UK Politics Thread XII: The Lockdown

[Fartsniffage]

Don't be dense. If you're in a family that lives from paycheque to paycheque then amassing that kind of debt is daunting. Try to imagine you're not loaded, I'm sure you can get it.

When I was going from school to university, we had a woman in from the local uni who explained how the student loan system worked. She was very clear that what happened was that a small amount of your income would be garnished in order to pay for it and that it wasn't like an ordinary debt. The initial fear might be uncomfortable, but it's not like they don't try as hard as possible to get it into peoples heads that it's not going to cause them problems.

That maybe you are dense. Or at least have a lack of imagination. Either way you're back on my ignore list.

[Gormwood]

Don't be dense. If you're in a family that lives from paycheque to paycheque then amassing that kind of debt is daunting. Try to imagine you're not loaded, I'm sure you can get it.

When I was going from school to university, we had a woman in from the local uni who explained how the student loan system worked. She was very clear that what happened was that a small amount of your income would be garnished in order to pay for it and that it wasn't like an ordinary debt. The initial fear might be uncomfortable, but it's not like they don't try as hard as possible to get it into peoples heads that it's not going to cause them problems.

Income during a pandemic? Really?

[Celritannia]

Now explain what makes those regulations actually objectively bad.

Free tuition? I used to believe in it, however then I began to wonder why my friends who didn't go to university should fund my degree. It's also something Scotland can't afford.
Smoking bans are wrong as they restrict the liberty not just of the patron but of the business owner.
Kragholm pointed out what's wrong with the minimum unit pricing.

Ah yes, because it didn't work during the 70s

[Celritannia]

Don't be dense. If you're in a family that lives from paycheque to paycheque then amassing that kind of debt is daunting. Try to imagine you're not loaded, I'm sure you can get it.

When I was going from school to university, we had a woman in from the local uni who explained how the student loan system worked. She was very clear that what happened was that a small amount of your income would be garnished in order to pay for it and that it wasn't like an ordinary debt. The initial fear might be uncomfortable, but it's not like they don't try as hard as possible to get it into peoples heads that it's not going to cause them problems.

You truly do not understand how the majority of people have to suffer because of unexpected payments.

[Thanatttynia]

An argument for free university tuition on the basis that society benefits from many university graduates would be easier to swallow if it was shown society benefits from many university graduates

[Celritannia]

An argument for free university tuition on the basis that society benefits from many university graduates would be easier to swallow if it was shown society benefits from many university graduates

Again, it worked in the 70s, it can work today.

[Greed and Death]

An argument for free university tuition on the basis that society benefits from many university graduates would be easier to swallow if it was shown society benefits from many university graduates

Again, it worked in the 70s, it can work today.

No it was Thatcher who fixed the economy then.

[Thanatttynia]

An argument for free university tuition on the basis that society benefits from many university graduates would be easier to swallow if it was shown society benefits from many university graduates

Again, it worked in the 70s, it can work today.

What exactly worked in the 70s ..?

[The New California Republic]

Please don't rise to it guys.

[Dumb Ideologies]

In a more socially functional economy you'd have closer ties between higher education and on-the-job training and rather than loans you'd have the government and the relevant industry fund them directly as part of on an obligation from the state's ownership stake in every business.

The number of places would be based on the projected needs of the economy, each sector would have their own exam developed by the government-industry partnership, and if you don't get one of the places for your area of work you don't get to study it.

There's an extent to which the expansion of higher education has been used as a way to massage unemployment figures and sold as an aspirational "product" where going has status in and of itself. Which has produced debt, inflation in qualifications required for relatively mid-range jobs, and this widespread weird transition into adulthood via a space which has often wildly different values to the outside society.

[CoraSpia]

When I was going from school to university, we had a woman in from the local uni who explained how the student loan system worked. She was very clear that what happened was that a small amount of your income would be garnished in order to pay for it and that it wasn't like an ordinary debt. The initial fear might be uncomfortable, but it's not like they don't try as hard as possible to get it into peoples heads that it's not going to cause them problems.

You truly do not understand how the majority of people have to suffer because of unexpected payments.

I guess there's a good chance I honestly do not know how the student loans system works. Does it function like a normal loan then?

[An Alan Smithee Nation]

Thinking in terms of reducing NEETs had bad consequences. If it becomes a conveyor belt where nearly everyone goes straight from school to university, the value of degrees to employers becomes diminished. Then you will need a degree to sweep the streets, and PhD to become a data entry clerk. You can reduce the number of people going to university either by making the qualifying threshold higher or by making it more expensive. If you make it more expensive, it benefits rich stupid people. If you raise the qualifying threshold but make it cheap to study, you get clever people from all walks of life getting the education they benefit from, clearly a superior solution.

