British Universities, facing HUGE cuts, plan tuition increase

[Andy Nguyen]

Prof. Steve Smith, president of Universities U.K., which represents Britain’s higher-learning institutions, said the government was likely to cut about 80 percent of the current $6.2 billion it pays annually for university teaching, and about $1.6 billion from the $6.4 billion it provides for research.

To make up for the shortfall, universities would have to raise tuition to an average of more than $11,000, Professor Smith said, and doing so would require Parliament to lift the cap on such fees, now set at $5,260.

“It’s a savage cut, and it’s unprecedented, and it’s the government moving out of the funding of higher education,” Professor Smith, vice chancellor of the University of Exeter, said in an interview. “We’ve had a big comfort blanket called state funding, and now we’re being thrown out of the nest.”

Britain’s universities, heavily subsidized by the state, already feel pared to the bone after a series of cuts in the past year or so. In anticipation of further cuts, many are beginning to lay off instructors, reduce the number of classes and shut down departments. Some instructors and researchers, dismayed by how little money they are being offered and worried about future financing, have abandoned Britain for more lucrative offers at universities abroad.
Universities in Britain Brace for Cuts in Subsidies - NYTimes.com

 

[Andy D.]

Very short sighted on the part of the British government I think.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Follow up article on the issue
Britain Looks to Graduates to Pick Up the Tuition Tab - NYTimes.com

I don't know how much it will affect foreign students who already pay top dollars. Would they pay more to subsidize domestic students?

 

[DominiConnor]

The 'good' news is that it will actually benefit foreign students, since there has long been been a serious cross subsidy from them to 'home' students (EU+Brits)

The fuckwit arts grads who run UK universities don't like the current system, typically referring to it as 'Soviet' since the central government sets numbers of students in each subject and requires them to meet targets for output.
Being arts grads, they are almost wholly ignorant of history, especially the fact that Soviet Russians built one of the finest (some would say the finest) education system on the planet.
Or perhaps selective ignorance is in play here, senior people at Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, QMC or LSE earn less than the secretary to the head of Harvard or Princeton.

It's a clusterfuck on an evangelical scale, and it's not just the scale of cash...

In British universities, there was no difference in price between cheap useless subjects like Spanish or Media studies and expensive but useful like physics and chemistry.

That is changing big time.

That means a powerful incentive to study things that are neither useful to the student or to the wider economy. There exists no equivalent to the endowment/scholarship systems in the USA at all.
Actually that's not quite true. My wife won a scholarship whilst at Oxford, which she used to buy my wedding ring, £65, good money in 1732 when it was set up...

British Conservatives are both different and the same as American ones.
Both despise education for the masses, but British Conservatives have a top class education, whereas American ones make Sarah Palin look well informed.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

The spending cut plan is making news around the world today
Britain Details Radical Spending Cuts, Citing Debt - NYTimes.com

LONDON — The British government on Wednesday unveiled the country’s steepest public spending cuts in more than 60 years, reducing costs in government departments by an average of 19 percent, sharply curtailing welfare benefits, raising the retirement age to 66 by 2020 and eliminating hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs in an effort to bring down the bloated budget deficit.

 

[DominiConnor]

The British conservative party membership average age is as I recall 69.
Yes, really.

That is why they didn't address pensions properly.

When state pensions were first introduced in Britain, roughly half the population did not reach 65, the age where they could claim it.
Being then a mostly industrial economy, it was absurd that you'd ask a 66 year old to shovel coal, carry bricks, or bend metal using his own muscles. So it was both humane and relatively cheap.
Also families were vastly larger, so older people were part of a group that would help them live what was expected to be a few years in adequate comfort.

Now of course in developed countries, most earn our keep using screens, or in roles where the heaviest thing we lift is our laptop, and life expectancy has shot up at the same time as birth rates have gone down.

So we ought to be looking at not only moving the default retirement age to 70 right now today, then drifting it up, but also getting rid of the idea that there is a mandatory retirement age at all.

