Report finds for every £1 of public money invested in the higher education sector across the UK, £14 is put back into the economy

17 comments

1. Nice try buddy, I’m not paying back those student loans!

2. “The total economic impact of the UK higher education sector on the UK economy is more than £265 billion.

   This includes the impact of:

   Research and knowledge exchange: £63 billion
   Impact of teaching and learning: £95 billion
   Impact of educational exports: £37 billion
   Impact of higher education provider (university) expenditure: £70 billion”

   When you get into it there’s a lot of nebulous words like “support” the issue with this sort of stuff is that if you did it for every sector you’d double count benefits. My job is possible because of a lot of different types of government spending and to what extent is that just my degree and the public money that funded it? If there were fewer degree holders, would employers react to that in a way that would negate any downside?

   Really it’s only the bottom 2 numbers that are countable.

3. Its amazing how things that are supposedly wildly profitable need such high amounts of government support

4. The UK already has world class institutions and talent. The issue is that once they make it big they go to the US.

   The problem isnt education funding. What’s needed is deep structural reform that would create the kind of ecosystem that entrepreneurs would want to invest in long term.

5. I’m struggling to understand how this applies to my cousins who got terrible A level results but got accepted by some bottom ranked universities anyway to do Sociology and Business Studies – they are now laden with debt and in jobs which are nowhere near graduate level (retail and other works in a local pub). There are hundreds of thousands of others in a similar position who were hoodwinked by crap quality universities who just want the fees (paid for by government borrowing) and of course the profit seeking student accommodation companies who build crap quality cramped accomodation and charge insane rents which are also paid for by government borrowing (i.e. student loans)

   So sure I’m guessing the greedy university bosses and accomodation landlords are super happy with the money being transferred to them from student loans which will never get paid back (so it’s basically the government printing money and bearing all the risk}…

6. People are clapping like seals for the collapse of the UK’s last great national industry for which we are globally renown and attracts a totally ungodly sum of money into parts of the country that, without their local universities, would have basically nothing going on and no real source of mass employment.

   As a former academic I can barely begin to describe how fucking appalling working conditions have become and how absurdly tight budgets now are. My last employer can’t even afford to put on coffee and tea for events any more lol…

   I don’t get the attitudes in this country. We find we’re good at something and then the immediate response is somewhere between “how do we exploit this for absolutely maximum national and corporate profits at the expense of the workforce” and “how do we tear this all down so the workers involved don’t get a feeling like they’re too far above their station?”

   Its depressing as fuck man, as I get into my 30s I can barely stand living here any more, I just don’t get the culture. I feel like an alien in my own country and its not even fucking immigrants its all our own native chuds who want us all to be crabs in a bucket with a nice lordly character above us blessing us with their warm piss.

7. How would you even begin to work this out with so many variables?

8. It was very noble and selfless of the UK University sector to commission an econometric report that showed the nation received a 1400% return on public investment in the UK University sector.

   One wonders why they aren’t patriotic enough having stumbled on these pyramid scheme like returns to recommend the UK Government to bet all the pension funds on pumping redbrick universities full of enough cash to make a Russian Oligarch blush.

   Do they just hate money? Or is that payback ratio obvious horseshit baked into an econometric model that was reverse engineered from the outcome the funders desired?

9. I’m guessing most people here haven’t read the 85 page document accompanying the article…

   I wouldn’t take the headline at face value

10. Report commissioned by universities finds you should give them more money

11. I don’t understand this, doesn’t the UK have a huge overqualification problem?

12. Imagine charging international students over £20k pa for a history degree BA and unironically holding your hand out for more money 

13. The trouble is that our system of government produces self-interested politicians who lack the willingness to make long-term decisions that won’t benefit the country until they’re long out of power.

    They’re in the pocket of corporate interests that benefit from their short-term decisions.

    This is literally the point of neoliberalism: make money for the rich, now! Have the press lie about how this is also great for poor people, then when it doesn’t work, blame the failure of the policy on the next government, or immigrants, or the disabled. Rinse and repeat.

    All the reports in the world can’t change that, no matter how much sense they make.

14. Research by a Uni, it must be true. The reality is that most Uni degrees are crap, and not even worth the paper they are written on.

15. Yet somehow we let our politicians tell us we should make our own children pay to be highly educated. Having great engineers, scientists etc is so woke now though.

16. Good job we had 14 years investing in higher education then!!!. Oh wait….

17. Funny that lol. We needed a report to confirm what 400 years of ed establishments already knew.

Comments are closed.