLDCEL
he can't comprehend how the UK economy has changed.
Yes, too many. But then who will get to go to a university and who will get to go to Apprenticeship? And who will Big banks, Big tech, Big finance or Big law firms hire? If they prefer to hire someone with a degree, you should see why people want to have a shot at a university. Imagine how we get here? Wasn't it that feeling when 70% of people have no opportunity to go to a university while those 30% enjoy a good time getting hired by a big firms? If I am one of those 70%, I will want to have a shot at a university.
@@naratipmath bricklayers joiners electrician plumbers £2-3 grand a week after 3 year apprenticeship 35 hours a week and lots of work .. banks and insurance companies laying off all the time and cutting back . University’s are good for doctors surgeons engineering law and tec but there’s a lot of pointless degrees out there these days . Universities used to be for the kids that smashed it at school and had a real passion for learning . I’m a self employed joiner and our building sites are run by 25 year olds with multiple degrees in building and no idea how to build a house and estimators who past their degree but have no idea how to estimate in the real world . When I left school I got an apprenticeship with a joinery company did one day a week at college 4 days on a building site got my qualifications and of I went . There’s only so many office jobs and tec is reducing them daily but we need building workers and all the suppliers of materials and transport to get things built and you don’t need a degree to do all that .
@@matthew-xm3cp who can’t me ???
A whole load of these “universities” were never more than polytechnics in a glitzy frock, churning out thousands of graduates with degrees not worth the paper they’re printed on in subjects of dubious value. Losing a few wouldn’t do any harm to the UK economy - there aren’t enough jobs at the right salary level and skill levels anyway. A lot of the new graduates end up in jobs that A levels used to be good enough for
Nice to see my alma mater in the video, I doubt it’s going bust anytime soon though!
Are these the same ones where the Chancellor earns £850K plus ?
University is a shame and they stopped teaching years ago and became activists
Unis have always had a strong link with activism, muppet.
@@CBbreakerWhen you resort to insults you lose the argument. Of course universities have been a hotbed for activists for donkeys years. Unfortunately nowadays, judging by the many students who are interviewed on camera, many of the students who actively protest have been taught what to think not how to critically think. Those who can are usually too busy studying to bother.
What evidence do you have to support this? My guess is none
@@benetvincent1 looks at the world around you that’s all the evidence you need
@@CBbreaker 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 you lose
How are they bust every uni started charging 9k a year per student? 15+years ago...!
And 30k for international students WTH!!!
@@lackofcontentCrazy!
Pitiful management from senior staff, constipated committees.
Stop paying useless administrators. So much has been taken from the classroom.
The administrators are critical to Universities, they’d collapse without them!
25 K to 30 K is far too expensive for foreign students, many other unis are starting in other parts of the world and are excellent.
I agree! And that's just tuition! The foreign students also pay NHS surcharge, pay thousands annually for their accommodation and there are living expenses as well. The universities have made a fortune on these foreign students. Reading the comments and yours is the only comment that has mentioned how the foreign students are overpaying too.
The government have also made it harder for international students to bring their family over. Many international students were really here to game the system and bring their family over here to work and hopefully stay permanently.
Good. I walk past the Anglia Ruskin London campus, Farringdon every single day and it is overwhelmingly Sub Shahan Africans, some South Asians and a few Eastern Europeans and are just money mills. They need to have their status removed and wither converted into polytechnics, or the land given back to the public. You could easily get rid of 40-50% of the universities.
They wouldn't be 'withering' into Polys (again) though. They'd go back to being more important and successful and to taking a better intake than Uneeeeeees.
Universities want to charge like companies, while acting like charities. I’m doing a distance learning degree with Teeside uni. There’s 200 people on my module. It’s £450 per module for text on a screen and a link to Kahn Academy in the references. The recommended text has more in it and full online walkthroughs of every question. Please explain what I’m supposed to be impressed by, here? This is laughable.
Yep unis want to have their cake and eat it to. Online courses historically used to be cheaper than on campus now they are the same price if not higher on campus it's insane!
It was obviously a bubble years ago. Universities borrowed heavily on the basis of student fees, which were themselves based on borrowing; and they spent the money on a wild building spree.
