Yeah that’s what happens when you make access to uni a product to be bought for huge sums instead of a freely/cheaply accessible public good. Students are now customers and they want value for their tens of thousands of pounds.
I know a few lecturers who have been saying for years that expectations of them are being raised in line with costs.
And, tbh, it’s fair enough. You want to get what you paid for in all walks of life.
Why are students trying to make a hit record anyway instead of reading books or something?
Can’t blame them. How many students have paid tens of thousands for a zoom course these past 2 years
Considering annual tuition fees have been frozen at £9,250 for the past five years and the rate in which inflation is barreling, Universities are in a bit of a pickle…
Fees were capped at £9000 in 2012, in today’s money that be £11,324.01… across a campus of say 14,000 to 15,000 students that a lot of lost money (and increasing) each year.
Thing is, a free education is not a way to lower quality, on the contrary, you can raise the expectations as a university due to the low cost.
Part of the problem is the fact the charge is badged as “Tuition Fees” …. This makes people think it is just for the academic teaching. It should be more accurately badged as “University charge” as it encompasses libraries,equipment ,facilities etc.
I remember coughing up the fees and getting a timetable for around 12 hours a week – 1hr lecture, 2hr seminar, 4 modules – and one seminar teacher rarely showed up. If she did, she’d look out of the window airily asking what we thought of the book, then went ‘for a cigarette’ and didn’t return.
Other seminars were a hand wave and ‘talk amongst yourselves’ and one creepy guy who turned every lesson into a discussion on snuff porn. I still remember a session on Rossetti, a beautiful painting up on the projector, while he was going on about some video he’d watched. Freakin weirdo.
We were told the rest of the time we should ‘be reading ‘. If we complained we were called babies who wanted to be spoonfed. I was also called ‘a primary school baby’ for calling a professor ‘sir’.
Frankly I’ve engaged in deeper literary and artistic discourse on Reddit.
I knew students on better courses at better unis who were in full time, 9 to 5 sorta thing.
It wasn’t worth 9 grand. Certainly wasn’t worth 24. With students now being subjected to online only learning, without access to laboratories, facilities, theatres etc… It’s just ridiculous.
And I bet they get the same line of ‘well we won’t spoon-feed you, this isn’t primary school’ when they say anything. So what is it then – a building provided for independent study?
University is the biggest scam going. I know, I went.
Yes my Computer Science degree got me into a good paying job, but everything I learned in lectures. Was worse content then what was freely available on YOUTUBE. Literally just went for the piece of paper saying 1:1 on it.
I’ve spent nearly 20 grand now on Teams calls. I don’t have a solution I just want something to fucking change.
Edit: Couple that with half the university facilities STILL not being back to the standard they were in 2019 and I’m feeling completely ripped off.
When you let capitalism bleed into education and turn Degrees into products, this is what happens.
So I currently study in the Netherlands and my sister studies in Manchester. She is paying 4x what I am but I have infinitely more contact hours, more assignments, more feedback and more opportunities for personalised learning. I genuinely do not understand where the money is going. She will go for weeks with no assignments. It frankly looks boring.
Raise the cost, raise expectations.
Open University costs £19,368 total for a degree and you can complete it flexibly; usually over 3-6 years. That means you can be earning and working.
A degree counts for a lot but so does experience. Why not have both by the time you graduate?
The course materials are usually much better than a standard Uni as its distance learning.
I am a student here from the USA. It is actually cheaper here for higher education The USA is a much more advanced case of what is happening here. We were not told we wouldn’t be having in class lectures until September 2nd. I pay about 25k for my masters degree tuition as a non UK student. A teacher admitted that the degree was well over booked with foreign students that they planned the whole time that we would be online. They packed us into these online classes for easy money. I rarely go to campus. Also since these classes have so many students the teachers made deadlines so they could complete their grading. Unfortunately the time frame absolutely destroyed the project study balance for the students and it has been a disaster in managing projects with limited resources with so many students. Students have to accommodated for the overbooking too. There are so many more issues beyond these. I am grateful for a degree at a more affordable price than in the USA but I feel like this is a terrible system.
On my Master’s course of circa 200 people we threatened to take our uni to court over failure to deliver the proper course and they gave us all a discount on the fees. The straw that broke the camels back was 200 of us came in, the lecturer did not turn up so the university put a 2 hour long documentary on from BBC iPlayer.
