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I feel sorry for the police over these stupid moronic students who don’t even know what their marching about, just taking a day off University to cause trouble, full of low social class youths who have no morals brought up by a broken family background attending poor Universities shouldn’t have the right to represent those students who are more intelligent and know what they’re talking about.
These students deserve to get battered
Why is Charles & Camilla’s car getting kicked international breaking news? That just swung me in favor of the protesters.
Seriously though, I completely understand how angry these students are, and I don’t think raising tuition (how is that even the government’s job?) is a good idea for reducing the debt. These may be lower class youths, but they’re lower class youths trying to get an education, which no matter how bad the university is, is the best way to get out of their situation. Education is the one area that should never have cuts in even the most austere budget.
Good decision IMO.
Absolutely disgusted by the ones who are jumping on the bandwagon of what should have been peaceful protests and turning things nasty. They need to get a life, accept decisions and get on with it.
A lot of wasted energy, policing time etc, etc…all those people could have been doing something useful today clearing snow and ice with shovels and helping people who are struggling in these poor conditions.
Makes me sick, and they’re not all from the background you suggest Mr Wilson, just you talking utter bollocks again.
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What I don’t understand is why your average 9-5 worker is getting their backs up about paying student fees, for one; we’re the ones that have to pay these fees back and two we have to pay tax like anyone else on top of our loan debts when we get a job so where’s your problem? without graduates the society wouldn’t work with the labour market, we need inspirational entrepreneurs like myself.
If you’re such the inspirational entrepreneur you say you are then you will have absolutely no problems at all. 21k a year will be absolute peanuts to you and you will pay back your debt with ease in no time.
So why are you getting your back up over having to pay it back?
Why should the pay of the binman and the barista subsidise the University education of those destined to earn much higher wages than them thanks to that University education? Is that fair? Is that what the socialist hot-heads want? The poor subsidising the rich?
Why should I pay for Phillip Green’s tax avoidance scheme, Insomniac. 1.2 billion pounds. Why should I pay for Richard Branson’s tax avoidance scheme, Insomniac?
Substitute a hundred billionaires, maybe a thousand others for those two names, Insomniac.
When Mandelson confronted Michael Smurfit about tax in 2008, and Smurfit said, "if you charge me one percent more tax for living in London, I’ll move back to Dublin", why didn’t he say, "okay, then. Move back." And then see what he did.
You’re really selective in your arguments, Insomniac. You have been for five years since I’ve been here. You pick and choose your spots like a football hooligan kicking the crap out of a shirter near a train station.
My son now has a choice after tonight. He either goes to university and comes out owing £30k. Or he gets a trade and owes nothing, without any of the life enrichment, the worldview enhancement, the interaction and the sheer beauty of higher education he would have had by going to university.
He objected to me using Keele University as an example in my last post as they’ve done their utmost to encourage he and his fellow students to enrol there. I’d rather him van drive than go there, guvnor, *doffs cap* which is essentially what you and the Coalition wants, even though he averages 7’s all over the place.
I want my son to go to one of the redbricks or the Rowing Universities. Sheer economics, not snobbery. He’s clever enough and nice enough and why should some rich kid get subsidised by his parents even though my kid is cleverer and smarter?
You cannot answer that, Insomniac.
Every binman or barista I know – and I know a lot more than you do, Insomniac – would be happy for him. I know, because I actually speak to them. Being a non-internet, lower division team, community punter and all that.
Wouldn’t you? I’d be happy for your daughter, or Zamorston’s offspring, if education were free or a lot cheaper than the fee after today.
The work he will do – teaching, training, public service, social work etc – would have paid for his education over and over again. Why should he have to pay for the lot? And why should he have to pay for the same education a rich kid experiences? You’re just not answering it, Insomniac.
we need inspirational entrepreneurs like myself.
.. the cleverest kids in the country won’t go to Uni, I don’t care personally. The lib dems lied to get elected they should resubmit their manifesto and stand for re-election.
How is the window cleaing round anyway, hope you didn’t sign on in the bad weather lol.
Max – Points made very well as ever.