BLAIR- the root cause of every problem we are experiencing
Totally incorrect. It was the Tories that converted most polytechnics into universities during 1991-1993 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-1992_university#:~:text=In%20the%20United%20Kingdom%20(UK,university%20status%20since%201992%20without. As for tuition fees and loans that was also a Tory idea too by which time much of the infrastructure and system was already in place by the time Labour had inherited the formal papers for the policy in 1997
Spending too much money on pronoun training and not enough on mathematics will get you there.
The uni degrees are, in some subjects, totally worthless as their are no jobs at the end of them. It's at the stage where they may as well offer degrees for watching Eastenders.
yet in London khan is wasting millions on diversity courses
Evidence of this?
@@stevec6427 Look it up. It's been well covered.
oh, grow up.
People are wising up. Accumulating tens of thousands in debt when the degree won’t give access to earning levels to provide a decent living. Better off getting an apprenticeship and a trade.
Who couldn’t see this coming? The last Labour gov under Tony Blair wanted 50% of all school leavers going to Uni. Never mind the fact they were chasing 10% of the job market. This model was always unsustainable. BUT it did allow for money to be borrowed from future generations to swell the coffers in the here and now. Now that money making scheme has run its course and the Universities will have to shrink. The new money making scheme has already been announced and it’s the Labour house building scheme. I suspect it will be the WEF/UN 15 minute cities. The British people will be building their own open air prisons…
Micky mouse degrees goodbye
I studied Electro-Mechanical Engineering.. hardly a "Micky Mouse degree"
Lol
@@martinspeer262 nobody said it was, they even say in the video its humanities and arts courses which are threatened to be cut...
@@Sickerror As someone from across the pond who has just finished 37 years of reviewing people for company jobs, the problem is the corporations. In the USA until 2021 if you did not have a university degree of some sort you could NOT even be considered for a job, even if the job could be done better by someone trained out of secondary school. Most US companies got rid of internal training departments in the 1980s and shifted to using university degrees as an indicator of suitability for all positions, even clerical. No degree, even the Mickey Mouse ones, no job interview.
The secret is out - a university degree for a large percentage of students is a bad economic decision. Either in what they study and/or the debts that they accrue. The supposed UK skills gap (the need for cheaper workers) is being met by importing labour rather than training our own.
Mmmmm, when did this start?
Only after Tony Blair quit? 🤦♂️
University's have millions in money and property. Why can't these assets be used for education.
universities
You don't need waster degrees when trying to drive an economy to growth. You need qualified scientists and engineers with well trained skilled people able to bring designs into reality. The other stuff you can do when there's extra money sloshing around the system.
As someone from across the pond who has just finished 37 years of reviewing people for company jobs, the problem is the corporations. In the USA until 2021 if you did not have a university degree of some sort you could NOT even be considered for a job, even if the job could be done better by someone trained out of secondary school. Most US companies got rid of internal training departments in the 1980s and shifted to using university degrees as an indicator of suitability for all positions, even clerical. No degree, even waster ones, no job interview.
@@gregorybiestek3431 My God, what a waste..
This was the threat with this privatisation through student tuition fees. They've turned education from a public good to a profit centre, and like any element of the private sector it undergoes boom and bust mechanics.
I am not sure why the taxpayer needs to sort this out to be honest, let the institutions that failed to manage themselves properly collapse. The industry decided to take the risks, and they should bear the same consequences as any other private sector entity.
The first thing that should happen is they should get rid of the managers who have paid themselves ridiculously high salaries to make the wrong decisions.
They should look at the amount of money spent at the top for Heads of Universities. An example is Professor Atherton. Universities seem to have plenty of money for upgrading buildings for the needs of those running Universities.
Half of university courses could be shut down tomorrow with no detriment whatsoever to the quality of the workforce. Millions of young people completely wasting three yearsof their life. Everyone knows this, but no one will say it.
TBH for young people in rip off Britain, it makes more financial sense to get an apprenticeship unless you desperately want to be a doctor or something.
Good riddance. Those of us in the know on this said at the time, this sort of thing would happen going after expensive foreign students and Research at the cost of teaching. But of course it was all "that's a problem for future generations".
Nobody is going to miss loads of wimmin doing Feminist Studies
tell that to your mother
this is nothing but a win tbh
They built accommodation out of greed for themselves. Some Students feel secondary and in COVID ripped off.