In nearly all countries, the normally quite low pay of state workers was bought off by arts graduate politicians who knew they would not be in power to be blamed when the compensating pensions fell due. The French are currently rioting about being retirement being increased to 62, rioting is of course as natural to French citizens as the rape of children is to priests, but when 25-40% of the workforce in any country discover they are being shafted big time over their pensions it will get grim. The UK is probably the least awful, partly because they have been shafted more slowly over a longer period, but even then the accounting for state pensions is so shitty that if executives and accountants of a big firm tried anything like that, they'd be in jail.


If we don't then regardless of what political position you take on state benefits, then the West will have literally tens of millions of pensioners living in deep poverty.

State pensions are of course not a socialist idea, regardless of what the witches in the Tea Party say. They were brought in by Bismarck, Chancellor of Prussia and a great personal idol of Hitler.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

What a violent day it was for London.

LONDON — A demonstration against government proposals to cut education spending and steeply increase tuition for university students turned violent on Wednesday as protesters attempted to storm the building that houses the Conservative Party.

The protesters scuffled with police officers, set off flares, burned placards, threw eggs, bottles and other projectiles and shattered windows at the building, 30 Millbank, in Westminster. A small group of demonstrators, some of whose faces were obscured by ski masks, climbed to the roof of a nearby building, waving anarchist flags and chanting “Tory scum.”

The protest was dispersed about 10 p.m. Fourteen people, including seven police officers, were injured, none of them seriously, the authorities said. Thirty-five people were arrested.

Tuition Protest in London Turns Violent - NYTimes.com

 

[DominiConnor]

This is a cool shot.
What you didn't see were the shots taken from across the road...

The big window got trashed, and the door was broken, some people sprayed graffitti, but the attack was so small that the shop you can just see in this picture was virtually undamaged.

As for it being 'violent' it was nothing like a European or American riot.. There was considerable pushing and shoving, a few punches were thrown and some stones were thrown at windows.

Also, look at this shot carefully.
One guy is kicking a window, whilst the others stand politely back, and let the press take the photo they need to get paid for that day.

There is of course deep anger, much of which is justified, but this is not civil disorder, and took place on a Wednesday...

In Britain, there is a convention that Wednesday afternoons are kept free of lectures for sports and other activities.

So we have a mild scuffle on a day when the students didn't have much else to do.
Hardly a revolution.

 

[ANielsen]

Same all over Europe..

In Denmark, spendings on research, infrastructure, education etc. are all being cut to fund the massive explosion in pension and healthcare cost that comes about with the ageing of the huge generations of the late 40’s and 50’s.

Despite all the cuts in what I would call long term investments, it is not in any way enough and the government is now taking up debt to pay for these people to retire.

Every single economist here says that the retirement age needs to be raised drastically, making the point that it is absurd that these huge generations can look forward to being subsidized by the government for 20-25 years on average.

However, due to the sheer size of these generations, no politicians dare to talk about retirement or healthcare reforms and this despite the horrifying budgets forecasts

This is what worries me though,

When these generations are dead and gone, the dept has to be repaid by the current youth.

Can anyone explain to me how this is not simply the older generation blatantly stealing from the younger ones with democratic majority as the legal?

 

[bigbadwolf]

As for it being 'violent' it was nothing like a European or American riot..

So we have a mild scuffle on a day when the students didn't have much else to do.
Hardly a revolution.

Of and by itself it will not cause a change in government policy. This is nothing like the actions of the miners during the '70s and early '80s.

The present British govbernment is intent on dismantling big chunks of the social welfare state.

