> The prestigious Russell Group of universities says institutions are making a loss of £1,750 a year teaching each home student because tuition fees have remained almost static for 10 years and have not kept pace with inflation.
> The University of Birmingham’s Vice Chancellor, Sir Professor David Eastwood is not taking a pay cut to his £450,000 pay package despite looming financial pressure during COVID-19.
> The university told The Birmingham Tab that “a small number of Vice-Chancellors have taken a short term pay cut. Our approach at Birmingham is to carefully consider all options and ensure decisions made fully support the short and long term sustainability of the university.”
> Vice Chancellors at Russell Group unis have already decided to take a pay cut, including Edinburgh, Nottingham, Manchester, Imperial College London, Liverpool, Cardiff, London School of Economics, Bristol, York, and King’s College London.
As always, costs should be cut at the top.
​
Cut the greedy pigs–the chairman’s and the other fatcats saleries with the snouts in their troughs salaries first.
It’s interesting that having pushed tuition fees into individuals, raising them is now a political hot potato…
Paying to learn is an absolute disgrace, that said……why are apprenticeship courses not promoted more?
They can scale down a bit on building flashy campus buildings if they are short on cash. I am sure not every university needs a brand new library building as big as the one in Birmingham city centre.
Hahahaha, get lost, I paid £9000 a year, around triple what the people who did the same degree a year before paid and got exactly the same experience. These universities have plenty of money to throw about, they just don’t want to
Out of interest, is there anything that actually forces universities to charge £9,250 for home students, or is that just the maximum amount that student finance will lend? Could they hypothetically offer a course for, say, £20,000, and just accept that they are pricing out anyone who can’t afford to pay the fees upfront? If so, that seems like the most likely outcome.
I am a big proponent of higher education and academia . But my god universities are so financially inefficient.
I know a university that frequently runs taster days and events and it will pay significantly above retail wage hourly rate and you’ll have so many students helping in these events with more than half standing about doing nothing
I have a friend who is a master’s student who is an associate lecturer (no previous experience) , gets £45 per hour and basically admits they don’t fully know what they are doing some of the time.
Alot of universities have kneecapped themselves because they’ve brought or renovated new buildings and are still paying them off so now because the cost of living has increased they have less available cash on reserve.
I think in no way should the cost of students loans shouldn’t be going up. The yearly loan amount exceeds inflation, £3000 years (2009~) ,academic year 2010/11 the maximum tuition fee had reached £3290 , 2012 , £9000.
The value of courses and the content hasn’t tripled and in some cases students are getting less teaching hours than pre pandemic and like 7 hours of lectures per week.
The universities are institutions for education not for profit institutions
So I did the math.
According to the article Universities are losing about £4k on each student. At £9k per year I guess that means it costs £13k to fund the student. Assuming a 3 year course that amounts to £39k, lets round that up to £50k for prudence.
The average UK salary is about £25k at the moment, so let’s assume all grads earn an average salary. Now let’s introduce a student tax, levied against anyone that’s undertaken a degree.
To repay that £50k outlay before retirement you would need to tax each student 4.4% of their gross salary. For context my student loan repayments are currently 4% of my gross salary.
Either my maths is wrong here or there is a blindingly obvious solution to the problem – free further education for everyone funded by a 4%-5% ‘student’ tax, applied to anyone choosing to undertake further education.
This could cover all forms of further education including degrees, apprenticeships, vocational courses, adult education, etc. It would remove all barriers of entry to any UK national and would keep our higher education facilities well funded.
I’ve been extremely prudent with the maths as well, I’m sure three year courses cost much less than £50k whilst a lot of grads will earn far more than £25k.
Da fuck do you charge every student 9k a year and charge for course materials and still complain about money?
Any increase would go straight in the pocket of the fat cat chancellor.
Obviously covid was a big issue for university’s, but then nobody got a refund. I paid my £9250 to have one live thing a week and then staggered rehashed lectures where 1/2 had poor audio or visual or both. On one occasion I had lecture revolving one particular law from 3 years prior where the law had actually changed and 90% was irrelevant. Money well spent though because it paid for those sweet sweet fat cat salaries.
Cool, does this mean University admin staff will get a sensible wage increase?
I got a promotion last year and minimum wage is still catching up faster than I’m progressing.
A family member of mine works for Birmingham Uni. International students rock up absolutely throwing money about. Don’t attend any lectures yet ace their chosen degree – funny that.
fuck off. I did the maths once, they were getting over £20 per student per lecture on my course. with over 100 students to 1 lecturer they were raking it in.
the university system has remained mostly static for hundreds of years, it needs a serious overhaul.
with modern tech it is criminal that at the very least there aren’t free online options for lecturers, and taxes should cover fees to pay for coursework and exam marking/taking.
what is better, delivering (roughly) the same course 10x at every university or working 10x as hard to make the course higher quality and putting it online for anyone to study? it’s a fucking corrupt racket.
you want argue that university is a unique experience? fine, you’re still allowed to go! just don’t force the rest of us to take on a life long 9% tax for your preference.