So what. They made their own mess.
When I went to university in 1997 I had no fees to pay, my university had government funding and operated within that funding and it was fine. The business model adopted to now is flawed and irresponsible and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I am in the system so to speak and bloody angry at how the tories have ignored the problems and with management within the institutions. It's not great for the students, research and the economy.
Why should tax payers pay for your degrees? Also since 1997 the number of university students has increased considerably like our ballooning population, finally we weren't nearly 3 trillion pounds in debt 😅
Blair and his 50%target started this not the Tories .They just went with the flow .Result was all to predictable long ago .
Who cares about these "woke madrassas?"
This the horror of the capitalist system it gets all the benefits of the graduates and their research and put vitually nothing back in. It is incredibly frustrating.
What research?
@@ScruffyTubbles companies will usually fund research at universities but they will own the patent occasionally it will be shared. The amount of funding the university gets will usual be a tiny percentage of profits made from patents.
Good, goverment should support apprenticeships and specialised college degrees that'll actually get you a job, unlike a lot of the pointless courses at uni.
It's our fault.
Yes I would be a great idea to stop charging interest fees on loans this is crippling students. many are keeping away from universities because of this one fail factor. Stop charging and make it benificial for students to join, simple equation.
Isn't this linked with a drop in demographics?
no it is due to the dumbing down of the the British people.....young folks today have no general knowledge about anything never mind being add to speak and write their mother tongue....black culture has destroyed it..... heard white boys near eton talking like gangsters... a joke
As an ex-academic saw this coming back in the 1980s. The rush by polytechnics to become universities was a huge mistake. The debt taken out poly management was astronomical and not sustainable. Meanwhile the established universities decided to tear up salary scales and pay themselves salaries comparable with industry and beyond. It’s taken a while to fall apart but was inevitable.
Close them down.
Outstanding, no more Gender Studies, or Liberal Arts doctorates. WORK.
Perhaps the preponderance of women's studies, the push for DEI, to much focus on courses with no chance of a job at the end of them is part of the problem? Too much climate lies and general woke activism taught.
The bloated HE sector needs to shrink with more resources put into Further Education.
A very valid point. FE has been the poor relation compared to HE and a correction is due.
Why?
How can university be in financial peril, if tuition fees for home students was trippled 14 years ago when The Tories came into power? They are greedy. Tuition fees are too expensive! 30 thousand pounds for overseas students? That's ridiculous! The government should not bail them out.
The mass expansion of higher education(which actually started under the Tories) has been an absolute disaster for the UK. Even if you do to a distinguished university and do a challenging academic subject, then that degree has lost all meaning these days.
The elephant in the room is about lowering the amount of people going, getting rid of the subjects which are of very little academic value and converting certain universities back into polytechnics - but again - there's no political will to do that.
UN checked GRAFT industry, w/ RIFE foreign admissions ROT.
When's the LAST time any UK Uni was clearly AUDITED?
Im actually ecstatic that unis are facing this. They have over expanded in the rush to sell worthless degrees.
When all is said and done, they are a business. They have overstretched themselves and are now looking for a bailout. Utterly unacceptable.
I live in Birmingham and i often pass the campuses. They have clearly spent millions building student accommodation as well as other facilities. This catastrophe was always in the pipeline as it over time becomes clear that students are 1: not getting value for money, and 2: being lumbered with degrees that are either over allocated and thus worthless, or simply have no meaning in the actual world of work.
Tories removed the stability of our education system. Universities, polytechnics and colleges. All served a purpose and had a steady funding stream from small 1% taxes on uk businesses. Tories during the Thatcher years removed that. Making a business with profits going to shareholders from education is what has gone wrong.
Which university do you know someone that has shares in it?
What is the 1% tax you recall / imagine?
@@danielwebb8402 Students are funding unis at a rate of £40k per course. They used to pay zero and got a good education, up to 2010. Then the Tories destroyed 500 years of quality universities.
@@danielwebb8402 you could have found out in less time than it took to ask the question
@lonniei1606
No I can't
Business tax for education 80s doesn't return anything.
Because you don't know what you are talking about / making it up.
Hence......
You've not replied with the name of this 1% business tax that was removed.