From the point of higher education, the government has an argument of sorts. What is the use of producing hundreds of thousands of ill-educated graduates for whom no jobs exist? Why should state funding in difficult times go towards this? Graduate unemployment is reaching new heights this year. A couple of English academics, Hesketh and Brown, argued six years ago in their book, "The Mismanagement of Talent," that of the 400,000 graduates produced each year in the UK, only 20,000 were getting the good graduate jobs (and these would be going disproportionately to the Oxbridge, Imperial, UCL, and LSE crowd). That the country does not need more graduates as the majority of new jobs will be in areas like catering and nursing (despite the feeble protests of people like Tony Blair that "high-tech Britain" needs more graduates). Why, then, subsidise a sociology graduate from Thames Valley "University?"

 

[bigbadwolf]

When these generations are dead and gone, the debt has to be repaid by the current youth.

Can anyone explain to me how this is not simply the older generation blatantly stealing from the younger ones with democratic majority as the legal?

As Michael Hudson pointed out in a recent video, debts that cannot be paid will not be paid. The demographic shift in Europe will necessitate drastic changes.

Older people tend to vote; younger people tend not to. So that's one source of inertia right there.

 

[TraderJoe]

I was also shocked at the French protests when the government raised the retirement rate from 60 years to 62 years. In reality, for most of the jobs which are done today, people are quite capable of working until they reach the age of 75 years and the government needs to raise the retirement age to 75 years. But people want to retire at age 60 years and then live off the government for 30 years. This is driving all the governments in Western Europe and USA into bankruptcy.

There is hope on the horizon.The fast-food places have driven 70% of American adults into obesity. This should reduce life expectancy by 5 years and will solve the government debt problem to a large extent. People are getting fatter day by day and this should solve the government debt problem.

 

[MSFHQ]

Wow, only 11k tuition to go to LBS, LSE, Oxford? Get these people some tissues.


I am extremely anti socialist, but my personal views aside, when the government is paying for or subsidizing everything you either increase taxes to you cut some services when things get tight. I think eliminating a lot of the education subsidies is probably the lesser of the evils if you ask me. Either way, British education is still incredibly cheap.

The whole French rioting was simply pathetic. It is really funny because it shows how disconnected a lot of Europe is with the global economy.

 

[bigbadwolf]

In today's Guardian:

Britain's most senior police officer warned today of a new era of civil unrest as the national campaign against university fee increases and education cuts gathered momentum.

Meanwhile, protesters today occupied 16 university campus buildings around the country. Six of the occupations – in Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Plymouth, Edinburgh and London – were expected to continue through the night. The Southwark and Bermondsey constituency office of Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat deputy leader, was also occupied by around 30 students from the London School of Economics.

More here:

The protests by students and school pupils are continuing, with at least 10 universities and colleges occupied overnight Wednesday. These include Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, the University of Leeds Student Union, and the Aston Webb building at the University of Birmingham. Royal Holloway, Plymouth, Warwick, London South Bank, UCL, Essex and UWE Bristol, Glasgow, Strathclyde and Dundee Universities. These followed occupations at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University and University of the West of England that began in the days leading up to Wednesday’s demonstrations.

And in Italy:

Italian students protesting at education reforms have targeted two top tourist attractions, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Colosseum.

Tourists were evacuated as some protesters hung out a banner from the top tier of the medieval tower while hundreds more stood by on the ground.

In Rome, students jumped over turnstiles to protest briefly inside the ancient amphitheatre.

The Italian parliament is due to vote on the reforms on Tuesday.

Students and academics are outraged over cuts of around 9bn euros (£8bn, $12bn) and the proposed loss of 130,000 jobs in the education system, AFP news agency reports.

 

[DominiConnor]

@Anthony: Although I see your point on how fees for top grade UK universities are cheap compared to US ones, that's not really the point.

Like me, you despise socialism, but in fact my position on this is at least mildly nationalist, in that Britain needs a highly educated workforce if it is to have any chance of prospering in the 21st century.
Although British education up to age 18 is not so shitty as American, it still doesn't make it all the way to good.
The fact is that even the most pitifully unskilled British or American worker is vastly more expensive than reasonably skilled people in most of the world. The effects of that arbitrage are obvious even to US evangelicals who now are quite loudly upset about it. Their solution is to reduce still further the level of science education in US schools, and put up protectionist barriers. Hard to see that ending well.

