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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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