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and pay cash to unis:p.

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I'd rather they learn to pay their way through life early than have the government raise taxes for me to pay for them :)

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I spend your taxes on marketing campaigns, and thank you for your contribution :)

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Yes. But that's not a choice that was made by the unis, is it?

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Are you saying this is supply and demand? I'm shocked:p

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Not yet you're not :p

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No, your taxes in the UK are spent much more wisely.

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:rofl::rofl::rofl:

please no more my sides can't take it...;)

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At the moment they're paying for a good knees up in Brighton

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What are you getting at with that? Believe me, the universities would much prefer it if they didn't have to charge tuition.

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Would they? Even for MBA's and the like? - I got the impression that they are very profitable for the unis. A bit like how unis love foreign students cos they can charge them more.

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Jeezus, even for a libertarian, you come across as a prat. Has it escaped your notice that in the country in which you live, universities are non-profit organizations?

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What bollox, they’re now just acquisitive institutions that operate on the model of growth rather than quality. In NA this has always been the case, while in the UK the halcyon days of detached scholarship was done away with in the 1980s. It’s all about bringing in the revenue. No matter what the academy wants to delude themselves its all about bums on seats that can pay. Blame the Dearing Report. Academic capitalism rules, ok.

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Eh? That doesn't make any sense. Charities are non-profit making organizations, doesn't mean they don't want as much cash as they can get though does it.

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I don't deny any of that. What I said was that this situation wasn't the choice of the universities. Here (Ontario) or in the UK.

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Income from student enrollments doesn't come close to covering the costs of running a university, so yes cashflow is obviously important. If you'd ever attended finance meetings you'd quickly understand that everything possible is done to keep costs to the student as low as is feasible.

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Sure, but MBA students are going to be a bit of a cash cow for unis. The fees for them seem a lot more than for other courses. The disparity of prices for MBA courses would suggest some market forces at work.

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Absolutely. We have a Business School which is bleeding rolling in cash. But I've yet to see any spill over into the rest of the University.

I agree with whoever said (I think Souv) that such nonsense doesn't belong in a university in the first place.

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Long gone are the massive UGC block grants that used fund institutions. Public money only accounted for about 16% of the overall budget at my last place.

Today, for many departments, the 'cash cow's' are foreign students, especially foreign students doing MBAs.
Also, most research universities take up to 40 to 50% of any research grants that are awarded. Plus in my old department we would put on crap workshops in the summer and at Christmas and charge obscene amounts of money.

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I was at Nott uni. I can tell the agressive marketing that they did there to fill in seats....on one msc course(operations management) there were 90 percent chineese students...just a few locals. It was obvious to me as to what was going on. I know the whole debate is complex but beleive me universities these days are far from non-profit making bodies.

Prospect magazine in the UK had an interesting article once about the new type of courses bieng designed evey year totally unrelated to the needs of the economy.

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Its called Humanities, they've been at it for years.;)

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A memo got sent round my old department once informing us that from that point onwards "students" would be referred to as "customers". I kid you not.

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I also spent time in the US system. Never again and that was, let's see, 28 years ago.

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I blame it all on Maggie. Or are you too young to remember that bit?

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I've never heard of prospect magazine of course. But why did they think that was a bad idea?

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Im not surprised. Why do you think students have barcodes now on their IDs?:rofl:

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Oh, I remember Maggie, but I don't blame it all on her. Just part of it. For me most of the mess was almost an unavoidable consequence of a general decline in the British standard of living. Maggie's garage sales and the Blair/Brown housing ponzi scheme were all just delaying the inevitable: a lower standard of living for Britain which has been gathering momentum for half a century or longer. Just my two cents...

I'll add the memo was met with the ridicule it deserved.

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Not a great deal to disagree about there. Although the phrase "Blair/Brown ponzi scheme" is a bit harsh. Wasn't that the City/Wall Street?

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It's not harsh enough. But an excellent post nevertheless.

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Actually in the UK, it was mainly down the increasing demand for higher education access by the working class. The system simply couldn't pay for everyone. This has also been the main reason we now have 'top up fees' in the UK. We are moving increasingly closer to the US model for funding HE.

One thing Maggie did to increase university access was to abolish the polytechnic system and almost over night they got re-branded as universities. So in some respects, the Thatcher government did more to provide working class access to HE than any other administration, including those of Attlee, Wilson or Blair.

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Not at all. What she did (as you point out) was to redefine polys as universities, thus "at a stroke" increasing access to universities, while starting the rot which has turned the majority of UK universities into polytechnics.

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Poor choice of terms. I meant increasing university access.

That's just a matter of personal conjecture usually informed by that age-old complaint that 'things were better in the good old days'. What we can measure is the increasing participation rates, whether that in itself dilutes 'the quality' of pre 1992 universities is again open to speculative debate, but not to credible research.

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Well when I were a lad, we got a real degree at a real university, not one of them poncey polythingamy whatsits. And when I were a lad and we took our ex ams they weren't ex ams unless someone fainted and got carried out on a stretcher yelling "I'm an orange and I got my pips squeezed!"

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Oh the Academic snobbery. I went to Polytechnic and am damn proud to have done so.

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Don't get me wrong AX. I firmly believe that the old polys (like present day Colleges at least in Ontario) did/do a superb job of equipping a large section of the cohort with very valuable practical skills and knowledge of direct relevance to their chosen careers. Most people get better training than they would at a university.

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Absolutely. They simply changed the name of the institutions to remove the stigma of two-tiered system, and that of 'training' versus 'education'. A lot of people in the UK can't live without formalized stratification so pine for the days when 'universities' were afforded higher prestige. You still hear the comment, "that was a former poly you know." You got the same thing with the emergence of the redbricks and the glass plates. We love our snobbery in the UK.

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Possibly. But there's more to universities than teaching undergrad students, as well you know. Graduate eduction and basic/applied research to name a couple. At least in Canada (Ontario) a distinction is made between research intensive universities on the one hand and "primarily undergraduate universities" and Colleges on the other.

And before I get accused of academic snobbery again, I repeat that IMO a larger fraction of students receive a really useful education/training in the second category than in the first.