The average per-hour productivity of Chinese / Indian / Indonesian workers is still lower than high wage cost countries, but that gap is closing, and in some industries they have overtaken to the point where they'd be cheaper even if paid the same.

Although some jobs can be done by people with only an evangelical level of education locally like filling supermarket shelves, cutting hair, most inherently local jobs don't pay well. Even there, we see automation reducing the demand. Already there are cleaning robots in use in hotels, and automation not only reduces demand for labour, it moves the work in making the machine to where the machine is made. That means in the mid term that skilled jobs in producing automation are going to be a useful, but these too will go to places where they are made better and cheaper.

Look at US agricultural employment, yes the crops are grown in the USA but the % of the cost in
growing them that is the result of US labour is in monotonic decline.

So the days when you could afford to only educate middle class white men are gone. Not because of 'fairness' or 'equality' but because uneducated people are increasingly a drag on the economy.

Another issue in comparing (say) the LSE with the USA is the complete absence of any system that helps kids with poorer parents. The endowments of British universities are simply not large enough to seriously consider helping them, although for internal political reasons most have one or two (literally one or two) students whose fees are taken care of out of their own funds.

I'm not sure the LSE has an endowment at all.

Fees deter poorer students from getting a better education, that lowers the average. Given the average is far too low, that is a bad thing.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Like me, you despise socialism, but in fact my position on this is at least mildly nationalist, in that Britain needs a highly educated workforce if it is to have any chance of prospering in the 21st century.

The fact is that even the most pitifully unskilled British or American worker is vastly more expensive than reasonably skilled people in most of the world. The effects of that arbitrage are obvious even to US evangelicals who now are quite loudly upset about it. Their solution is to reduce still further the level of science education in US schools, and put up protectionist barriers. Hard to see that ending well.

The average per-hour productivity of Chinese / Indian / Indonesian workers is still lower than high wage cost countries, but that gap is closing, and in some industries they have overtaken to the point where they'd be cheaper even if paid the same.

In a globalised economy, the dubious virtues of which cheerleaders like Tom Friedman incessantly preach, Western workers -- no matter how fast they run -- are never going to be able to catch up with the wage/productivity ratio of workers in India and China.

I am a socialist and I do see education as a social good rather than a private commodity. Yet I still see some of the reasoning behind Cameron & Co's decisions. Throwing money at education as a panacea for structural unemployment wrought by changes in the global economy will not work. The mantra of "more education" -- brayed by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair -- is not plausible. Blair arbitrarily decided that 50% of British youngsters should go to university because the supposedly high-tech British economy needed them. Yet as Hesketh and Brown pointed out in their 2004 book, The Mismanagement of Talent, the jobs aren't there. The new jobs -- to the extent that there will be new jobs -- will be in decidedly low-tech areas like catering and nursing. Just churning out brigades of youngsters with increasingly underfunded -- and hence devalued -- degrees is not the solution. Why, then, should government funding go towards churning them out when graduate jobs don't exist? Let the universities survive in the free market and let supply and demand sort themselves out to reach an equilibrium. Many universities and many departments will fold -- but maybe that's for the best since we probably don't need so many expensive-to-produce history and philosophy graduates who will be working at checkout tills, and truth to tell, our new service-oriented British economy doesn't need quite so many engineers either. If you're a free marketeer surely you would go along with this argument?

In the US, nationalists like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts do understand that without protectionist barriers the majority of US workers -- including engineers, scientists, and programmers -- are well and truly buggered. In this regard I recommend Roberts' recent book, How the Economy was Destroyed.

 

[DominiConnor]

I agree that quality is too poorly correlated with cost in education.

The British economy is high tech, the problem is that it is not high tech enough
Not being a socialist I reject the anti-globalisation position that because I am a white man I have some sort of right to a higher standard of living than coloured people. The triumph of the last 25 years is that globalisation has taken a whole billion people out of the sort of poverty that kills children in their first year, and makes having daughters an unaffordable luxury.

