However, at the same time, roughly 80% of the teaching budget (C was right, the BBC was overly optimistic in its reporting) that universities get directly from government is being taken away. Greater minds than mine (well, ones that have access to the budgets they need to do the sums, and the willingness to actually do it) have looked at this situation, and the result is apparently clear. Students will pay roughly 3x as much for their education. Therefore they will, not unreasonably, expect to get more (or at least the same). However, the overall income per student to the university will be slightly LESS than it is now, even though the student is now paying £9000 per year.
Given how untrustworthy we university employees are considered to be, judging by the increase in audits, papertrails, approvals committees (made up of university employees - quis custodiet ipsos costodes? easy, they've gotten us to do it to ourselves) etc., isn't it impressive how we ARE trusted to do more with less all the time?
Oh yeah, it also looks as if:
- the money from government will be taken away NEXT autumn (2011)
- the new fees will only apply from Autumn 2012 entry
That could be... interesting.
Wow...glad (not) to see the commercial side of education is making its way over to England as well. Indeed -- more for less. Are British students as overt in making this relationships? As in, "My dad paid XYZ for this and I need an A"?
ReplyDeleteThe money will start being taken away in Autumn 2011, it won't all go at once so there won't be a complete lack of funding. It will be a smaller but noticeable amount (I have heard 10% and 12% figures bandied about as the cut for next academic year.)
ReplyDeleteBlackdog: they will be overt once the fees kick in, I daresay. Currently, the parents do ask a lot about contact hours when they accompany their offspring for open days.
What about the difference between sciences and humanities? That is, is the government going to continue to fund education in sciences and technical subjects (and, most likely, 'business',since the business grads have done such a GREAT job with the economy so far), but not in humanities, with the result that students coming in to university will have to pay more to study humanities than to study sciences?
ReplyDeleteThat's what we'd heard here, but reports are confusing.
No, that's not it. People keep misunderstanding what the government is going to do as to the difference between sciences/humanities funding. Let me try and explain more clearly.
ReplyDeleteYou can think of the current situation as every degree subject getting the same baseline of funding per student, but some subjects get extra, because they are more expensive to teach. It is this "extra" that the government is going to continue to pay, but the baseline funding is getting removed from ALL subjects, sciences and humanities alike. In the approx 80% teaching grant cut, the remaining 20% or so is the extra funding for the expensive subjects.
So the government is, on paper at least, providing the means by which students *might* be charged the same whatever subject they study. However in practice, universities are yet to decide what fees they will charge and whether they will charge more differential fees for different degree subjects. So we don't know yet whether humanities will cost more (or indeed less), that information doesn't exist yet.
Our VC is currently encouraging all of us academics to individually think about what the quality is of what we provide, and asking for all of our opinions as to what sort of fees we should charge.
And since the government is planning a wholesale grab of any fees you charge above £6000/annum, there is no incentive whatever to actually charge more than £6000/annum. Did they think of this? One has to wonder.
ReplyDeleteSo you could get a maximum of £2710/annum per student more than you're presently getting. Has anyone crunched the numbers on how much it actually costs to teach a Humanities student (or any student for whom the 'extra' funding is not provided?)
I know that in these parts, the Humanities faculties are the only ones that actually fund themselves and produce a profit, because we're dirt cheap. They don't pay the lecturers as much - because they can get away with not paying us as much, we just take what they give us and are grateful - and then all we really need is a blackboard and a photocopier. And these days we put everything up on Moodle and don't even need the photocopier. So a portion of the per-head amount we get from the government to teach Humanities students actually gets spent on Sciences students, who cost more.
Wait, I've just grasped the point of your last paragraph. The government is going to take away funding in 2011, but the universities will not be allowed to increase their fees until 2012? So there will be a year in which there is no money to teach and no way of raising any?
ReplyDeleteI think we are promised a process as C describes, which goes something like:
ReplyDelete* reduce basic subsidy to zero over several years, starting 2011
* start charging higher fees for new students from 2012, so that over the next 3-4 years each new group pays the new fees whilst the ones who started before 2012 stay with the old fees. so we end up short, but not impossibly short, in 2012.
However, we have been told by our vice-chancellor that we should PLAN on the basis of all the base subsidy going next year, as Miseried about in the post. i.e. that the promises will not be adhered to. Given that the Lib Dems promised to abolish the existing tuition fees, and are now supporting (indeed, charged with sorting out in many ways) the new system, I can see why he is asking us to do that. Maybe he knows something we don't?
In the UK, we are all on the same pay scale (except medical subject academics) - so humanities staff aren't cheaper (well, by making promotion contingent on things that are 'easier' for scientists to do, you can try and distort the figures a bit). Their teaching space is for sure cheaper - maintaining labs costs - and their project students don't need an allocation for lab costs etc.. Their argument always was 'but we do more small group intensive teaching'. However, as 'small group' is now 15-25 students, and meetings are down to once a fortnight or once every three weeks in the interests of efficiency and 'not overloading the students with reading', one has to wonder.
Yes, students already try the 'I'm paying, so I should get a first/an A/to not have to come to class at 5pm'. Citing the 'gym model' soon stops them doing that to me! And the government's argument is that they will all take out loans, of course, provided by the government at special low rates with special terms. In reality, if parents can possibly afford it they'll pay, the loans will only hang around the necks of those from poorer backgrounds who we should be encouraging into HE...
Re: the £6000 limit. Above £6000 there will be a sliding scale of levy - one proposal I've seen is 40% of the first thousand (we charge 7000, get 6600), then a scaled increase per 1000 until anything charged over the cap is 100% the governments'.