Cut every single Chancellor’s wage by half and you’ve solved the problem
Where does the money go? Are students given a breakdown of costs?
“pay didn’t keep with inflation”
Well neither does the quality reflect on the already high cost, so get lost.
I’m having a hard time understanding how come showing powerpoints to a few hundred students in a room, for a couple of hours a week, 22-24 weeks a year, would cost universities well over 10k a year per student in said room.
Most universities have just become a cash cow for Chinese money.
Is there anything within the public service sphere that isn’t in crisis?
– Met Police under special measures.
– University funding crisis mentioned here.
– Barristers now on strike due to chronic underfunding.
– Trains on strike.
– Ambulance waiting times at 3 hours.
– Army being reduced to 79,000 personnel.
– Chronic housing shortage.
– London Underground funding cut to the bone.
– Civil Service redundancies in the thousands.
The argument used to be that privatisation was the answer, but:
– Water companies have polluted 99% (!) of all rivers in the UK and dumping untreated sewage into them.
– Energy prices quadrupling in October from 18 months ago prices when France managed to cap their prices.
– Way behind course for carbon reduction leading not only to climate disaster but also a complete reliance on horrific regimes worldwide.
– Price of train ticket usually 3 times the price of equivalent airfare.
All of this would be bad enough but it’s happened alongside:
– austerity measures slashing real rate wages for key workers.
– inflation at nearly 10%.
– highest tax burden in my lifetime.
– real danger of Northern Ireland issues coming back.
– lowest value of the £ in my lifetime.
– economy contracting.
Even ignoring partygate/PPE corruption/law breaking/continuous lies/human rights violations everywhere/electoral damage etc, this has to be the worst performance by a government in British history. They have failed on pretty much every single metric. They simply don’t know what they’re doing and it’s painfully obvious that they don’t. People tie their flag to a political mast and I understand that, but even for died in the wool Tories, this lot must give them stomachaches. A whole generation will never forget and never vote Tory again. They have been an utter disaster. I don’t even care who else gets in. It can be a coalition of SNP, Lib Dems and Sinn Fein for all I care as they literally cannot do a worse job.
I have disliked many policies over the years, from both main parties, but I have never encountered such monumental incompetence. The country just can’t afford much longer of this.
Sadly I think the UK will be in a bad way in two generations as rich kids from China and India flood our unis and then go back home and working class British youth will be priced out of degrees and the chance of social mobility.
I work for a UK uni in a management school and over the pandemic the international student numbers have just skyrocketed. 10x from a little before I started to the upcoming autumn semester and each international student pays more than my yearly salary to attend. The university is essentially floating on an absurd income from our faculty while staff are leaving at a frightening rate.
The simple fact is most people who going to university don’t need to go to university for the career path they will end up on. This culture of “you must go to university” is saddling a generation with student debts they’ll never pay off on their lower-middle income salaries.
University should be for people going into fields such as science, medicine, engineering, technology, law and so forth and it should be *free* to those people (or dramatically reduced).
Maybe the university chancellors could cut back on the avocados and make coffee at home?
How is it then that countries like Germany have almost no uni fees and they still manage to run reputable institutions?
Stop paying them extortionate wages then, simple
University is a scam for most students. I went to a well known university to study Computer Science (the CS course was considered one of the better in the country) in 2016. Cheating was easy to achieve and the overall experience boiled down to “your milage may vary, nothing is guaranteed to be good”. This was £9K to be educated by a respectable University.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine from the course dropped out within 6 weeks, studied various CS and ICT qualifications from home at a fraction of the cost of a year’s tuition and within 2 years he was working in a decent tech related job. Within 5 years he has his own home and family with career progression.
As for the students I know on CS courses, i have zero idea how they’re doing now but I’m certain theyre doing worse than the guy who dropped out.
When i went to Uni a few years ago (just before covid) the Uni cut the pay of numerous amounts of professors + laying off some more. While this was happening the VC was receiving over 300k while adding more and more university accommodation so they could accept many more students thus making more money. I had more days of strikes during my final year than actual learning time will i ever see that money again.. fat fucking chance.
University these days is a racket
Going to be that dickhead but fuck it. universities would save money if they stopped funding so many bullshit degrees too much fat that needs to be cut.
29 comments
> The prestigious Russell Group of universities says institutions are making a loss of £1,750 a year teaching each home student because tuition fees have remained almost static for 10 years and have not kept pace with inflation.
