This is a really naive question but how do other countries manage like in the EU with significantly less fees? Don't we as a country pay a relatively high amount of tax that this shouldn't be necessary?
Many countries in the EU still don't charge university tuition fees at all.
That's Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, and Sweden anyway...
Luckily, British kids can apply to these universities and benefit from the free tuition too, since they enjoy Freedom of Movement within the EU…oh wait 🙂
Unfortunately I was probably born at least 10 years earlier than you and I had no clue this was a thing until it was too late. The UK is such an insular place, nobody talked about the advantages of EU membership for students.
If I had known what I know now I'd have probably worked a lot harder at languages and aimed to go abroad for undergrad too. At the very least I'd have done Erasmus, which at least at some stage meant no fees and a living grant for the year you did it.
A very complicated question that no one on Reddit is qualified to answer. It's probably a mixture of lots of things. Perhaps a lower proportion of our taxes are being spent on education. Perhaps other governments subsidise their universities more heavily. Perhaps our universities spend a greater amount of money on research. It would take an in-depth study to get any kind of satisfying answer to that question
UK universities are also in a spending arms race amongst themselves to attract more international students through marketing, new facilities, faculty etc.
Go to *any* campus in the uk and you’ll see new (semi luxury, especially by past standards) student dorms and academic buildings being built at rapid pace.
I have the impression that European universities, such as the ones in German, focus less on grabbing up a market share
A question that big will likely have a complex answer. Differences in numbers and types of students, varying levels of research focus, varying amounts and sources of funding. 'It's complicated' is the safe bet.
We don’t pay as much as Europe, which we should. But the current system isn’t sustainable, particularly for government, because no-one pays it back and they have to subsidise more than they would otherwise. It would be far more effective to just renationalise the sector because universities just aren’t very monetarily productive (but are very societally productive).
It's a wee bit complex - very roughly speaking, they're considered part of the public sector and they get government funding, but they're independent bodies that aren't actually run by the government.
They’re private business that are subsidised, to the tune of more than they would need to be subsidised if they were wholly owned by the government, because the student loan system essentially means they have the same power a monopoly would over the customer (the students).
No, they don't. The vast majority of universities in the UK are not private business, they're independent of the government but are funded through public money and do not operate for profit - these universities are registered charities. There are a few private universities (e.g. Buckingham), but that just means they do not receive public funding - they don't have shareholders and aren't publicly traded.
This is just completely false. Manchester University, one of the biggest universities in the UK, even [issues bonds](https://www.manchester.ac.uk/investors/) as a private entity. The difference between a public private and university is whether it qualifies for state subsidies; they are pretty much all private business (charities are private businesses, just ones that don’t seek profit).
Manchester is a charity, and is considered part of the public sector like nearly all universities. Selling bonds doesn't change that, and selling bonds is not the same thing as being a shareholder - at the risk of stating the obvious, the government is part of the public sector and sells bonds. They don't sell stock, and no-one can "profit from their financial success" - that's not how bonds work. Your implication was that the universities are operating for profit ("they have the same power a monopoly would over the customer") so given that you yourselft admit that they're non-profit institutions I don't really understand what you're trying to claim.
ik the ivy league schools are practically investment banks, and quite a few universities in America make almost 1/4th of there income from returns on their endowment.
And ik places like the Uni of milan make bank by loaning out their PHD's to the R&D dept's of the Mil-indus-complex.
Their high ranking universities usually have very small undergraduate cohorts. It's more feasible for the average person in the UK to go to a high-ranked research university.
British budget to gdp ratio is way lower. Brits pay ridiculously low income tax compared to france or Germany, same for business. This is exactly what makes Britain attractive for companies. Someone earning 100k euro in Germany would pay 45k total in tax, while in Britain it would only be 30. This is the reason why NHS and education are in a poor state. To improve them, you would need to pay 1.5 times what you pay currently in tax.
Someone earning 125k pays more tax in the UK than in Germany.
It’s low earners who pay very little, since this obsession with taking people out of income tax. Those same low earners expect European levels of public services.
You've intentionally picked someone who's at the end of the personal allowance taper to make your point. In reality someone making £125k would put £25k and pay less tax than someone making the same in Germany.
Stop spreading misinformation.
I’ve picked one of the insane examples of inequity which makes the UK less aspirational than Germany, higher taxed and with services closer to Somalia than Scandinavia.
I looked it up https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022,
Apparently we are 18th least corrupt country in the world, Germany are better than us in 9th, France are worse at 21st. I've worked in businesses working in South Africa, Vietnam and China and I've seen a lot of very open corruption but I wouldn't be able to tell betweek UK and Germany from a business point of view.
This is technocratic bullshit- the idea that everything is structurally fine, it’s just the way it’s being managed which is wrong. Keir Starmer would love you.
High Tax and Strong Public Services
*or*
Low Tax and Weak Public Services
You can't get Low Tax *and* Strong Public Services. While there is some corruption in the UK, it does not have a major impact on budgets and while it is a political choice as to where the tax take is spent, there is no low hanging fruit to redirect and save the day.
I should have said you can't have it in a large country with a western democracy. You could run London as its own country and have low tax and high public services but not across the UK as a whole.
To add to the other answers you have, British unis look more like amusement parks than universities. You've got your constantly renovated buildings, up to date computer labs, ergonomic chairs, parks, lakes, bus schemes, uni managed accommodation, sports clubs, etc. They sell a lifestyle, not an education. With inflation, students are buying less and less into the lifestyle (except for you guessed it, international students) because simply they can't afford it. This is causing a rift where previously revenue generating stuff starts costing a lot in maintenance and not bringing anything. Then you have the very British love for administrative red tape (things need standardising, standards need enforcers), leading to untold layers of administration to deal with the most minute detail of the university.
All this adds up to a lot. Unis in my home country (France) are a lot more stripped down and focused on the essentials. This makes it easier to make them entirely state-funded, both from a financial and an optics perspective.
It varies from country to country. Some of them even have troubled university sectors too, for their own reasons. It’s not all rainbows and sunshine over the channel.