200 people @ £9,000 a year is £1,800,000. We had something like 30 classes that year so they got £60,000 for putting a BBC video on.
Absolute joke! Lecturers were all useless and clearly only there because they wouldn’t succeed in the real world of work.
There are no consequences to running crappy courses. Nobody holds them to account. Nobody (seems to be) holding them to any real standards or objectives.
And then they’re incentivised to pack in as many bodies into every course as possible.
It’s a complete mess.
As much as this sub thinks remote learning and work is the solution to every single problem its about time they realised it was having harm on some parts of life when seen as the default. Students paying 9k for a few teams calls and prerecorded lectures is a shit show
The whole “industry” is a crazy black hole of abusive practices that wouldn’t be allowed in any other sector. Target under 18s for loans? Why not! Make baseless promises in your ads? It’s legal when the government do it! Accept money for services but then fail to provide them or refund the customer? Totally legitimate when you’re customers are renamed “students”.
University was the biggest mistake I made. Essentially taxed for the rest of your life. I’m about £60,000 in debt because I didn’t realise the interest was a thing, just thought I had to pay back the loan.
Universities had a laughable approach to Covid.
Still insisting on Zoom lectures and restricting university events when there were little restrictions anywhere else in the country and everyone was getting on with their lives. So glad I graduated before this whole mess.
Why can’t we afford to have free university any more? It seems like the politicians who benefited from free education pulled the drawbridge for this generation. Charge foreign students by all means, but not the UK citizens.
I paid for a masters 20 years ago after a few years in industry and one of the course modules was completely out of date teaching around tech that was obsolete so I formally complained and they closed the module and transferred us to something else. If I hadn’t, the 10 or so students who had transferred straight from their undergraduate degrees would have been paying for something quite useless.
Universities are big businesses that employ people who still think like they are in public sector jobs and should be treated as such (I.e. untouchable and doing the public good) and when their customers who are paying serious money expect good value they don’t like it.
There’s a pit somewhere with all the money made from students.
Around 700,000 students go to university each year, average annual cost of 9k~ and you’re looking at around 6.3 billion for just 1 year of students.
All just to be handed a piece of paper.
Aye I’ve complained because their shit for what I’ve paid for
I’m 3 years into my 4 year bio degree and I hate it. I am filled with regret. Studying in the pandemic has been horrendous. Only a select few of the lecturers have been understanding or seem to actually care about providing good quality content in lectures.
I’ve missed out on vital lab time and students have not had much support or guidance. Also our feedback for assignments is consistently late which is really frustrating and anxiety inducing.
If I could go back, I wouldn’t go to university and I wouldn’t recommend my university for my degree pathway either.
If you want to turn students into customers then this is what happens, good for them.
I’ve not complained, and I probably should have. I graduated summer last year, and my university experience at Durham was horrendous.
I suffer from tics, which can be triggered by certain sounds. Once lockdown hit, the university switched to online learning. However, they gave their professors neither the equipment nor training to continue teaching under these conditions. As it happened then, I would tune in to the zoom lesson and immediately be hit by the tinniest, most crackly audio quality you could imagine, and I would sit in my damp accommodation hours a day physically incapable of following along because I was twitching too much. Waste of money and time.
If you’re going to charge £9,000 a year for people to attend your university, they’re going to behave like customers rather than students.
The professors don’t care, the content is vague or just information dumped into slides, there is no inspiration and it just feels like my organisation skills are being tested more than anything and that I’m being pushed into a worker box I don’t fit in. I chose biology and I got thrown into a mess that’s left me with no confidence and full of shame in my lack of ability to siv through all the shit until I actually find the assignments I have to do, then I have to try and make sense of the unhelpful instructions. Pursuing an ADHD diagnosis but it really shouldn’t be this hard with or without that.
I’m a 26f first year in Brighton.
All education should be free
Uni isn’t for everyone. That was the huge error the Blair govt sold to the youth of the time, that everyone should go to Uni rather than simply start work or do vocational training or apprenticeships.
Now you have thousands of kids leaving school going into Uni doing pointless subjects they will never actually use in the real world. A particularly popular one in the mid-2000s was psychology, everyone was doing psychology, not a single one who graduated with their 2:2 (as the vast majority did, even the firsts also did not go on to use the degree beyond “hey I got a degree, look”) became a psychologist or even worked in the field. Now they are still left with huge debts over 15 years later.