Wonder if that includes the [Uni of Birmingham…](https://thetab.com/uk/birmingham/2020/05/21/no-pay-cut-for-uobs-450k-vice-chancellor-for-now-say-uni-44519)
> The University of Birmingham’s Vice Chancellor, Sir Professor David Eastwood is not taking a pay cut to his £450,000 pay package despite looming financial pressure during COVID-19.
> The university told The Birmingham Tab that “a small number of Vice-Chancellors have taken a short term pay cut. Our approach at Birmingham is to carefully consider all options and ensure decisions made fully support the short and long term sustainability of the university.”
> Vice Chancellors at Russell Group unis have already decided to take a pay cut, including Edinburgh, Nottingham, Manchester, Imperial College London, Liverpool, Cardiff, London School of Economics, Bristol, York, and King’s College London.
As always, costs should be cut at the top.
​
Cut the greedy pigs–the chairman’s and the other fatcats saleries with the snouts in their troughs salaries first.
It’s interesting that having pushed tuition fees into individuals, raising them is now a political hot potato…
Paying to learn is an absolute disgrace, that said……why are apprenticeship courses not promoted more?
They can scale down a bit on building flashy campus buildings if they are short on cash. I am sure not every university needs a brand new library building as big as the one in Birmingham city centre.
Hahahaha, get lost, I paid £9000 a year, around triple what the people who did the same degree a year before paid and got exactly the same experience. These universities have plenty of money to throw about, they just don’t want to
Out of interest, is there anything that actually forces universities to charge £9,250 for home students, or is that just the maximum amount that student finance will lend? Could they hypothetically offer a course for, say, £20,000, and just accept that they are pricing out anyone who can’t afford to pay the fees upfront? If so, that seems like the most likely outcome.
I am a big proponent of higher education and academia . But my god universities are so financially inefficient.
I know a university that frequently runs taster days and events and it will pay significantly above retail wage hourly rate and you’ll have so many students helping in these events with more than half standing about doing nothing
I have a friend who is a master’s student who is an associate lecturer (no previous experience) , gets £45 per hour and basically admits they don’t fully know what they are doing some of the time.
Alot of universities have kneecapped themselves because they’ve brought or renovated new buildings and are still paying them off so now because the cost of living has increased they have less available cash on reserve.
I think in no way should the cost of students loans shouldn’t be going up. The yearly loan amount exceeds inflation, £3000 years (2009~) ,academic year 2010/11 the maximum tuition fee had reached £3290 , 2012 , £9000.
The value of courses and the content hasn’t tripled and in some cases students are getting less teaching hours than pre pandemic and like 7 hours of lectures per week.
The universities are institutions for education not for profit institutions
So I did the math.
According to the article Universities are losing about £4k on each student. At £9k per year I guess that means it costs £13k to fund the student. Assuming a 3 year course that amounts to £39k, lets round that up to £50k for prudence.
The average UK salary is about £25k at the moment, so let’s assume all grads earn an average salary. Now let’s introduce a student tax, levied against anyone that’s undertaken a degree.
To repay that £50k outlay before retirement you would need to tax each student 4.4% of their gross salary. For context my student loan repayments are currently 4% of my gross salary.
Either my maths is wrong here or there is a blindingly obvious solution to the problem – free further education for everyone funded by a 4%-5% ‘student’ tax, applied to anyone choosing to undertake further education.
This could cover all forms of further education including degrees, apprenticeships, vocational courses, adult education, etc. It would remove all barriers of entry to any UK national and would keep our higher education facilities well funded.
I’ve been extremely prudent with the maths as well, I’m sure three year courses cost much less than £50k whilst a lot of grads will earn far more than £25k.
Da fuck do you charge every student 9k a year and charge for course materials and still complain about money?
Any increase would go straight in the pocket of the fat cat chancellor.
Obviously covid was a big issue for university’s, but then nobody got a refund. I paid my £9250 to have one live thing a week and then staggered rehashed lectures where 1/2 had poor audio or visual or both. On one occasion I had lecture revolving one particular law from 3 years prior where the law had actually changed and 90% was irrelevant. Money well spent though because it paid for those sweet sweet fat cat salaries.
Cool, does this mean University admin staff will get a sensible wage increase?
I got a promotion last year and minimum wage is still catching up faster than I’m progressing.