[CoraSpia]

Thinking in terms of reducing NEETs had bad consequences. If it becomes a conveyor belt where nearly everyone goes straight from school to university, the value of degrees to employers becomes diminished. Then you will need a degree to sweep the streets, and PhD to become a data entry clerk. You can reduce the number of people going to university either by making the qualifying threshold higher or by making it more expensive. If you make it more expensive, it benefits rich stupid people. If you raise the qualifying threshold but make it cheap to study, you get clever people from all walks of life getting the education they benefit from, clearly a superior solution.

I do believe the entry threshold should be raised. You shouldn't be able to get into university with 3 Ds at a-levels.

[Ostroeuropa]

Thinking in terms of reducing NEETs had bad consequences. If it becomes a conveyor belt where nearly everyone goes straight from school to university, the value of degrees to employers becomes diminished. Then you will need a degree to sweep the streets, and PhD to become a data entry clerk. You can reduce the number of people going to university either by making the qualifying threshold higher or by making it more expensive. If you make it more expensive, it benefits rich stupid people. If you raise the qualifying threshold but make it cheap to study, you get clever people from all walks of life getting the education they benefit from, clearly a superior solution.

I do believe the entry threshold should be raised. You shouldn't be able to get into university with 3 Ds at a-levels.

This will mean some universities end up closing because they cater to students who didn't perform well at school and specialize in getting them at least functionally educated for their chosen field.

You cannot get into many universities without good marks. The ones you can get into with bad marks, that's like, what those are for. It's what they do.

Thinking in terms of reducing NEETs had bad consequences. If it becomes a conveyor belt where nearly everyone goes straight from school to university, the value of degrees to employers becomes diminished. Then you will need a degree to sweep the streets, and PhD to become a data entry clerk. You can reduce the number of people going to university either by making the qualifying threshold higher or by making it more expensive. If you make it more expensive, it benefits rich stupid people. If you raise the qualifying threshold but make it cheap to study, you get clever people from all walks of life getting the education they benefit from, clearly a superior solution.

The issue is that beyond the Big Two, I don't think employers tend to actually scrutinize the universities.

I'm in the best university in the country (yes, above oxford and Cambridge) for my chosen field, but I can bet you no fucker is going to know that unless I tell them myself and I may as well have gone to the worst one.

This is why the degrees are becoming devalued, because employers are too lazy to find out the differing values between the degrees.

[CoraSpia]

I do believe the entry threshold should be raised. You shouldn't be able to get into university with 3 Ds at a-levels.

This will mean some universities end up closing because they cater to students who didn't perform well at school and specialize in getting them at least functionally educated for their chosen field.

You cannot get into many universities without good marks. The ones you can get into with bad marks, that's like, what those are for. It's what they do.

So they take 9000 pounds from students while not gaining those students a substancial return on investment? It seems like what these universities do is lie to students in order to make more money for themselves.

[Ostroeuropa]

This will mean some universities end up closing because they cater to students who didn't perform well at school and specialize in getting them at least functionally educated for their chosen field.

You cannot get into many universities without good marks. The ones you can get into with bad marks, that's like, what those are for. It's what they do.

So they take 9000 pounds from students while not gaining those students a substancial return on investment? It seems like what these universities do is lie to students in order to make more money for themselves.

It's always a good return on the investment so long as it gets you a job.

The issue with student loans is that it spooks people into not applying because they don't want to take on the debt, it's not an issue with it being a rip-off per se, it's that people in economically precarious situations don't want the added risk. This Is despite that risk being managed and mitigated by the nature of our student loan programmes.

I'm personally ambivalent on student financing from a socialist perspective, because frankly the notion that people who didn't go to university should pay for it strikes me as dubious. But I do support state financing on nationalistic basis, our universities current financial situation has influenced their curriculums such that they don't piss off foreign dictatorships who send them money for overseas students. Most notably with China and its influence on foreign affairs, politics, history, and Chinese studies. The whole "In 1989 in Tiananmen square, nothing happened. This will be on the test" problem.

Targetted state financing might be the best of both worlds. We can push financing towards degrees that are susceptible to that kind of foreign interference, and we can push it towards degrees in industries the UK has a lack of available talent in and which serve the public good like doctors and teachers.

But why someone should pay for a marketing degree for someone else is a harder sell for me, and I think Dumb Ideologies has hit the nail on the head there. The industries in question should foot the bill rather than the public.

[Dumb Ideologies]

Universities are in a very odd place because they're partly a business, partly based in ideals of "for the sake of learning itself", and partly a glorified daycare providing busywork while people handle the kidulthood transition.

If we're doing this based on some rarified notion of expanding people's minds then loans don't make sense because they're more about yields on investments and they're contrary logics if it's a good in itself. If it's a business then just load them up with high-paying foreign students and if you want more of them change course content to meet their ideological requirements. If we're doing this to transition people into adults then the divergence between mainstream society and campus culture is a problem. If we're doing it for the job market then what the economy needs is the priority and for some courses where there's far more people than directly related jobs then loans aren't a very good financial bet.