I’m just trying to see it from both sides. I work hard for a living and pay my taxes and always have done since leaving school, to be totally honest it doesn’t bother me either way if I pay towards a students further education or whether they pay it themselves.
What I can understand and apprecaite is the country is in a dire financial situation and cutbacks are having to be made across the board. It is a stone wall certainty that people will be unhappy in all walks of life.
I don’t really see it as all doom and gloom for anyone who wants to go into further education with the decision made today. It may sound daunting to begin with, but from the way I understand it to work it isn’t going to financially cripple anyone for the rest of their lives.
£7 a month (is it?) that’s the cost of a couple of pints a month, not much really in the grand scheme of things.
My daughter is 10 in a couple of weeks and what I try and instill into her is that you have to work hard in life to achieve anything and you get nothing for nothing.
If she gets to the point your son is at and she wanted it enough, I would encourage her to go for it.
I’ve already experienced all kinds of living in my life so far, I was brought up in a coucil estate in a broken home, My Dad not so skilled but going from job to job and working his nuts off to support me and my sister with his partner, while my Mum was much more successful and along with my Stepdad were earning together well in excess of six figure salaries living in a lovely area (Stoke Poges) in a 650k house.
I left home and did the few years living with mates and for a few dark years experienced total rock bottom, and I mean rock bottom. Just one step up from being homeless, struggling to eat at times and blowing my wage on drinking, gambling, etc…
I’ve been in my current job 14 years now and after leaving school with no qualifications, other than common sense, reliability and a great work ethic (from my old man) I’m not doing bad for myself at all. I’m currently earning about 6k a year more than my older sister who got 8 straight A’s at school and went onto further education.
Since leaving school I’ve had to go through plenty of hard times and I’m still not where I want to be really, but I see light at the end of the tunnel in about 4/5 years if we carry on as we are at the moment.
The point I’m trying to get across is it may take 5/10 years of your life to get yourself into a good financial positition and I would encourage my daughter to go for that further eduacation and work hard to pay it back and then reap the benefits of a decent salary for many years after that.
I think you apprecaite the finer things in life when you get a bit older anyway, and if things carry on going the way they are for me, like I say in 4/5 years I’ll be just shy of 40 and in a happy place.
Maxilon, in response to your earlier post:-
1)Why should I pay for Phillip Green’s tax avoidance scheme, Insomniac. 1.2 billion pounds. Why should I pay for Richard Branson’s tax avoidance scheme, Insomniac
Of course you shouldn’t. If anyone – whether billionaire or binman – illegally avoids paying tax, then that is wrong. I’ve never said I approved of crime have I? Just because some people may get away with breaking the law, is no excuse for everyone to believe that they too should be allowed to break the law. We both seem to agree on this point (that we should all pay our due taxes). Your conflation is that those that don’t – and get away with it – means everyone else has some moral defence for not paying theirs either. So, should we all just stop paying taxes?
2)You’re really selective in your arguments, Insomniac
Yes; guilty as charged. Absolutely no point in posting on things that I have no opinion on. So, we agree on that too.
3)My son now has a choice after tonight. He either goes to university and comes out owing £30k.
Well, that’s just it – "he has a choice." (whether the debt was zero, 10k, 20k or 30k.) (And he’s always had a choice – except that that choice is harder now; university education was never compulsory.) The state support education through taxation to age 18. After that, no; the student has to find some of the cost of tertairy education themselves. If an 18 year old decides he wants to become a plumber or bricklayer or barista or binman or clerk should the taxpayer pay for that training too? Or is it okay by you for the poor to pay their taxes to fund the educational elite 30% or so at Uni but not to fund the training of those in "menial" jobs? Can that attitude be called egalitarian or socialist?
Of course it’s galling that tertiary education was once free – especially for the politicians who introduced University fees (Blair, Brown,Millibands, Balls, Harman etc.). But that’s how it is. You and your son have to take a chance. Does he gamble on taking on a debt (which doesn’t have to be repaid until he earns £21k and then only at a modest rate etc. etc.) through going to university in the hope that by gaining a degree, the employment he gets afterwards will compensate? It’s a tough call, and one that I and many others are having to make now. In life one sometimes has to make choices, it’s unavoidable. My daughter’s 17 and, even though our household income is modest, I’ve always encouraged her to reach for the top and get the best education she can and worry about the loan/debt afterwards. (But not too much as the conditions aren’t onerous, no matter what the Socialist Worker / anarchist NUS big-mouths spout. Youngsters – and their parents – should listen to wiser council than those.)