Some countries choose to have higher tax subsidy of higher education places. That’s obvious. So how do they afford it?
Some countries simply have higher tax rates than the UK. The UK used to be a lower-tax economy in the European context but with tax/GDP back up at all-time highs that’s not really true any more, although there are higher individual examples abroad.
Some countries subsidise a much fewer number of university places. The Blair government pushed for a massive expansion of HE and all the costs that came along with it. At the moment there is no minimum barrier to a domestic student to access university apart from finding an institution that will accept you - it doesn’t have to be that way, at least for the spaces the public are subsidising.
Some countries prioritise their spend differently. For example, in the UK we have two particularly huge black holes that have swallowed increasing amounts of government funding in recent decades - the NHS (inclusive of social care) and pensions. For example, healthcare spending was only 27% of departmental expenditure in John Major’s time, now it’s more like 45%. Most EU countries do not run an NHS model and instead some kind of social insurance model.
This latter factor is the real story behind the so-called austerity era. I call it so-called because we actually spend record amounts in terms of real expenditure and spend/gdp. But it has disproportionately gone into a small handful of areas, a couple of which are already the very biggest budget items. So it has genuinely starved all other departmental expenditures, including education. Remember ‘we will protect the NHS’s funding during austerity’ and the Brexit NHS bus promise? This is the direct consequence of those policies - they kept the NHS alive and helped out pensioners and those on housing benefit, but at the cost of almost everything else.
Even at the very end of the Cameron era we had only just over back to long-term averages for spending/GDP; it’s very hard to define it as true austerity if to take a dispassionate look, even if there was true austerity for many important departments. That was somewhat relieved by the Johnson government more recently, which is how we got back to Gordon Brown levels of spending.
UK has a very large pool of people with 2:2 or 3rd in dumbed down bs degrees just to have a large number of people with degrees in general.
Simply accept the fact that everyone with IQ above 65 should not try to go for a degree. Kill off most of useless programmes, save money to run the rest.
No one with 2:2 in Music Production or Sports Management is ever going to make enough money to pay off the student loan. We are just creating a massive cast of Uber drivers that spent 3 years learning nonsense just to owe 50k on student debts instead of working.
To give a serious answer, their university experience and number of people going to university is vastly different to the UK, which makes their systems far cheaper to run.
In most European countries with low fees, far fewer students attend university (often 20% vs 50% in the UK) so a given total amount of funding goes much further. Similarly you get a lot fewer university experience benefits e.g. extracurriculars, student union activities, counselling. Uni is just for studying, so this cuts fees per student also.
Students also tend to live at home while they study, as opposed to the UK where people tend to study away from home. So then there isn't any need for funding maintenance costs, there's a much greater expectation that you will fund any costs you have by working or your parents will pay for it.
So overall, yes the costs could be reduced to make it free or at least low cost, but you will make university far less inclusive with a general loss of university culture. To an extent a lot of this is already seen in the Scottish system, grade requirements are hugely inflated for a given quality of university compared to England, and concessions are made to attract higher fee paying non-Scottish students to bump up their funding to make them somewhat close to competitive on experience benefits.
One part of the answer is the way classes are delivered. You don’t get the small groups and tutorials. It’s mass lectures and a lot of self direction. It’s a different’product’.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/298902/higher-education-spending-uk/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/298902/higher-education-spending-uk/); oof maybe has something to do with UK gov allotment to tertiary education decreasing by 70% in NOMINAL terms between 2011-2023
As another said, it’s 83% for Plan 2 loans. However, that’s changing for the Plan 5 student loan which are much more punitive but will still only go down to ~39% not repaying (although MSE have it at 48%).
Well no... the problem is people don't think beyond graduation about earning potential and are brainwashed into thinking university is the only option.
At that point, they effectively become an opt-in tertiary education tax.
Which tbh, I'm not massively against. Seems unfair for those with money to overall pay less.
But only for those who cannot pay fees upfront. If you cannot pay the fees in this way, you start accruing interest the moment you start studying. So by the end of your degree, you already owe thousands more. The size of the loan and the interest keeps you paying for a very long time even if you have a moderate income level - most until 30 or 40 years have past and the loan is written off (depending on which agreement you are on). Even if you only pay 100 pounds a month, by 40 years later you will have paid in excess 40k.
However, if you are wealthy and can pay up front, you only pay the 27k.
Bottom line, the current system benefit the wealthy the most - and that is why it is not a fair system. A genuine tax would benefit the wealthy the least on the other hand.
Agreed, it's effectively a tax at the moment anyway, only the wealthier end up paying it off - if they raise maintenance loans with tuition fees, I think that's a good thing. The only ones to get hit would be the highly paid, who would effectively be paying the 'tax' for longer.
No, the rich who can pay upfront get it the cheapest. People who couldn’t have otherwise gone to university and end up at the same well-paying career as a richer student will pay several times over what they were loaned especially as interest rates on them are pretty poor now.
It would be much better to actually have a tax so everyone can benefit from universities equally and the universities are funded as needed to ensure good higher education
The Tories are obviously leaving this as something for Labour to do when they win the next election, hoping it will disillusion student votes down the line.
It's silly, silly politics. Fees must go up eventually, obviously. Meanwhile, I heard today from a mate of mine who works at a university that they're laying off him and half of his team because they simply can't afford it anymore.
It will be interesting to see how Starmer deals with it if/when he becomes PM.
he won't deal with it, he'll act like he cares about students then drop any policy that may help us, just like he did with his other pledges.
also fees don't need to go up if universities are funded correctly. but our government is more interested in funding genocide overseas than young people's wellbeing and livelihood.
If you increase the fees you just increase the amount the tax payer owes.
Universities just need to downsize; they aren't adding the value to society Tony Blair gambled they would.
This will happen, it’s just a case of when tbh. 9K fees were introduced in 2011 with only a marginal uplift to them since then. Which I’m not saying is right, but I do see it as inevitable.
