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Originally Posted by Hugh
I agree with nearly all of your post, except the bit about funding.
Whilst 9k is more than delivery cost of some Arts degrees, it does not go anyway near covering the cost of the STE part of the STEM courses, and does not take into consideration the ongoing costs of maintaining and enhancing University infrastructure (buildings, faculty resources, IT, etc.).
In the past (before fees came in) these costs were mostly covered by one-off tranches from Central Government - all these now needs to be met by student fees (or bonds raised against the future income from Student Fees). Also, Universities pays VAT on most of the goods and services they receive, but can only recover a small percentage of VAT, via partial exemption recovery rules, which puts a 20% loading on most purchases.
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I'd like to know the true cost of tuition as opposed to the rest. Osem Jnr hardly ever saw his lecturers and did 90% of the work on his own or in a classroom setting with minimal input from his university. His third year was spent working in a school 4 days per week with a few hours set aside on Friday for admin/uni stuff related to the course. He paid £9k for that particular privilege most of which wasn't going towards tuition IMHO. At least he has a job, however.
The answer to this problem is clearly not straightforward but I think many students are getting royally ripped off in what has very quickly become a business and they're getting really very poor value for money in many cases. These new concessions are going to make precious little difference to the reality students face but we all know that what Labour promised prior to the election was just so much pie in the sky. The whole thing is a complete mess and the cost of administering it all is going to mushroom out of control. At some point there has to be a complete rethink but where will that leave the countless thousands who're already up to their necks in debt?
---------- Post added at 11:01 ---------- Previous post was at 10:57 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by denphone
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Nah, it's a poisoned chalice, only an idiot would want the job right now.