Only go to Uni if you are an academic or the field you plan to work in requires it, otherwise just start work or find a vocation. Uni really isn’t for everyone.
People are rarely happy when they get scammed.
This is the inevitability of making universities into business ventures whilst still trying to keep a thin veil of academia over them. The quality of courses has dropped as a result because universities that lack the prestige of oxbridge, imperial, UCL, etc, will just take virtually anyone so long as they can pay… and since the gov freely gives out the tuition loans there is little incentive to reject people when you can make a quick buck accepting someone who might fail out in 2nd year or even redo years to graduate with a third or a 2:2.
I don’t wholly put the blame at universities feet, I think schools/college/sixth form have been very naive or negligent in suggesting students go to university to do a course that has poor job prospects and career pathways. The system has changed and since university is available to virtually most students, there’s a greater saturation in some industries of graduates to jobs. And there are some degrees I quite frankly only exist to attract rubes to get a mountain of debt in return for a piece of paper that doesn’t mean much.
I don’t understand how this is going to be sustainable for the government. The mountains of debt that are piling up that will have to be cancelled must be monstrous. I really think there will be a reckoning in 20 odd years when the first tranches of loans start being cancelled when they expire considering that the interest that piles on them is huge.
I am currently coming to the end of a master’s degree at King’s College London. I did my undergrad studies in Swansea between 07-11 with a year on Erasmus in Germany.
King’s is an absolute joke compared to how Swansea was. The teaching staff clearly got used to WFH and were loathed to come in, some even recycled online lectures from last year. Almost no face to face office hours, my personal tutor has never even replied to a single email that I’ve sent her (which I’ve complained about).
The lecturers clearly only care about their own research and treat teaching as a chore. I’m asking now for a refund, it’s been a total waste of time, and certainly hasn’t lived up to what was sold to us. We were promised visits from key figures from within the field, visits to major businesses in the sector, and practical skills useful in the workplace. None of that happened and five weeks out of 20 were lost to strikes.
35 comments
Yeah that’s what happens when you make access to uni a product to be bought for huge sums instead of a freely/cheaply accessible public good. Students are now customers and they want value for their tens of thousands of pounds.
I know a few lecturers who have been saying for years that expectations of them are being raised in line with costs.
And, tbh, it’s fair enough. You want to get what you paid for in all walks of life.
Why are students trying to make a hit record anyway instead of reading books or something?
Can’t blame them. How many students have paid tens of thousands for a zoom course these past 2 years
Considering annual tuition fees have been frozen at £9,250 for the past five years and the rate in which inflation is barreling, Universities are in a bit of a pickle…
Fees were capped at £9000 in 2012, in today’s money that be £11,324.01… across a campus of say 14,000 to 15,000 students that a lot of lost money (and increasing) each year.
Thing is, a free education is not a way to lower quality, on the contrary, you can raise the expectations as a university due to the low cost.
Part of the problem is the fact the charge is badged as “Tuition Fees” …. This makes people think it is just for the academic teaching. It should be more accurately badged as “University charge” as it encompasses libraries,equipment ,facilities etc.
I remember coughing up the fees and getting a timetable for around 12 hours a week – 1hr lecture, 2hr seminar, 4 modules – and one seminar teacher rarely showed up. If she did, she’d look out of the window airily asking what we thought of the book, then went ‘for a cigarette’ and didn’t return.
Other seminars were a hand wave and ‘talk amongst yourselves’ and one creepy guy who turned every lesson into a discussion on snuff porn. I still remember a session on Rossetti, a beautiful painting up on the projector, while he was going on about some video he’d watched. Freakin weirdo.
We were told the rest of the time we should ‘be reading ‘. If we complained we were called babies who wanted to be spoonfed. I was also called ‘a primary school baby’ for calling a professor ‘sir’.
Frankly I’ve engaged in deeper literary and artistic discourse on Reddit.
I knew students on better courses at better unis who were in full time, 9 to 5 sorta thing.
It wasn’t worth 9 grand. Certainly wasn’t worth 24. With students now being subjected to online only learning, without access to laboratories, facilities, theatres etc… It’s just ridiculous.