Was it called "the leprechaun at the bottom of the garden for education tax"? Another imaginary thing.
@@danielwebb8402 can i buy shares in oxford University? And read....
Going to say no on the handouts for saving the arts and humanities degrees. They were never a realistic option, and they have become huge student debt pits with no real job prospects.
Unless you went to Oxbridge. Having an Eng Lit degree seems mandatory for getting a job in broadcasting these days.
While I see your point about the “everyone must go to uni” model being unsustainable. Saying arts and humanities degrees are basically pointless does those of us working hard in the arts a disservice. I went to uni in the late 90s doing a music degree at a time when music was very strong in schools and universities. I’m fortunate to have had a 20+ year career performing and teaching all over the place. If those courses disappear people like me would end up with no outlet, as I was to bad at everything else to study something different to that level. The UK music and film sector is a big contributor to our economy so while science and technology degrees are really useful, there should still be a place for high level arts and culture. I’m currently teaching instrumental lessons at a university and the music degree courses there are now under threat of staff redundancies and cuts. I’m incredibly sad that what was a leading music course hangs in the balance. No matter who is to blame for the state of things (management, government policy etc) it’s the staff and students that are suffering now.
@@jimfieldhouse2267 you were a lucky one. Yes, in an ideal world a music degree would get you a job, but let's be clear, 95% of the people who do get them can't land a job in the field after getting one to manage to make even a poor living. And it is with the debt model actively burdening the next generation five times more likely than it helps.
@@adrianbundy3249 As someone from across the pond who has just finished 37 years of reviewing people for company jobs, the problem is the corporations. In the USA until 2021 if you did not have a university degree of some sort you could NOT even be considered for a job, even if the job could be done better by someone trained out of secondary school. Most US companies got rid of internal training departments in the 1980s and shifted to using university degrees as an indicator of suitability for all positions, even clerical. No degree, even worthless ones, no job interview.
Universities have been haemorrhaging staff for years because they had their funding cut to zero and then were legally restricted from setting their own prices above a certain amount. That amount has been fixed for years but costs go up. Eventually, they either have to raise their prices, get funded again or go bust. You don't need a degree in economics to figure that out
Universities have made massive monies
It's all at the wrong end though, it's the cleaning staff and support staff where the redundancy is made, never at the CEO equivalent level. Vice chancellor doesn't go, nope I don't need the insane pay rise this year he or she goes, yes please but let's try and get away with a 0.1% cost of living rise for staff.
Do we really need so many arts and humanities courses?
Too many people go to university but don't come out with a useful qualification.
We need more apprenticeships rather than degrees.
When I went only 15% of people went to university.
When I studied it was 4% at University (not Uneeeeeeeeeeeeeee) and about the same at Poly.
@@ScruffyTubbles Maybe my figure was overstated because I lumped uni and poly together which wasn't the case in the early 90s
Most of these ‘universities’ are gloried polytechnics. They are no loss.
Just Look at the Universe of Nottingham been building vanity projects based on a unrealistic vision of expansion by growing overseas students numbers, it was always going to end in tears as it doesn’t take an expert to realise that those overseas students would be then teaching in their own Universities, thus there be no need for their students to come here
Universities need to work together rather than complete
how many trans positions and woke enough advisors do they have and their pay???
UNIVERSITY ENTRANCE EXAMINATION
Time allowed 3 minutes
A mother is 21 years older than her son. In 6 years she will be 5 times as old as her son.
Where is the father?
Some technical staff in universities are on low £20k annual wage. don't believe the hype
How many illegal immigrants came in onstudent visas?
at £34K a pop not many I’d think
Don’t know about other Unis but one of our local ones let the students leave early and told them they could do their finals exam AT HOME on line.😱😱😱😱 The students during Covid were given a wave through on their exams, The teachers for the whole of Covid worked from home, then had a strike. The elite Uni’s have 10 week terms and 42 wks hols ( so the tutors can write their books )
Good, about time the Deans, Vice Chancellors & higher academics stopped paying themselves massive salaries stop irrelevant courses & stop all that DEI.
Stop the muesli knitting and underwater basket weaving degrees.
On no, what will we do without all those arts and humanities graduates, will we have a shortage of painters and dance interpretaters and HR consultants?