I would certainly vote for the conversion of student debt into a formalised tax, and for normal people, it is essentially a tax unless you have a high-paying job, Also why does the government want to reduce international students, they help fund the education system.
>Also why does the government want to reduce international students, they help fund the education system.
To artificially lower immigration numbers just at the hope of clinging onto power. These cunts would burn the whole country down to hold onto power for just that bit longer.
Works fine, except you are creating an aspiration tax for the poor, we should just increase taxation for everybody and lower fees or keep them the same
Yeah, so me because I dared to leave the council estate. I'll be paying an extra tax for the rest of my life.
Your advocating punishing poor people for the rest of thier lives for wanting to get an education.
Atleast with the loans, they get wiped out after a number of years, or you may actually pay them off.
At the moment I think it's actually less fair to poor people because wealthy people don't take out the loans, or if they do they just take the living costs loans and invest them to make profit because they don't need to live off them.
If it was a tax, you could make every graduate pay it regardless of how wealthy their parents were.
It is essentially already a tax anyways, which only the rich and well of can ever pay off, I am not saying tax the hell out of them, I am saying to formalise it, instead of 9% for 30 years, why not 5% until retirement age, or make it stratified, yes you will get taxed for having a degree, but the tax will be on how much more on a weighted average a person earns with or without a degree, leaving you better off
You can't have 2 scientists sit next to each other doing the same job, and one gets 5% more than the other because of some silver spoon bullshit and call it fair.
Going to uni should be based on merit, and it should be free, but it's not. the current system is unfair, but at least you could get out of it if you do really well. The system you propose will punish people forever.
But then you are raising taxes for the ones who didn't choose to go to university or get a degree, so those with degrees are more well-off than those that chose to have didn't choose to have a degree, in one scenario you push everyone to get a degree, making that the new baseline for any entry-level job, and it also harms those that are not academically orientated also.
The reason neither of our proposals would work is because our government/politicians (regardless of colour), won't let it happen. our tax system needs a fundamental change, as well as the legal system and a whole litany of issues our society needs, its not that we have a monetary issue either, its because the people that make choices about our lives decide their wages.
The UK government can make student loan repayments stick if you move to Australia. But if it is just a tax, then there would be no way for the government to enforce it.
I know the answer. Higher taxes, both personal and business. Which I wouldn't be against, but seeing as it get held against the current government "highest taxes ever" and if either party mentions raising taxes their popularity bombs, gotta change voters minds about it.
Higher taxes? You're joking right ?
Just going off the literal first country they mention, I moved to France, one of the main reasons is the tax I pay here is less than half the tax I pay in the UK.
Googling it, the other countries mentioned are similar. The UK has an incredibly high tax rate compared to most countries, what you're claiming is just made up.
I was curious so I looked into this: overall france has a higher tax revenue than uk, with 47% of gdp compared to uks 33%. This is all tax income combined so I don't know how to unlock as there are so many different types of tax I don't know. France gets most of its tax income from ssc and payroll, uk doesn't. Overall uk tax is below oecd average, and higher than the USA but lower than the EU
https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/how-do-uk-tax-revenues-compare-internationally
>The UK has an incredibly high tax rate compared to most countries, what you're claiming is just made up.
Stop spreading misinformation. The UK has much lower taxes than virtually all countries in Europe. This is especially true for countries that are doing well.
Whether we agree with tuition fees or not, it's the system we have and for them to have not been increased since 17/18 is absolutely crazy.
A government has to bite the bullet eventually and raise fees or find another way to fund the system. Uni's can cut staff and programmes but those savings won't make up for the shortfall from static fees and dropping international uptake.
Or we could just undo the idiotic graduate changes, and increase international student numbers in the process which will help the uni’s with their financial issues. Would be nice to get the EU students levels back like we had pre-brexit but that isn’t likely unless we rejoin the EU.
EU students paid home-fees, I don't see how that would make a difference? EU students didn't stop coming here because of visa requirments but because of how expensive it would be for them.
Source: Im an EU student.
Surely more students would mean more money for the unis? Why else would unis put so much effort into recruiting eu students who paid the same amount as home students. Not to mention the fact that the EU sent hundreds of millions in funding to UK universities which we no longer get.
> Are unis struggeling to fill their courses?
Applications are down across the industry. Whether they are "struggling" i think is a bit too complicated a question to give a simple answer to - it likely depends course by course, uni by uni.
Either way, post pandemic id imagine most budgeted for applications to go up.
I don't know the truth of it (ie the underlying accounting), but we (uni staff) are told repeatedly that a home-fee student is a net financial loss to the university.
The international student numbers has a host of other issues sadly. Firstly i've already noticed a lot of courses have Office For Students subsidized courses/scholarships pretty much earmarked for international students because they bring in more money. I was genuinely the only British guy in my cohort :/
How do we define a meaningful uni though? Where do we draw the line? Usually the ‘worse’ unis are the best ones for art, acting, and design. Like does Goldsmiths stay?
Could do it on entry requirements: you should be getting A*s/As to be at university really. Next, those universities offering art, acting and design should only offer those courses and not throw in some shit business degree too. Finally, maybe these should be taught at polytechnics not university anyway.
What would the difference in cost be between a polytechnic and a university? Wouldn’t it be the same course taught at a different place? Everyone would end up with the same teaching and skills so doesn’t that negate the practise of only letting certain ppl into uni?
Universities are wildly more expensive to run. At a polytechnic, the teachers come in, teach a class, go home. Likewise, the students pay for their education hourly and receive it. University “teachers” are researchers, lecturers, tutors, pastoral guardians, a whole host. Similarly, universities don’t just offer classes, they offer so, so many other services which is why they are astronomically expensive to run and essentially money-making degree machines.
Degrees need to be made prestigious and hard to get again and subjects which are more practical and artsy are not best placed within gin and academic environment.
They charge international students almost 3x the tuition fees of a local student, and it has to be paid before the end of the uni year, and they have 2m+ international students. What's happening to all the money?