What are universities supposed to be doing? Policy is messy because we're trying to pat heads, rub bellies and juggle all at the same time.

[Celritannia]

You truly do not understand how the majority of people have to suffer because of unexpected payments.

I guess there's a good chance I honestly do not know how the student loans system works. Does it function like a normal loan then?

Not the point, but w/e.

[Thanatttynia]

Our university problem stems, as people have said^, from corporate control. Institutions which ought to be places of scholarship are run like businesses. (The same problem exists with charities and churches.) 'My house is meant to be a house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.' This serves no-one. Worthless degrees make it harder, sometimes impossible, for those with and without degrees to find appropriate employment. A whole host of profound societal problems are caused by elite over-production. Our discourse is so deeply fucked that to challenge the university industry is seen as holding down the poor, preventing social mobility, when in actual fact the effect of an elite-in-excess is to make all class sectors downwardly mobile except the super-rich, insulated from national problems by their wealth and globalism.

[Celritannia]

For the 6th largest economy in the world, this is sickening.

[Thanatttynia]

Thinking in terms of reducing NEETs had bad consequences. If it becomes a conveyor belt where nearly everyone goes straight from school to university, the value of degrees to employers becomes diminished. Then you will need a degree to sweep the streets, and PhD to become a data entry clerk. You can reduce the number of people going to university either by making the qualifying threshold higher or by making it more expensive. If you make it more expensive, it benefits rich stupid people. If you raise the qualifying threshold but make it cheap to study, you get clever people from all walks of life getting the education they benefit from, clearly a superior solution.

This is the optimal solution for now. Govt should fund a top percentage of students, possibly from each LEA by population or even school/college to prevent concentration amongst the metropolitan middle and upper-middle class. But there must also be a commitment to reducing the numbers of students attending university in total, and of course better provision for vocational training that amounts to more than a vague commitment to apprenticeships (i.e. bring back those local polytechnics and technical schools - destroyed in the 90s - that people can attend to gain training from home and whilst working.)

But we must not simply replace new universities with polytechnics and so replicate the binary divide... vocational employment, from accounting to engineering to law, should not require university or equivalent education. In the longer term this will hopefully make the university bureaucracies unsustainable and increase the quality of our degrees and scholars, providing our universities are not allowed to simply replace their loss of income from British students with foreign students.

[Celritannia]

Our university problem stems, as people have said^, from corporate control. Institutions which ought to be places of scholarship are run like businesses. (The same problem exists with charities and churches.) 'My house is meant to be a house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.' This serves no-one. Worthless degrees make it harder, sometimes impossible, for those with and without degrees to find appropriate employment. A whole host of profound societal problems are caused by elite over-production. Our discourse is so deeply fucked that to challenge the university industry is seen as holding down the poor, preventing social mobility, when in actual fact the effect of an elite-in-excess is to make all class sectors downwardly mobile except the super-rich, insulated from national problems by their wealth and globalism.

Not all universities. Metropolitan Universities were established to help average people gain a university degree.

But we have advanced as a society, we do not need business to be the main ethic for university application.
Everyrone deserves the right to education.

A more healthy and educated society, the better the economy.
What exactly is a worthless degree though?

[The Notorious Mad Jack]

An argument for free university tuition on the basis that society benefits from many university graduates would be easier to swallow if it was shown society benefits from many university graduates

University graduates are less likely to commit crime, engage in damaging public health activities, and show greater social cohesion, trust and tolerance, amongst other benefits as detailed in this 2013 report for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

[Celritannia]

Thinking in terms of reducing NEETs had bad consequences. If it becomes a conveyor belt where nearly everyone goes straight from school to university, the value of degrees to employers becomes diminished. Then you will need a degree to sweep the streets, and PhD to become a data entry clerk. You can reduce the number of people going to university either by making the qualifying threshold higher or by making it more expensive. If you make it more expensive, it benefits rich stupid people. If you raise the qualifying threshold but make it cheap to study, you get clever people from all walks of life getting the education they benefit from, clearly a superior solution.

This is the optimal solution for now. Govt should fund a top percentage of students, possibly from each LEA by population or even school/college to prevent concentration amongst the metropolitan middle and upper-middle class. But there must also be a commitment to reducing the numbers of students attending university in total, and of course better provision for vocational training that amounts to more than a vague commitment to apprenticeships (i.e. bring back those local polytechnics and technical schools - destroyed in the 90s - that people can attend to gain training from home and whilst working.)

But we must not simply replace new universities with polytechnics and so replicate the binary divide... vocational employment, from accounting to engineering to law, should not require university or equivalent education. In the longer term this will hopefully make the university bureaucracies unsustainable and increase the quality of our degrees and scholars, providing our universities are not allowed to simply replace their loss of income from British students with foreign students.

Every citizen should have the ability to go to university if they wish.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

For the 6th largest economy in the world, this is sickening.

Tories cant feed Britain
News at 11