4)…and why should some rich kid get subsidised by his parents even though my kid is cleverer and smarter?
You cannot answer that, Insomniac.You can’t avoid the rich spending money on the betterment of their loved ones.(Wouldn’t you do just the same if you were a millionaire?) It’s a simple as that, and viewing life through the prism of jealousy and class envy is counter-productive.
As for education? Well, private schools are here to stay – whether we like it or not. Ban them (as the Socialists among us might argue) and they’ll just send their kids overseas and maybe we’ll (the UK) lose the talent, skills, employment and brains that they might bring.
As for tertiary education, I get the impression that you think stupid rich kids will get into Uni whereas poor bright kids won’t. That’s not true. As I’m sure you know, Uni’s demand certain levels of exam grades in order to qualify for a University course. Nowhere on the criteria does it say anything like "need 3 A’s or can be as thick as pig sh1T if daddy earns over 2 million" – does it? So my daughter and your son will not lose out to less well educated kids because they’re from a wealthier family. Everyone offered a place on a University course will need to have obtained pre-set exam grades; wealth doesn’t come into it. (Paying off debt is of course helped when family are rolling in it – but you are totally wrong to say that dim rich kid gets a place at expense of clever poor kid.)
5)Every binman or barista I know – and I know a lot more than you do, Insomniac
Well, you can’t possibly know that – but I’m not going to enter into an "I’m more working class than you" type debate. Let’s just say that if you think my views mark me out as someone not from a working-class background then you’re wrong. But being working class doesn’t mean I must only listen to one side of every argument. There are opinions worth reading and listening too beyond the Daily Mirror / Guardian type papers and the BBC.
What saddens me most about this whole University Fee saga, as I’ve said before, is that it scares working class parents from daring to be ambitious for their children. It frightens them into thinking that £30k or so debt effectively stymies their offspring from having educational (and thus possibly higher paid employemnt) ambitions.
The fees and repayment plans put forward by the coalition are NOT a deterrent to bright kids from whatever background going to university. The poverty of ambition of many of the working-class is the real deterrent. And this, fuelled by the misrepresentaion, scare-stories and hyperbole of the Socialist Worker/anarchist/NUS-lefties is thereal danger
to working class childrens’ betterment.
Per Shakespeare – "Our doubts are our traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win for fearing to attempt" – or something like that. Tell your son to go for it and not to hide behind the rock of mis-informed lefty class-envy hyperbole that gets too much publicity and hides the reality and, in doing so, does working-class kids like my daughter and your son no favours at all.Worth a read…
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielknowles/100067809/the-nus-is-an-irrelevance-staffed-by-careerist-labour-sympathisers-elected-on-a-joke-turnout/Mr Wilson and co might also like to read this…
What’s particularly galling about the air of righteousness that some of the student protestors exhibit is that we now know the National Union of Students would prefer maintenance grants to be cut than for tuition fees to be raised. According to a story in the Telegraph this morning, Aaron Porter, the leader of the NUS, wrote to Vince Cable earlier this year in which he proposed that student grants be cut by 61% over the next four years and that students be charged a higher rate of interest on loans. The NUS also proposed that £2.4 billion be cut from the universities’ teaching budget over the next four years, a reduction of 48%.
In short, the NUS would prefer the government to drastically cut support for low income students, making it much harder for people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds to go to university, than to raise tuition fees. I have long suspected that Aaron Porter and his cronies don’t care tuppence about the difficulties young people from low income families face when it comes to funding their tertiary education and here is the proof. All they care about is protecting the financial interests of an
Don’t hear too much about that angle on the BBC or in the Daily Mirror or Guardian I suspect.
Full article at:-
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100067521/the-student-protesters-are-morally-indistinguishable-from-merchant-bankers/from the way I understand it to work it isn’t going to financially cripple anyone for the rest of their lives.