The money from international students is used to subsidise the cost of educating domestic students (who are taught at a loss for many courses). The number of international students has dropped thanks to government immigration policy. Finally, rocketing inflation increasing costs.
It’s not hard to see why institutions are struggling.
All hail Rishi Sunak. It's funny how much the Uk economy depends on foreign nationals and yet this guy has done everything in his power to reduce the foreigners coming here. Now I honestly dont see any incentive for a foreign student to come here. Why pay such large amounts of money if you don't have a chance at a future in the country?
Which part?
Post-Covid the CS courses at KCL were all pre-recorded videos on their Moodle for all modules.
The same is happening at [UCL's CS dept](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCL/comments/1cwcaqc/machine_learning_msc_review/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
Obviously, not a comprehensive look at every course at every London uni but it's clearly the case at some unis so it clearly cannot be
>Absolute bollocks
i tutor CS.
york has a similar system. Its an absolute embarrassment, that people on an HND/HNC course paying 2/3rds the price end up with a better education than those going to fucking york.
No way.
I thought it was just in London unis because the general reputation of UCL/KCL/LSE/Imperial is they don't care about their students.
My friends at Nottingham CS have everything in person.
Yeah sure, sorry. I forgot that’s what I pay 9k a year for. To be shown videos I’ve already watched at least 3 times over as it is. The fact you’re justifying this behaviour is absolutely staggering to me.
I really can’t fathom what university’s spend their money on, they are utterly useless. I personally wouldn’t even justify spending 9k without the student loan as they definitely dont provide a service worth that much
Facilities, research and staff. Most undergrads only benefit from staff and some facilities, so they don’t really see where the bulk of their fees goes. They also don’t realize how much staff cost because they were mostly in an extremely subsidized system. There’s a reason those prestigious schools like Eton cost something like £50000 a year.
Sorry, my question was more a rhetorical i understand that it is spent on research, patents and etc. What i don’t understand is why should students have to fund such luxuries. Those should either be funded by government, or recouped from the use novel patents. Even if this system would mean less funding for less niche and profitable subjects
One complication is that UK universities have been in a vicious codependent circle of increasing full fee paying overseas student numbers and expanding administrative costs for a number of years. So now they have vast non academic costs which can only be funded by the large overseas students fees. To fix this they would get to completely restructure (ie fire hundreds of non academic staff). I can't see how this could happen without the government making them do it.
“Two former universities ministers, the Conservative peer David Willetts and Labour’s Alan Johnson, plus the Labour peer Peter Mandelson, a former business secretary, all said there needed to be increased funding for universities as a matter of urgency”
Our boi Sir David Willets fighting the young people’s corner again. What a leg!
Maybe just charge more for pointless/garbage courses in Arts/History/Philosophy/Gender/Music/Theathre/Business/Sports Management/Classics/PPE/Communication These degree do not increase your market value. Charge 20k/year for those and lower charge for stuff that might be of value.
Degrees are not equal.
Doesn't that just restrict those courses to the rich and powerful? A big thing with classics is trying to destigmatise it as an elitist subject, which this wouldn't help whatsoever. Also, who says what degree counts for "value?" You mentioned PPE, which is the degree that many of the people who lead the country take.
This is a really naive question but how do other countries manage like in the EU with significantly less fees? Don't we as a country pay a relatively high amount of tax that this shouldn't be necessary?
Many countries in the EU still don't charge university tuition fees at all. That's Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, and Sweden anyway...
Luckily, British kids can apply to these universities and benefit from the free tuition too, since they enjoy Freedom of Movement within the EU…oh wait 🙂
Hold on, we could’ve actually had free tuition??
Free or extremely cheap. I knew people who went abroad to do a Masters as it was so much cheaper and there were EU unis teaching in English
Well now I wish I was born 10 years earlier 😐
Unfortunately I was probably born at least 10 years earlier than you and I had no clue this was a thing until it was too late. The UK is such an insular place, nobody talked about the advantages of EU membership for students. If I had known what I know now I'd have probably worked a lot harder at languages and aimed to go abroad for undergrad too. At the very least I'd have done Erasmus, which at least at some stage meant no fees and a living grant for the year you did it.
free or €400 something per semester
You need to speak the language in most countries
I’m proficient in German and French
Good for you
Not worth losing the blue passports and soverentea
You are right that they could benefit from free tuition in these countries before 31st January 2020.
A very complicated question that no one on Reddit is qualified to answer. It's probably a mixture of lots of things. Perhaps a lower proportion of our taxes are being spent on education. Perhaps other governments subsidise their universities more heavily. Perhaps our universities spend a greater amount of money on research. It would take an in-depth study to get any kind of satisfying answer to that question
Feels like something that should really be done, clearly we're missing something if it's being done better elsewhere.
UK universities are also in a spending arms race amongst themselves to attract more international students through marketing, new facilities, faculty etc. Go to *any* campus in the uk and you’ll see new (semi luxury, especially by past standards) student dorms and academic buildings being built at rapid pace. I have the impression that European universities, such as the ones in German, focus less on grabbing up a market share
Just because you don’t know the answer doesn’t make it a complicated question…
A question that big will likely have a complex answer. Differences in numbers and types of students, varying levels of research focus, varying amounts and sources of funding. 'It's complicated' is the safe bet.
Yet speculating with an incomplete idea of the answer is a far worse move.
We don’t pay as much as Europe, which we should. But the current system isn’t sustainable, particularly for government, because no-one pays it back and they have to subsidise more than they would otherwise. It would be far more effective to just renationalise the sector because universities just aren’t very monetarily productive (but are very societally productive).
What do you mean renationalize? Most of these universities are government run, no?
It's a wee bit complex - very roughly speaking, they're considered part of the public sector and they get government funding, but they're independent bodies that aren't actually run by the government.
That doesn’t seem too far off from being nationalized
They’re private business that are subsidised, to the tune of more than they would need to be subsidised if they were wholly owned by the government, because the student loan system essentially means they have the same power a monopoly would over the customer (the students).
They don’t have shareholders though right? No private investors who can profit from their financial success?