A family member of mine works for Birmingham Uni. International students rock up absolutely throwing money about. Don’t attend any lectures yet ace their chosen degree – funny that.
fuck off. I did the maths once, they were getting over £20 per student per lecture on my course. with over 100 students to 1 lecturer they were raking it in.
the university system has remained mostly static for hundreds of years, it needs a serious overhaul.
with modern tech it is criminal that at the very least there aren’t free online options for lecturers, and taxes should cover fees to pay for coursework and exam marking/taking.
what is better, delivering (roughly) the same course 10x at every university or working 10x as hard to make the course higher quality and putting it online for anyone to study? it’s a fucking corrupt racket.
you want argue that university is a unique experience? fine, you’re still allowed to go! just don’t force the rest of us to take on a life long 9% tax for your preference.
Cut every single Chancellor’s wage by half and you’ve solved the problem
Where does the money go? Are students given a breakdown of costs?
“pay didn’t keep with inflation”
Well neither does the quality reflect on the already high cost, so get lost.
I’m having a hard time understanding how come showing powerpoints to a few hundred students in a room, for a couple of hours a week, 22-24 weeks a year, would cost universities well over 10k a year per student in said room.
Most universities have just become a cash cow for Chinese money.
Is there anything within the public service sphere that isn’t in crisis?
– Met Police under special measures.
– University funding crisis mentioned here.
– Barristers now on strike due to chronic underfunding.
– Trains on strike.
– Ambulance waiting times at 3 hours.
– Army being reduced to 79,000 personnel.
– Chronic housing shortage.
– London Underground funding cut to the bone.
– Civil Service redundancies in the thousands.
The argument used to be that privatisation was the answer, but:
– Water companies have polluted 99% (!) of all rivers in the UK and dumping untreated sewage into them.
– Energy prices quadrupling in October from 18 months ago prices when France managed to cap their prices.
– Way behind course for carbon reduction leading not only to climate disaster but also a complete reliance on horrific regimes worldwide.
– Price of train ticket usually 3 times the price of equivalent airfare.
All of this would be bad enough but it’s happened alongside:
– austerity measures slashing real rate wages for key workers.
– inflation at nearly 10%.
– highest tax burden in my lifetime.
– real danger of Northern Ireland issues coming back.
– lowest value of the £ in my lifetime.
– economy contracting.
Even ignoring partygate/PPE corruption/law breaking/continuous lies/human rights violations everywhere/electoral damage etc, this has to be the worst performance by a government in British history. They have failed on pretty much every single metric. They simply don’t know what they’re doing and it’s painfully obvious that they don’t. People tie their flag to a political mast and I understand that, but even for died in the wool Tories, this lot must give them stomachaches. A whole generation will never forget and never vote Tory again. They have been an utter disaster. I don’t even care who else gets in. It can be a coalition of SNP, Lib Dems and Sinn Fein for all I care as they literally cannot do a worse job.
I have disliked many policies over the years, from both main parties, but I have never encountered such monumental incompetence. The country just can’t afford much longer of this.
Sadly I think the UK will be in a bad way in two generations as rich kids from China and India flood our unis and then go back home and working class British youth will be priced out of degrees and the chance of social mobility.
I work for a UK uni in a management school and over the pandemic the international student numbers have just skyrocketed. 10x from a little before I started to the upcoming autumn semester and each international student pays more than my yearly salary to attend. The university is essentially floating on an absurd income from our faculty while staff are leaving at a frightening rate.
The simple fact is most people who going to university don’t need to go to university for the career path they will end up on. This culture of “you must go to university” is saddling a generation with student debts they’ll never pay off on their lower-middle income salaries.
University should be for people going into fields such as science, medicine, engineering, technology, law and so forth and it should be *free* to those people (or dramatically reduced).
Maybe the university chancellors could cut back on the avocados and make coffee at home?
How is it then that countries like Germany have almost no uni fees and they still manage to run reputable institutions?
Stop paying them extortionate wages then, simple
University is a scam for most students. I went to a well known university to study Computer Science (the CS course was considered one of the better in the country) in 2016. Cheating was easy to achieve and the overall experience boiled down to “your milage may vary, nothing is guaranteed to be good”. This was £9K to be educated by a respectable University.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine from the course dropped out within 6 weeks, studied various CS and ICT qualifications from home at a fraction of the cost of a year’s tuition and within 2 years he was working in a decent tech related job. Within 5 years he has his own home and family with career progression.
As for the students I know on CS courses, i have zero idea how they’re doing now but I’m certain theyre doing worse than the guy who dropped out.
When i went to Uni a few years ago (just before covid) the Uni cut the pay of numerous amounts of professors + laying off some more. While this was happening the VC was receiving over 300k while adding more and more university accommodation so they could accept many more students thus making more money. I had more days of strikes during my final year than actual learning time will i ever see that money again.. fat fucking chance.
University these days is a racket
Going to be that dickhead but fuck it. universities would save money if they stopped funding so many bullshit degrees too much fat that needs to be cut.