And I bet they get the same line of ‘well we won’t spoon-feed you, this isn’t primary school’ when they say anything. So what is it then – a building provided for independent study?
University is the biggest scam going. I know, I went.
Yes my Computer Science degree got me into a good paying job, but everything I learned in lectures. Was worse content then what was freely available on YOUTUBE. Literally just went for the piece of paper saying 1:1 on it.
I’ve spent nearly 20 grand now on Teams calls. I don’t have a solution I just want something to fucking change.
Edit: Couple that with half the university facilities STILL not being back to the standard they were in 2019 and I’m feeling completely ripped off.
When you let capitalism bleed into education and turn Degrees into products, this is what happens.
So I currently study in the Netherlands and my sister studies in Manchester. She is paying 4x what I am but I have infinitely more contact hours, more assignments, more feedback and more opportunities for personalised learning. I genuinely do not understand where the money is going. She will go for weeks with no assignments. It frankly looks boring.
Raise the cost, raise expectations.
Open University costs £19,368 total for a degree and you can complete it flexibly; usually over 3-6 years. That means you can be earning and working.
A degree counts for a lot but so does experience. Why not have both by the time you graduate?
The course materials are usually much better than a standard Uni as its distance learning.
I am a student here from the USA. It is actually cheaper here for higher education The USA is a much more advanced case of what is happening here. We were not told we wouldn’t be having in class lectures until September 2nd. I pay about 25k for my masters degree tuition as a non UK student. A teacher admitted that the degree was well over booked with foreign students that they planned the whole time that we would be online. They packed us into these online classes for easy money. I rarely go to campus. Also since these classes have so many students the teachers made deadlines so they could complete their grading. Unfortunately the time frame absolutely destroyed the project study balance for the students and it has been a disaster in managing projects with limited resources with so many students. Students have to accommodated for the overbooking too. There are so many more issues beyond these. I am grateful for a degree at a more affordable price than in the USA but I feel like this is a terrible system.
On my Master’s course of circa 200 people we threatened to take our uni to court over failure to deliver the proper course and they gave us all a discount on the fees. The straw that broke the camels back was 200 of us came in, the lecturer did not turn up so the university put a 2 hour long documentary on from BBC iPlayer.
200 people @ £9,000 a year is £1,800,000. We had something like 30 classes that year so they got £60,000 for putting a BBC video on.
Absolute joke! Lecturers were all useless and clearly only there because they wouldn’t succeed in the real world of work.
There are no consequences to running crappy courses. Nobody holds them to account. Nobody (seems to be) holding them to any real standards or objectives.
And then they’re incentivised to pack in as many bodies into every course as possible.
It’s a complete mess.
As much as this sub thinks remote learning and work is the solution to every single problem its about time they realised it was having harm on some parts of life when seen as the default. Students paying 9k for a few teams calls and prerecorded lectures is a shit show
The whole “industry” is a crazy black hole of abusive practices that wouldn’t be allowed in any other sector. Target under 18s for loans? Why not! Make baseless promises in your ads? It’s legal when the government do it! Accept money for services but then fail to provide them or refund the customer? Totally legitimate when you’re customers are renamed “students”.
University was the biggest mistake I made. Essentially taxed for the rest of your life. I’m about £60,000 in debt because I didn’t realise the interest was a thing, just thought I had to pay back the loan.
Universities had a laughable approach to Covid.
Still insisting on Zoom lectures and restricting university events when there were little restrictions anywhere else in the country and everyone was getting on with their lives. So glad I graduated before this whole mess.
Why can’t we afford to have free university any more? It seems like the politicians who benefited from free education pulled the drawbridge for this generation. Charge foreign students by all means, but not the UK citizens.
I paid for a masters 20 years ago after a few years in industry and one of the course modules was completely out of date teaching around tech that was obsolete so I formally complained and they closed the module and transferred us to something else. If I hadn’t, the 10 or so students who had transferred straight from their undergraduate degrees would have been paying for something quite useless.
Universities are big businesses that employ people who still think like they are in public sector jobs and should be treated as such (I.e. untouchable and doing the public good) and when their customers who are paying serious money expect good value they don’t like it.
There’s a pit somewhere with all the money made from students.
Around 700,000 students go to university each year, average annual cost of 9k~ and you’re looking at around 6.3 billion for just 1 year of students.