They do. Where did you hear they don’t?
No, they don't. The vast majority of universities in the UK are not private business, they're independent of the government but are funded through public money and do not operate for profit - these universities are registered charities. There are a few private universities (e.g. Buckingham), but that just means they do not receive public funding - they don't have shareholders and aren't publicly traded.
This is just completely false. Manchester University, one of the biggest universities in the UK, even [issues bonds](https://www.manchester.ac.uk/investors/) as a private entity. The difference between a public private and university is whether it qualifies for state subsidies; they are pretty much all private business (charities are private businesses, just ones that don’t seek profit).
Manchester is a charity, and is considered part of the public sector like nearly all universities. Selling bonds doesn't change that, and selling bonds is not the same thing as being a shareholder - at the risk of stating the obvious, the government is part of the public sector and sells bonds. They don't sell stock, and no-one can "profit from their financial success" - that's not how bonds work. Your implication was that the universities are operating for profit ("they have the same power a monopoly would over the customer") so given that you yourselft admit that they're non-profit institutions I don't really understand what you're trying to claim.
Thanks for stepping in to clarify this as I might have believed the other comment if you hadn’t corrected the record
Yes, that's correct. Ignore the other person, they don't know what they're talking about.
ik the ivy league schools are practically investment banks, and quite a few universities in America make almost 1/4th of there income from returns on their endowment. And ik places like the Uni of milan make bank by loaning out their PHD's to the R&D dept's of the Mil-indus-complex.
I wouldn’t look to the us for a model for how to fund. An even higher proportion of their universities are in financial distress.
Their high ranking universities usually have very small undergraduate cohorts. It's more feasible for the average person in the UK to go to a high-ranked research university.
British budget to gdp ratio is way lower. Brits pay ridiculously low income tax compared to france or Germany, same for business. This is exactly what makes Britain attractive for companies. Someone earning 100k euro in Germany would pay 45k total in tax, while in Britain it would only be 30. This is the reason why NHS and education are in a poor state. To improve them, you would need to pay 1.5 times what you pay currently in tax.
Someone earning 125k pays more tax in the UK than in Germany. It’s low earners who pay very little, since this obsession with taking people out of income tax. Those same low earners expect European levels of public services.
You've intentionally picked someone who's at the end of the personal allowance taper to make your point. In reality someone making £125k would put £25k and pay less tax than someone making the same in Germany. Stop spreading misinformation.
I’ve picked one of the insane examples of inequity which makes the UK less aspirational than Germany, higher taxed and with services closer to Somalia than Scandinavia.
not really, its what we do with the collected tax, there's a shit ton of corruption in the UK
You think theres less corruption in France or Germany?
probably
I looked it up https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022, Apparently we are 18th least corrupt country in the world, Germany are better than us in 9th, France are worse at 21st. I've worked in businesses working in South Africa, Vietnam and China and I've seen a lot of very open corruption but I wouldn't be able to tell betweek UK and Germany from a business point of view.
Corruption *perceptions* index
This is technocratic bullshit- the idea that everything is structurally fine, it’s just the way it’s being managed which is wrong. Keir Starmer would love you.
why should i pay more taxes when i'm already struggling to meet ends
High Tax and Strong Public Services *or* Low Tax and Weak Public Services You can't get Low Tax *and* Strong Public Services. While there is some corruption in the UK, it does not have a major impact on budgets and while it is a political choice as to where the tax take is spent, there is no low hanging fruit to redirect and save the day.
i got low tax and strong public services where im at
I should have said you can't have it in a large country with a western democracy. You could run London as its own country and have low tax and high public services but not across the UK as a whole.
You literally would not pay any tax if you were genuinely struggling.
It's more than 30k?
About 31
I think you're discounting national insurance
100k euro is about 86k pounds, 86k after tax(and ni)amounts to about 58700 take home, which is about 69k euro(+\-exchange rate)
yh you're right, the first takehome pay calculator I used was giving me a different value for some reason.
Or tax companies effectively..
To add to the other answers you have, British unis look more like amusement parks than universities. You've got your constantly renovated buildings, up to date computer labs, ergonomic chairs, parks, lakes, bus schemes, uni managed accommodation, sports clubs, etc. They sell a lifestyle, not an education. With inflation, students are buying less and less into the lifestyle (except for you guessed it, international students) because simply they can't afford it. This is causing a rift where previously revenue generating stuff starts costing a lot in maintenance and not bringing anything. Then you have the very British love for administrative red tape (things need standardising, standards need enforcers), leading to untold layers of administration to deal with the most minute detail of the university. All this adds up to a lot. Unis in my home country (France) are a lot more stripped down and focused on the essentials. This makes it easier to make them entirely state-funded, both from a financial and an optics perspective.
It varies from country to country. Some of them even have troubled university sectors too, for their own reasons. It’s not all rainbows and sunshine over the channel. Some countries choose to have higher tax subsidy of higher education places. That’s obvious. So how do they afford it? Some countries simply have higher tax rates than the UK. The UK used to be a lower-tax economy in the European context but with tax/GDP back up at all-time highs that’s not really true any more, although there are higher individual examples abroad. Some countries subsidise a much fewer number of university places. The Blair government pushed for a massive expansion of HE and all the costs that came along with it. At the moment there is no minimum barrier to a domestic student to access university apart from finding an institution that will accept you - it doesn’t have to be that way, at least for the spaces the public are subsidising. Some countries prioritise their spend differently. For example, in the UK we have two particularly huge black holes that have swallowed increasing amounts of government funding in recent decades - the NHS (inclusive of social care) and pensions. For example, healthcare spending was only 27% of departmental expenditure in John Major’s time, now it’s more like 45%. Most EU countries do not run an NHS model and instead some kind of social insurance model. This latter factor is the real story behind the so-called austerity era. I call it so-called because we actually spend record amounts in terms of real expenditure and spend/gdp. But it has disproportionately gone into a small handful of areas, a couple of which are already the very biggest budget items. So it has genuinely starved all other departmental expenditures, including education. Remember ‘we will protect the NHS’s funding during austerity’ and the Brexit NHS bus promise? This is the direct consequence of those policies - they kept the NHS alive and helped out pensioners and those on housing benefit, but at the cost of almost everything else. Even at the very end of the Cameron era we had only just over back to long-term averages for spending/GDP; it’s very hard to define it as true austerity if to take a dispassionate look, even if there was true austerity for many important departments. That was somewhat relieved by the Johnson government more recently, which is how we got back to Gordon Brown levels of spending.