Not a bad thing- kids look at getting jobs instead will be better off in the long run and the country needs you.
When the Labour government under Blair announced that 30% of young people would go to university it was always going to end in tears. The majority of students are never going to earn enough to pay the interest on their loans. I hope a lot of these ‘universities’ are closed down as they are conning young people into a life time of debt to obtain dubious qualifications which have very limited practical use.
I don’t think that 30% was really the problem, but as you stated in was the types of subjects that proliferated during those years of increase. I’m about to leave the IT sector, specifically software engineering. When I joined the industry over 30 years ago, there was a shortage on skilled engineers, now I’m about to leave nothing has changed. These are the types of areas where the growth was required, but never happened.
Most of the oder unis are actually once tech colleges. These tech colleges taught the working class certain skills. By changing them to unis we lost a source of skilled labour which us what the globalists wanted. Blame Blair the epitome of globalism.
@@rufdymond That is a result of the tuition fees era where what is offered by universities reflects the demands of 'customers', which in this case are children.
@@Unknown24466 Yeah and that is still not enough to fund all the additional universities Labour created. University degrees have become devalued whilst the cost of them has gone through the roof.
@@Unknown24466 But the £3k was never enough to support 30% of people going to University. When only 8% went the country could afford to subsidise them. I idea of tuition fees is the students were to pay for themselves. This was never going to work as there are not enough graduate jobs. I was a manager in an office where half the staff had degrees and were being paid 25k a year. You didn’t need a degree for the work, just the ability to speak with people and write a report, which they struggled to do!
False information. Universities need to offer Useful Courses, restricted Foreign students 😮😮
Gender and race studies.... biggest con ever.
From what I've witnessed unless a foreign student is attending Russell group of universities most of them use the education route as a back door for immigration,lets see what would happen if the government only allowed foreign students to study only stem and the 2 years graduate visa is scrapped....
A university that I work for has just announced that new starts will not be enrolled on defined benefit pension schemes but will have a defined contribution scheme. One wonders how they will be able to enrol academics for STEM subjects.
University Chancellors get from £250K to £488K they don't seem to be providing value for money. The front line people who provide the teaching get nowhere near that. Pay is related more to closeness to money than contribution to the organisation.
The Government should subsidise proper degree more, and NOT all this gender, media studies, and other useless degree nonsense,
If universities had continued with highly regarded and useful courses for the most talented and enthusiastic students perhaps we could have continued with the grant system for students from less advantageous backgrounds. The push towards attracting high fee paying students from abroad combined with a 'salesmanship and customer' system was always heading for a fall. In addition, when only 7% of the population gets educated in the public school system, carrying on to attend Oxbridge and the other elite universities, it is not surprising that this 7% have the monopoly on most of the plum jobs in politics and media regardless of their actual level of talent which is probably why the universities are in the state they are in today.
Good! In Lincoln, the Uni has bought most of the area for student housing & we all know they're nothing but a people smuggling ring. They sell courses with little hope of getting a job, but every chance of getting a visa.
Internationals students don’t want to come to the UK anymore
They also had funding from EU n Brexit also had an effect
Just close at least 50% of Universities; if they cant make a profit close them.
Don’t believe this. University income is around £500 million for the larger ones. They have been making extortionate amounts of profit. Time for some competition.
2:32 The government needs to step in to save arts and humanities courses? Oh please.
Losing money, good! Universities still gain taxpayers financial support many of those taxpayers are struggling financially themselves yet Universities seem to have no need to balance the books.. They prefer to favour overseas students above Britains finest for financial gain which they have not spent wisely. The gravy train is over do you hear over. As to the biased political environment in which our young people have to study, it proves to me that many of the the University governing bodies leave a lot to be desired.
Any course can be put on CZcams for free.
Well, yeah. They priced half of the population out of entering University! Plus, you can get a reasonable education online now, and starting an online business has never been easier. It's not worth 30k of debt when you're 21 to maybe have it help in a career if, by that age, you already know EXACRLY what you want to do with your life. It's a huge gamble and the price is way too high
What have they done with all of the money then.
inflation for one. education hasn't been exempt from the likes of power costs, they jumped by over a third and that comes straight out of small student fee budgets.
Tory corruption across the board.
Wasted money big style.