I also agree that the jobs aren't there, we have to go and fight for them, it will be bloody. I don't know if we will win, the odds don't look good.

I am amused by your idea that nursing is not high tech, you undermine your case by that assertion. Catering is not quite the industry it was either.

It may be as you cite that future jobs are low tech in the UK. In which case we're fucked, and not in a nice way either.

As a hard line economist I'm all for using supply and demand, but a fundamental piece of most economics is rationality and by definition children aren't capable of making good decisions. The market would be determined by 16 year olds and their mostly uneducated parents.
The need to be told what they should study, and to have it made hard not to.
Yes, I'm a liberal elitist, live with it.

I agree that history grads are mostly worthless, but I'd hire a philosopher from a good school over most CompSci grads. You are also wrong that they are expensive to produce. Science grads cost far more.

Protectionism doesn't work for developed economies, and fule wot as dun history kno tha.

US workers are buggered because they put they drop their pants, raise their arses and shove lubricant up there.
If you vote for evangelicals, fail to teach your kids, gain no experience of the world, and don't work to keep your skills sharp you will be crushed.

Think of that as evolution in action.

 

[bigbadwolf]

I also agree that the jobs aren't there, we have to go and fight for them, it will be bloody. I don't know if we will win, the odds don't look good.

Suppose I was living in England and had an idea to set up a software company. I wouldn't set it up there unless proximity to clients was imperative. I'd set it up in some low-wage country like Estonia or Latvia, both of whom are know for their programming savvy. It's no wonder, then, that Imperial graduates are looking for jobs in the City.

What's happening with globalisation is that not only are white populations buggered but also -- with some exceptions -- Third World populations as well. The benefits, such as they are, seeming to be accruing to a footloose transnational global elite. Thus, average calorific content has actually gone down in India over the last 20 or 25 years -- even while a few dozen Indians have become billionaires.

I am amused by your idea that nursing is not high tech, you undermine your case by that assertion. Catering is not quite the industry it was either.

My bad. I should have said nursing-home workers as Western populations become steadily more geriatric. Again, just quoting Hesketh and Brown.

It may be as you cite that future jobs are low tech in the UK. In which case we're fucked, and not in a nice way either.

Then why not change the paradigm to a protectionist one? Rentiers and finance capitalists might do well out of globalisation -- but I don't think anyone else does. It's no good if a DVD player can be had for $30 in Wal-Mart (or lower, if you're willing to risk being trod underfoot in a stampede) if you haven't got a job in the first place. Countries industrialise behind a tariff wall to protect their fledgling industries. And it would seem that industrial economies need some sort of protection to keep out the gale winds of unfettered competition, which decimate indigenous industrial capacity. Once this capacity is gone, so too vanishes the middle class. You are left with a few rich and many poor -- precisely the problem with the US economy today, which can't generate enough domestic demand because of lost jobs, stagnating wages, and a middle/working class up to its eyeballs in debt.

As a hard line economist I'm all for using supply and demand, but a fundamental piece of most economics is rationality and by definition children aren't capable of making good decisions. The market would be determined by 16 year olds and their mostly uneducated parents.
The need to be told what they should study, and to have it made hard not to.

Let's be real. British university students -- with some exceptions -- come from middle-class backgrounds, with the cultural capital that that implies. Those who don't come from such backgrounds tend not to go to uni, or if they do, it's some place like Hatfield poly (er, uni), in something soft (like media studies), and they tend to drop out. If free-market economics is good for the American goose, then it should also be good for the British gander. As a socialist I'm uncomfortable making these arguments, but I'm trying to see the reasoning behind Cameron and Co's decisions, and from the point of view I'm making explicit above it does make sense. I understand the class mobility that free or subsidised access to education makes possible is a good thing, but conservatives would argue that in practice it doesn't much happen and the worthwhile degrees (math, physics, engineering) from worthwhile schools are earnt by middle-class students whose parents could probably afford to fork out the dosh it really costs to educate -- same as in the United States.