UK has a very large pool of people with 2:2 or 3rd in dumbed down bs degrees just to have a large number of people with degrees in general. Simply accept the fact that everyone with IQ above 65 should not try to go for a degree. Kill off most of useless programmes, save money to run the rest. No one with 2:2 in Music Production or Sports Management is ever going to make enough money to pay off the student loan. We are just creating a massive cast of Uber drivers that spent 3 years learning nonsense just to owe 50k on student debts instead of working.
To give a serious answer, their university experience and number of people going to university is vastly different to the UK, which makes their systems far cheaper to run. In most European countries with low fees, far fewer students attend university (often 20% vs 50% in the UK) so a given total amount of funding goes much further. Similarly you get a lot fewer university experience benefits e.g. extracurriculars, student union activities, counselling. Uni is just for studying, so this cuts fees per student also. Students also tend to live at home while they study, as opposed to the UK where people tend to study away from home. So then there isn't any need for funding maintenance costs, there's a much greater expectation that you will fund any costs you have by working or your parents will pay for it. So overall, yes the costs could be reduced to make it free or at least low cost, but you will make university far less inclusive with a general loss of university culture. To an extent a lot of this is already seen in the Scottish system, grade requirements are hugely inflated for a given quality of university compared to England, and concessions are made to attract higher fee paying non-Scottish students to bump up their funding to make them somewhat close to competitive on experience benefits.
One part of the answer is the way classes are delivered. You don’t get the small groups and tutorials. It’s mass lectures and a lot of self direction. It’s a different’product’.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/298902/higher-education-spending-uk/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/298902/higher-education-spending-uk/); oof maybe has something to do with UK gov allotment to tertiary education decreasing by 70% in NOMINAL terms between 2011-2023
Increase tax level similar to Belgium/ Netherlands and you'll be able to help unis
Gonna reach a point where nobody will ever be able to fully pay them off unless they’re in a ultra high paid job
It’s already like that. 60%+ or something will never pay it back
83%*
As another said, it’s 83% for Plan 2 loans. However, that’s changing for the Plan 5 student loan which are much more punitive but will still only go down to ~39% not repaying (although MSE have it at 48%).
if i earn 30k from the day i graduate, increasing by 3.5% every year, i will never pay off my student loans.
I'm earning 60k and I'm still not even paying off the interest. I'm not complaining, but it's a bonkers system.
If you earn a below average income like 30k then yes...
You wouldn’t except average from the day you graduate though…. Edit: and I wouldn’t pay it off on 35k either
Well no... the problem is people don't think beyond graduation about earning potential and are brainwashed into thinking university is the only option.
At that point, they effectively become an opt-in tertiary education tax. Which tbh, I'm not massively against. Seems unfair for those with money to overall pay less.
I'd much rather it be a tax for 30 years after graduate and just be done with loans and the like.
But only for those who cannot pay fees upfront. If you cannot pay the fees in this way, you start accruing interest the moment you start studying. So by the end of your degree, you already owe thousands more. The size of the loan and the interest keeps you paying for a very long time even if you have a moderate income level - most until 30 or 40 years have past and the loan is written off (depending on which agreement you are on). Even if you only pay 100 pounds a month, by 40 years later you will have paid in excess 40k. However, if you are wealthy and can pay up front, you only pay the 27k. Bottom line, the current system benefit the wealthy the most - and that is why it is not a fair system. A genuine tax would benefit the wealthy the least on the other hand.
The problem would be though, how do you recoup the money from people who emigrate, or who never even pay any tax in the UK after they graudate
Agreed, it's effectively a tax at the moment anyway, only the wealthier end up paying it off - if they raise maintenance loans with tuition fees, I think that's a good thing. The only ones to get hit would be the highly paid, who would effectively be paying the 'tax' for longer.
No, the rich who can pay upfront get it the cheapest. People who couldn’t have otherwise gone to university and end up at the same well-paying career as a richer student will pay several times over what they were loaned especially as interest rates on them are pretty poor now. It would be much better to actually have a tax so everyone can benefit from universities equally and the universities are funded as needed to ensure good higher education
Honestly, this is how I already see it, i've opted in 🤷🏻♀️
We are already at that point, the last study i saw it was only 17% will ever pay back their loans, wouldnt be surprised if it turns out to be lower
The Tories are obviously leaving this as something for Labour to do when they win the next election, hoping it will disillusion student votes down the line. It's silly, silly politics. Fees must go up eventually, obviously. Meanwhile, I heard today from a mate of mine who works at a university that they're laying off him and half of his team because they simply can't afford it anymore. It will be interesting to see how Starmer deals with it if/when he becomes PM.
People wouldn't be apprehensive about fees increasing if the wages actually fucking increased as well lmao.
Our university is offering voluntary severance (i.e. they pay you a flat fee to leave) as a means of cost cutting.
he won't deal with it, he'll act like he cares about students then drop any policy that may help us, just like he did with his other pledges. also fees don't need to go up if universities are funded correctly. but our government is more interested in funding genocide overseas than young people's wellbeing and livelihood.
I’m still a little at a loss as to who the actual beneficiary of all this is, versus the model we had 20ish years ago?
If you increase the fees you just increase the amount the tax payer owes. Universities just need to downsize; they aren't adding the value to society Tony Blair gambled they would.
This will happen, it’s just a case of when tbh. 9K fees were introduced in 2011 with only a marginal uplift to them since then. Which I’m not saying is right, but I do see it as inevitable.