£7 a month (is it?) that’s the cost of a couple of pints a month, not much really in the grand scheme of things.
If that were true and assuming fee of 9k a year and a maintence grant of 5k a year to live off it would take 535 years to pay off
Rather, the proposal is for the loans to be paid back at 9% of income from those earning over £21,500 a year. – plus 3% per year interest.
So, again assuming the above, the repayments would be £161 a month – every month – for 34 years.
Maybe not a crippling debt but a sobering one.
Yeah, thought that didn’t sound right after I posted it, just that I’ve heard the figure £7 a month mentioned somewhere.
Still don’t see that as earth shattering though to anyone who has a positive outlook on their future and is prepared to put the graft in to get the later rewards and end up on a decent salary.
At the end of the day I was paying me old man that much a month about 17 years ago when I got my first paid job and I thought that was harsh but got on with it.
As the students will have to!
Totally agree with a lot of what Insomniac just posted above, he gets the main points across much better than I, the bit about plumbers etc, I couldn’t agree with more!
the proposal is for the loans to be paid back at 9% of income from those earning over £21,500 a year. – plus 3% per year interest.
So, again assuming the above, the repayments would be £161 a month – every month – for 34 years.
.. thanks for working that out Pete, it’s always nice to have the facts to hand.
The fees and repayment plans put forward by the coalition are NOT a deterrent to bright kids from whatever background going to university.
LOL .. what planet are you on?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/8194206/How-much-will-you-pay-for-a-university-education.html
As the final details of the loan/repayment scheme have yet to settled, I’m reluctant to believe any figures quoted by right, left or indifferent. £161 per month? (Chunky but not existence threatening surely?) This figure I guess (correct me if I’m wrong) assumes a person always remains on the same salary throughout their working career. If they fall below it (£21k) they pay nowt, and repayments would lessen if income lessened but was still above £21k.
Well, maybe, maybe not.
A glimpse at the above article shows how complicated it is to discern just who pays how much and at what rate over what period. The piece, although in theDaily Telegraph
does highlight the scheme’s shortcomings and attempts to make sense out of what’s been proposed so far. It tries to point out the possible bad and good points of the proposals.
For a real analysis of why would-be students should be rioting, I suggest a read of:-
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/katharinebirbalsingh/100066838/yes-students-should-be-protesting-%E2%80%93-against-university-courses-that-arent-worth-paying-for/
I know it’s a pain in the arxe having to connect to a link but this is really food for thought for teenagers and their parents – Maxilion would surely find it worthwhile as a parent of a bright son. Her intro is a bit flowery but the nitty gritty is as follows:-
"..Cameron doesn’t seem to grasp that no matter what he says these students are not going to stop marching, because the answer to the question of whether or not they should pay for higher education is simple: “NO.”I happen to agree with the students’ stance, of course, but not their reasoning. They are simply asking the wrong question. They should be asking: Is what we’re buying worth paying for? Isn’t that the most important thing? Frankly, as customers, these students are absolutely right to be outraged because the knowledge and skills, legitimised by their diplomas, are not worth the paper they’re written on. That is because some universities can no longer prepare young people properly for the workplace, as they once did, and that is because secondary schools are not getting children ready for university. And this, not the fees, is what students should be protesting about."
Is what we’re buying worth paying for?
That is what would be students and their parents should be asking.
I think for a student to finish uni and go straight into work they probably need to have done a four year course which includes a year in industry of some kind. Nottingham Trent [the best of what used to be the polys that were ‘upgraded’] is one of the best of it’s kind for this, having good links with industry; also Loughborough. Even teachers, having obtained their degree, have to do a further year without pay whilst training to teach. How many kids can afford four years of student loans etc? I know that, over the past few years, too many school leavers with bad grades have gone on to bad universities to do Mickey Mouse degrees but, as I said before, where, in the future are our teachers and engineers going to come from? The whole thing needs to be thought through a lot more carefully, because I don’t know where all this is leading to. We’re turning more and more into a third rate country, and the basis for everything is a good education system [along with a good health service; but that’s another story].
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