Tuition Fees Are Ripping Off Students

A new report had said that students are being ripped off by a tuition fees system that encourages Mickey Mouse degrees.

Student loans should be overhauled to encourage universities to offer degrees that help their students land better-paid jobs when they leave, instead of subsidising creative arts degrees.

According to a report published by the think tank Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), universities are accused of being focused on increasing numbers of students rather than improving the quality of degrees.

It recommends that universities should in future hand out student loans themselves, rather than the Government, using cash lent to Whitehall.

At the end of their studies, students would repay their loans to their universities, making the institutions accountable for any shortfall from defaults.

The CPS believes the changes would force universities to concentrate on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses that award students with better pay once they get a job after their studies.

It would let funding be redirected from bad courses at bad universities to supporting high-cost courses in medicine or the STEM subjects, according to the CPS.

In the past, less rigorous subjects that are less important to the labour market have been branded Mickey Mouse courses, and universities might also choose to substitute some degrees with shorter or online-only courses which would be more affordable.

Average student debt now stands at £45,000 in England, but 54 per cent of the value of student loans is written off. These moves could save the Treasury as much as £7 billion since more students would be able to make enough money to repay their loans, the think tank claims.

The report also says that too many courses aren’t delivering for students or the country, and we now spend more subsidising creative arts than engineering.

CPS director Robert Colvile said that we must find ways to incentivise universities to do the best for their students, rather than for themselves and that these modifications will make the system self-funding and encourage more students to take up courses that mean both the individuals, and the country, will become better off in the future.

He added that as well as adding to the workforce of engineers, scientists and doctors, it will save the Treasury billions of pounds that could then be reinvested into the education system of the future.

This has, of course, been going on for years and there are numerous people out there with degrees in absolutely nothing but have paid a fortune for the opportunity, and most are working in call centres, et cetera.

It’s estimated that there are 3,400 forensic scientists in the whole of the United Kingdom, but the demand is finite, and that bodies such as the Forensic Science Service, the main public sector employer only take on at most 100 scientists a year, but it’s estimated that they get about 1,000 applications for each post.

Having degrees doesn’t mean that a person will have a meaningful career at the end of it, but they will probably be paying back their debt for a pretty long time, and the one I’ve heard the most is that they’re too qualified to do the job.

Sadly, universities have now become a business whose job is not to teach but to make as much money as possible, and the system needs to change with a long term view on education and training to meet the needs of the country.

Mickey Mouse degrees should be banned and those teaching them should be made to get a proper job because the sad thing is that so many of these youngsters will graduate with second rate degrees and will then be unemployable. It happens all the time where graduates spend three or four years at university and then end up working as baristas in their local coffee shop.

It was much better when there were apprenticeships where you learnt a skill that was in demand.