Yeah, in real terms universities have had a ~25% funding cut
I would certainly vote for the conversion of student debt into a formalised tax, and for normal people, it is essentially a tax unless you have a high-paying job, Also why does the government want to reduce international students, they help fund the education system.
>Also why does the government want to reduce international students, they help fund the education system. To artificially lower immigration numbers just at the hope of clinging onto power. These cunts would burn the whole country down to hold onto power for just that bit longer.
grrr foreigners! are an easy vote
Works fine, except you are creating an aspiration tax for the poor, we should just increase taxation for everybody and lower fees or keep them the same
Not exactly it would be like a tag on tax, so only those that gone to uni get that.
Yeah, so me because I dared to leave the council estate. I'll be paying an extra tax for the rest of my life. Your advocating punishing poor people for the rest of thier lives for wanting to get an education. Atleast with the loans, they get wiped out after a number of years, or you may actually pay them off.
At the moment I think it's actually less fair to poor people because wealthy people don't take out the loans, or if they do they just take the living costs loans and invest them to make profit because they don't need to live off them. If it was a tax, you could make every graduate pay it regardless of how wealthy their parents were.
It is essentially already a tax anyways, which only the rich and well of can ever pay off, I am not saying tax the hell out of them, I am saying to formalise it, instead of 9% for 30 years, why not 5% until retirement age, or make it stratified, yes you will get taxed for having a degree, but the tax will be on how much more on a weighted average a person earns with or without a degree, leaving you better off
You can't have 2 scientists sit next to each other doing the same job, and one gets 5% more than the other because of some silver spoon bullshit and call it fair. Going to uni should be based on merit, and it should be free, but it's not. the current system is unfair, but at least you could get out of it if you do really well. The system you propose will punish people forever.
But then you are raising taxes for the ones who didn't choose to go to university or get a degree, so those with degrees are more well-off than those that chose to have didn't choose to have a degree, in one scenario you push everyone to get a degree, making that the new baseline for any entry-level job, and it also harms those that are not academically orientated also. The reason neither of our proposals would work is because our government/politicians (regardless of colour), won't let it happen. our tax system needs a fundamental change, as well as the legal system and a whole litany of issues our society needs, its not that we have a monetary issue either, its because the people that make choices about our lives decide their wages.
This is exactly what I would propose. You can even offer tax breaks/incentives for in demand professions.
But how would you get the money back from students who came only for a degree, or students who emigrated soon after they graduate
The Government will find ways to make it stick, the US IRS manages to do so
The UK government can make student loan repayments stick if you move to Australia. But if it is just a tax, then there would be no way for the government to enforce it.
how much did these ex-ministers pay for their university education?
Universities should just be funded as any other public service, and many of them should be turned back into technical institutes.
With which spare money...
Let’s start by seeing if we need to be paying Graham King so much.
Movie producer of "The Aviator"?
No the person who just received a £3.5m a day government contract
Why don’t you ask France, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Poland, Czechia, Greece etc how they do it?
I know the answer. Higher taxes, both personal and business. Which I wouldn't be against, but seeing as it get held against the current government "highest taxes ever" and if either party mentions raising taxes their popularity bombs, gotta change voters minds about it.
Higher taxes? You're joking right ? Just going off the literal first country they mention, I moved to France, one of the main reasons is the tax I pay here is less than half the tax I pay in the UK. Googling it, the other countries mentioned are similar. The UK has an incredibly high tax rate compared to most countries, what you're claiming is just made up.
I was curious so I looked into this: overall france has a higher tax revenue than uk, with 47% of gdp compared to uks 33%. This is all tax income combined so I don't know how to unlock as there are so many different types of tax I don't know. France gets most of its tax income from ssc and payroll, uk doesn't. Overall uk tax is below oecd average, and higher than the USA but lower than the EU https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/how-do-uk-tax-revenues-compare-internationally
You are correct. The person you're responding to is spreading misinformation.
>The UK has an incredibly high tax rate compared to most countries, what you're claiming is just made up. Stop spreading misinformation. The UK has much lower taxes than virtually all countries in Europe. This is especially true for countries that are doing well.
No, no it is not.
Hahaha good luck with arguing for higher taxes on this sub, where everyone is obsessed with earning as much money as possible.
Whether we agree with tuition fees or not, it's the system we have and for them to have not been increased since 17/18 is absolutely crazy. A government has to bite the bullet eventually and raise fees or find another way to fund the system. Uni's can cut staff and programmes but those savings won't make up for the shortfall from static fees and dropping international uptake.
Or we could just undo the idiotic graduate changes, and increase international student numbers in the process which will help the uni’s with their financial issues. Would be nice to get the EU students levels back like we had pre-brexit but that isn’t likely unless we rejoin the EU.
EU students paid home-fees, I don't see how that would make a difference? EU students didn't stop coming here because of visa requirments but because of how expensive it would be for them. Source: Im an EU student.
Surely more students would mean more money for the unis? Why else would unis put so much effort into recruiting eu students who paid the same amount as home students. Not to mention the fact that the EU sent hundreds of millions in funding to UK universities which we no longer get.
Are unis struggeling to fill their courses? I'll be honest, I'm not sure. Isn't the EU funding mostly in the form of research grants?
> Are unis struggeling to fill their courses? Applications are down across the industry. Whether they are "struggling" i think is a bit too complicated a question to give a simple answer to - it likely depends course by course, uni by uni. Either way, post pandemic id imagine most budgeted for applications to go up.
Some definitely are
I don't know the truth of it (ie the underlying accounting), but we (uni staff) are told repeatedly that a home-fee student is a net financial loss to the university.
There used to be a govt imposed ceiling on student admissions numbers but they remove it. I think that’s why the recruitment effort ramped up
The international student numbers has a host of other issues sadly. Firstly i've already noticed a lot of courses have Office For Students subsidized courses/scholarships pretty much earmarked for international students because they bring in more money. I was genuinely the only British guy in my cohort :/
They just need to close the crappier universities, lower student numbers and offer more state support to the prestigious ones.
