Note: This blog article is a rant of opinons… so if you are not into rants this may not be the post for you. I have multiple other posts which may be interesting to you, and hopefully am going to be spending more time writing better posts in the future.
This post is purely from my point of view as a third year university student, and probably relates to my specific course at my specific university.
I don’t come from a family with financial struggles; I am lucky to not take a maintenance loan (I still take a student loan for my main university fees). Although I feel ‘ripped off’ or ‘taken advantage of’, I am not in a position of financial hardship because of it, which I acknowledge means I am in much less of a position to make complaints then many others.
By the time I leave university, assuming that I do take a placement year (with reduced fees) I’ll have been here for five years. I’ll have also managed to place myself in around a growing £45,000 worth of debt – and to a person who’s going be in need of a mortgage and start on a basic graduate salary, this is a pretty significant amount.
If I don’t pay much off in the first few years, i.e have a low salary, the interest on this will soon become insurmountable. That’s the problem with compound interest. The debt becomes exponentially bigger. The only good thing is that the amount that needs to be paid each year is capped at a certain percentage of salary.
Do I think University fees are worth it?
At the moment, no. Maybe it once was, but I believe this moment has passed and for the quality of education received, there are better deals with online courses. Coursera, Udacity, Masterclass, Brilliant… are just a few online-first learning platforms. These have full (sometimes degree level) courses, at a much lower cost. Open University also has many great degrees for lower costs, which since most students are studying online now would be no change for them.
I know… I am neglecting the fact that as a university student I have easy access to many lecturers at the forefront of their fields, and yes this is a benefit. Unfortunately the pandemic has had a disappointing effect on the standard of my teaching. As students, we were constantly informed that the standard of our teaching would stay constant to what it was before.
Before the pandemic most of my hours of learning were face to face. Now, I have one hour a week live lecturing (sometimes not even in person) for each of my modules. That’s around 6 hours a week, which for a STEM subject isn’t much. I know many department staff and lecturers are doing their best in this unknown period but what I am receiving, as a consumer, isn’t good enough.
My course has embraced the online learning approach, but as a side-effect this has allowed the reuse of previous years material again, and again. Some lecturers create one set of material and then reuse it with little to no effort (almost passive). We log on, we read the notes, we watch previous years materials, we almost self-teach. I’d understand the fees if our lecturers were teaching us this material live – I’d be paying for the contact hours. Instead, in effect I am mostly paying for previous years work.
If we are going to continue paying such fees, the quality of the online material will have to increase to be equivalent to online-first learning platforms. Universities should also be more open on what specific services our fees go to. It would be interesting to see the breakdown of the £9250 I pay with what exactly it pays for.
But it’s not debt… it’s a tax
To move the rant onwards, I’d like to comment on our lovely government planning the lowering of repayment income boundaries. I understand that unless you pay the whole loan back, it acts much more like a tax then a debt, and this makes the burden easier for students to handle. Rather then digging themselves out of a deep hole they can instead imagine giving a small portion of their pile of dirt back as a ‘thank you’ for the benefits that a University degree has given them.
Unfortunately… instead of University fees being reduced (or even staying as they are) it looks as if the government is attempting to lower the repayment boundaries, making new graduates even worse off. Interestingly (or maybe it should be expected), many of the people who think the fees repayments should be higher went through University when fees were lower. If the government is going to force the students to pay more they should at least ensure that Universities offer a high standard of teaching for this value, and should take into consideration what online-first platforms offer at a lower value.
Claiming reimbursement…
Another point I want to rant on, which was highlighted during the many petitions sent to parliament during the pandemic is making claims for reimbursement (or reduction in fees). The government constantly returned to the point that if students wanted a refund based on lost teaching quality the method for this was not to ask the government but to file an independent complaint. This seems to miss the point however. It is not an independent issue. All students are facing it.
Concluding points
I’m sure I have fallen into many grammatical and factual issues in this blog article, partly because it was a rant, and partly because I’m still not great at writing. If anyone reading notices any issues please let me know. I’m also open to reading other peoples opinions so if you leave a comment it would be appreciated.