I agree that history grads are mostly worthless, but I'd hire a philosopher from a good school over most CompSci grads. You are also wrong that they are expensive to produce. Science grads cost far more.

Sure, no dispute. But why spend a farthing on these history and philosophy grads if all they're going to be doing is checking out produce at a Sainsbury till? Come to think of it, why spend a farthing on physics and chemistry grads if there are no jobs for them either? If they think they can get a job with the degree, let them pay for it -- not have the taxpayer underwrite the venture. This would be a conservative argument -- and one I can buy as at least it's consistent with a conservative outlook.

Protectionism doesn't work for developed economies, and fule wot as dun history kno tha.

Au contraire: that's the way economies become developed in the first place. And that's the way they remain developed -- unless they start to heed the siren song of free-marketeers like Milton Friedman.

Millions of American jobs have been lost to offshoring. There are not millions of high-tech jobs for those displaced workers to turn to -- even if they had the means and ability to acquire high-tech skills.

 

[TraderJoe]

Well the solution to all the problems is really a simple two-step solution.
Step 1: Raise the retirement age to 75 years.
Step 2: Provide subsidies to the fast-food burger and pizza places. This has turned 70% of the population obese and this reduces life expectancy by 14 years from 79 years to 65 years.

Thus, if you have life expectancy at 65 years and retirement age at 75 years, statistically, 95% of the population will die before they retire. So only 5% of the population will retire and live off the government and reduce the government to bankruptcy through the medicare and social security programs. Just think about it. Everybody will be working hard until they drop dead, thanks to the fast food restaurants. This will quickly solve all the government's debt problems, reduce taxes and all the young working people can enjoy their lives without having to support 70 million retirees.

 

[AlgoCan]

[not trying to jump into the discussion of socialism vs free market approach to higher education (and the discussion on pensions) ]

I just wanted to point that the UK's coalition government's action has pros and cons which only time will tell was advantageous to UK or not:

UK universities have for some time played a profiteering approach (mis)using the discrepency of home (UK+EU) tuitions and overseas students. Here is a BBC article from "2008" (here):

" Degrees are being awarded to overseas students who speak almost no English, claims a whistleblowing academic."

"More than 60% of higher degree students are now from outside the UK.

Overseas students have been seen as a lucrative source of revenue - with the Higher Education Policy Institute calculating payments to universities of almost £1.5bn per year in fees plus £2.2bn in living costs. "

Note: UK's research councils (in engineering case, EPSRC) does not provide PhD funding for overseas students. Therefore, the only option a supervisor has to attract top overseas talent, is industry funding (currently almost non-existent) or self-paid students (but obviously, top students are unlikely to decide to pay for an expensive PhD and will move somewhere else). This has resulted to some low-quality graduates that actually are not looking to find jobs, but just buying degrees for back home where the employer highly regards overseas education or to be "managers" in mom-and-dad's outfit with a "PhD from UK".

Now, in its heydays this lucrative industry allowed Universities to fund their more rigorous scientific programs. I recall my supervisor telling me about a UCL EE faculty opening in 2007 where over 750 application were submitted, a good deal from recent graduates and assistant/associate profs from prestigious US Universities. Another example, i know of, is a 10-year contact-based Prof at Imperial EE department which was a high ranking R&D manager at Bell Labs in US. He was hired with a very high salary and a rent-free house near Imperial at Kensington. In other words, in the not-so-friendly post 9/11 US, and with economy starting to fall apart, UK was able to absorb academic talent, while producing only a small percentage high skilled graduates.

So, imo, there will be a balance between the number of graduates trained (there still will be russian and middle-east oil-money students), a higher quality of the training (as only the best academic practices will survive under funding cuts), and on the other hand the quality of brain-drain towards UK (or maybe from UK?).