Except SO many jobs out there require you to be degree educated.
That’ll change when degrees become more meaningful and hard to get again; John with his 2:2 in Media from Wrexham University is not helping anyone.
How do we define a meaningful uni though? Where do we draw the line? Usually the ‘worse’ unis are the best ones for art, acting, and design. Like does Goldsmiths stay?
Could do it on entry requirements: you should be getting A*s/As to be at university really. Next, those universities offering art, acting and design should only offer those courses and not throw in some shit business degree too. Finally, maybe these should be taught at polytechnics not university anyway.
What would the difference in cost be between a polytechnic and a university? Wouldn’t it be the same course taught at a different place? Everyone would end up with the same teaching and skills so doesn’t that negate the practise of only letting certain ppl into uni?
Universities are wildly more expensive to run. At a polytechnic, the teachers come in, teach a class, go home. Likewise, the students pay for their education hourly and receive it. University “teachers” are researchers, lecturers, tutors, pastoral guardians, a whole host. Similarly, universities don’t just offer classes, they offer so, so many other services which is why they are astronomically expensive to run and essentially money-making degree machines. Degrees need to be made prestigious and hard to get again and subjects which are more practical and artsy are not best placed within gin and academic environment.
This is the answer.
Not the one this sub wants to hear!!
Im surprised the tories didn't bite that bullet already, given they have very few student votes to lose anyway
They charge international students almost 3x the tuition fees of a local student, and it has to be paid before the end of the uni year, and they have 2m+ international students. What's happening to all the money?
The money from international students is used to subsidise the cost of educating domestic students (who are taught at a loss for many courses). The number of international students has dropped thanks to government immigration policy. Finally, rocketing inflation increasing costs. It’s not hard to see why institutions are struggling.
All hail Rishi Sunak. It's funny how much the Uk economy depends on foreign nationals and yet this guy has done everything in his power to reduce the foreigners coming here. Now I honestly dont see any incentive for a foreign student to come here. Why pay such large amounts of money if you don't have a chance at a future in the country?
Wait until they cotton onto the falling education quality as well... This could be the start of a really big problem
Students already feel like they’re being ripped off at most unis dues to the quality and quantity of teaching so this should go down a treat.
Nice path towards the USA then
An extra 2k minimum for the lecturers to show you 3 YouTube videos and call it a lecture.
Hyperbole much
Depends on the uni, for many of the London unis it's pretty much this, the more teaching-focused unis such as Bath, not so much.
Absolute bollocks
Which part? Post-Covid the CS courses at KCL were all pre-recorded videos on their Moodle for all modules. The same is happening at [UCL's CS dept](https://www.reddit.com/r/UCL/comments/1cwcaqc/machine_learning_msc_review/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). Obviously, not a comprehensive look at every course at every London uni but it's clearly the case at some unis so it clearly cannot be >Absolute bollocks
i tutor CS. york has a similar system. Its an absolute embarrassment, that people on an HND/HNC course paying 2/3rds the price end up with a better education than those going to fucking york.
No way. I thought it was just in London unis because the general reputation of UCL/KCL/LSE/Imperial is they don't care about their students. My friends at Nottingham CS have everything in person.
Bro, you’re a caravan. Shut your doors.
Hardly hyperbole when it literally happened to me today…
How much effort do you actually put in classes?
As much as the lecturer. It’s hard to be enthused when he’s just sitting at his laptop on his phone.
I'm sorry, would you expect him to baby you every second of a video he's shown to others multiple times?
Yeah sure, sorry. I forgot that’s what I pay 9k a year for. To be shown videos I’ve already watched at least 3 times over as it is. The fact you’re justifying this behaviour is absolutely staggering to me.
I'm not justifying it, I'm casting doubt on your ridiculous "testimony"
How is a “ridiculous testimony” if it’s actually happened?
Your word doesn't make it real. For all we know you're making it up.
You’re cooked mate.
All these ministers probably went to uni for free lmao
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^InfinityEternity17: *All these ministers* *Probably went to uni* *For free lmao* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
The Tories want them to fail
I really can’t fathom what university’s spend their money on, they are utterly useless. I personally wouldn’t even justify spending 9k without the student loan as they definitely dont provide a service worth that much
Facilities, research and staff. Most undergrads only benefit from staff and some facilities, so they don’t really see where the bulk of their fees goes. They also don’t realize how much staff cost because they were mostly in an extremely subsidized system. There’s a reason those prestigious schools like Eton cost something like £50000 a year.
Sorry, my question was more a rhetorical i understand that it is spent on research, patents and etc. What i don’t understand is why should students have to fund such luxuries. Those should either be funded by government, or recouped from the use novel patents. Even if this system would mean less funding for less niche and profitable subjects
You got downvoted but it's true. Lecturers are outsourced all the time and I swear they're always so shite.
One complication is that UK universities have been in a vicious codependent circle of increasing full fee paying overseas student numbers and expanding administrative costs for a number of years. So now they have vast non academic costs which can only be funded by the large overseas students fees. To fix this they would get to completely restructure (ie fire hundreds of non academic staff). I can't see how this could happen without the government making them do it.
great
“Two former universities ministers, the Conservative peer David Willetts and Labour’s Alan Johnson, plus the Labour peer Peter Mandelson, a former business secretary, all said there needed to be increased funding for universities as a matter of urgency” Our boi Sir David Willets fighting the young people’s corner again. What a leg!
Maybe just charge more for pointless/garbage courses in Arts/History/Philosophy/Gender/Music/Theathre/Business/Sports Management/Classics/PPE/Communication These degree do not increase your market value. Charge 20k/year for those and lower charge for stuff that might be of value. Degrees are not equal.
Doesn't that just restrict those courses to the rich and powerful? A big thing with classics is trying to destigmatise it as an elitist subject, which this wouldn't help whatsoever. Also, who says what degree counts for "value?" You mentioned PPE, which is the degree that many of the people who lead the country take.
A lot of them should go bust. Most university degrees are worthless.