All just to be handed a piece of paper.
Aye I’ve complained because their shit for what I’ve paid for
I’m 3 years into my 4 year bio degree and I hate it. I am filled with regret. Studying in the pandemic has been horrendous. Only a select few of the lecturers have been understanding or seem to actually care about providing good quality content in lectures.
I’ve missed out on vital lab time and students have not had much support or guidance. Also our feedback for assignments is consistently late which is really frustrating and anxiety inducing.
If I could go back, I wouldn’t go to university and I wouldn’t recommend my university for my degree pathway either.
If you want to turn students into customers then this is what happens, good for them.
I’ve not complained, and I probably should have. I graduated summer last year, and my university experience at Durham was horrendous.
I suffer from tics, which can be triggered by certain sounds. Once lockdown hit, the university switched to online learning. However, they gave their professors neither the equipment nor training to continue teaching under these conditions. As it happened then, I would tune in to the zoom lesson and immediately be hit by the tinniest, most crackly audio quality you could imagine, and I would sit in my damp accommodation hours a day physically incapable of following along because I was twitching too much. Waste of money and time.
If you’re going to charge £9,000 a year for people to attend your university, they’re going to behave like customers rather than students.
The professors don’t care, the content is vague or just information dumped into slides, there is no inspiration and it just feels like my organisation skills are being tested more than anything and that I’m being pushed into a worker box I don’t fit in. I chose biology and I got thrown into a mess that’s left me with no confidence and full of shame in my lack of ability to siv through all the shit until I actually find the assignments I have to do, then I have to try and make sense of the unhelpful instructions. Pursuing an ADHD diagnosis but it really shouldn’t be this hard with or without that.
I’m a 26f first year in Brighton.
All education should be free
Uni isn’t for everyone. That was the huge error the Blair govt sold to the youth of the time, that everyone should go to Uni rather than simply start work or do vocational training or apprenticeships.
Now you have thousands of kids leaving school going into Uni doing pointless subjects they will never actually use in the real world. A particularly popular one in the mid-2000s was psychology, everyone was doing psychology, not a single one who graduated with their 2:2 (as the vast majority did, even the firsts also did not go on to use the degree beyond “hey I got a degree, look”) became a psychologist or even worked in the field. Now they are still left with huge debts over 15 years later.
Only go to Uni if you are an academic or the field you plan to work in requires it, otherwise just start work or find a vocation. Uni really isn’t for everyone.
People are rarely happy when they get scammed.
This is the inevitability of making universities into business ventures whilst still trying to keep a thin veil of academia over them. The quality of courses has dropped as a result because universities that lack the prestige of oxbridge, imperial, UCL, etc, will just take virtually anyone so long as they can pay… and since the gov freely gives out the tuition loans there is little incentive to reject people when you can make a quick buck accepting someone who might fail out in 2nd year or even redo years to graduate with a third or a 2:2.
I don’t wholly put the blame at universities feet, I think schools/college/sixth form have been very naive or negligent in suggesting students go to university to do a course that has poor job prospects and career pathways. The system has changed and since university is available to virtually most students, there’s a greater saturation in some industries of graduates to jobs. And there are some degrees I quite frankly only exist to attract rubes to get a mountain of debt in return for a piece of paper that doesn’t mean much.
I don’t understand how this is going to be sustainable for the government. The mountains of debt that are piling up that will have to be cancelled must be monstrous. I really think there will be a reckoning in 20 odd years when the first tranches of loans start being cancelled when they expire considering that the interest that piles on them is huge.
I am currently coming to the end of a master’s degree at King’s College London. I did my undergrad studies in Swansea between 07-11 with a year on Erasmus in Germany.
King’s is an absolute joke compared to how Swansea was. The teaching staff clearly got used to WFH and were loathed to come in, some even recycled online lectures from last year. Almost no face to face office hours, my personal tutor has never even replied to a single email that I’ve sent her (which I’ve complained about).
The lecturers clearly only care about their own research and treat teaching as a chore. I’m asking now for a refund, it’s been a total waste of time, and certainly hasn’t lived up to what was sold to us. We were promised visits from key figures from within the field, visits to major businesses in the sector, and practical skills useful in the workplace. None of that happened and five weeks out of 20 were lost to strikes.
Absolute joke.