Student Tuition Fees

As the country prepares for more civil unrest from the nations students I thought I would blog my views on the subject of tuition fees. (Although I doubt anyone will care.)

Anyway, My opinion on this is that why should Students not pay for their own education? surely if someone is to pay it should be the person who benefits? that is just common sense. I have a degree in Politics and Government which I did to improve myself, why should anyone else pay for this? It is my life, my higher earning potential, my cost!

I did not go into the degree thinking the country owed me the right to study, I also worked full time whilst I was studying to keep my bills paid. For some reason though a lot of these Students seem to think that as the country needs doctors they are doing the country a favour; I wounder how many people would be going through Medschool if the wage of a Doctor was capped to Average Wage? perhaps that is what the students would prefer - all jobs to have the same pay level - I would wager that many of the popular courses today would be empty in no time.

Also it is not as if Student debt is real debt, real debt is relentless, it doesn't wait for you to be able to afford it. I have had real debt issues and managed them whilst earning below 10k a year, so I am hard pressed to feel sympathy for those who complain that they will have debt on twice that amount.

My last point on this is that, as seems to be known to everyone outside of Student populations and Government, There are too many people going to university, this is again as it is considered a right not a privilege, a privilege that should not be based on wealth, but on ability, but a privilege none the less.

Uni Courses to be Rated

There is an article in the Daily Mail today which suggests that universities are soon going to have to give a rating for each of their courses, The ratings will be in the fields of Teaching Quality, Salary Prospects, Tuition time and Value for Money. This is a plan that has come down from the Higher Education Funding Quango, although I am usually against Quangos as I see that they give very little benefit for the costs, and especially at the moment when they seem to be desperately trying to justify their own existence ahead of the spending review in the Autumn, but I think this has real merit. It is a massive choice what you will study at university with the time either being the cementing of a lifelong career path or simply the wasting of three years before you end up not knowing what you want to do and still working in burger king. Myself I have a degree in politics which does not come in very handy in my career as a Database Engineer – this is perhaps one reason I became involved in local politics, to try and justify my degree.

Obviously these statistics being available on a comparisons website will not stop subject fatigue (I know someone who spent 7 years studying for a PHD in Palaeontology only to realise that she never wanted to dig in a dusty ditch again, and now runs a florist in London.) it will finally help potential students realise that the degree in Klingon or Facebook studies is not going to be the key to a long and successful career.

Early morning lecture; Economic lntegration, Wages and Equality.

I decided to dig out some of my old university lectures on CD this morning to listen to on the way to work. It was an interesting lecture looking at the effects of trade liberalisation on the equality of outcome in developing countries.

The main thrust of the debate was around standard integration theory and it's application to debates of opening up trade into Latin America, this is a very interesting idea as it would appear that when trade in Mexico was liberalised it was assumed that the effect would be the same as other developing countries, however unlike East Asia Latin America does not have an excess of unskilled labour, instead it is a semi-skilled area.

In integration theory it is a widely accepted fact that the abundant resource benefits and the scarce resource losses out, in developed countries that means that the unskilled workers lose out and the skilled workers gain, and vice versa in East Asia, this is where, in developed states, taxation comes in to redistribute resources to the most vulnerable. In the developing country the burden falls on the better off who are much better able to diversify and adapt.

The problem with Mexico however is that they do not have an abundance of unskilled workers and as a result the unskilled workers lose out, and in a middle income country the taxation and administration system is not developed enough to cope.

Of cause as a strong believer in capitalism and its key role in removing inequality in the global market place I was delighted to discover that despite these miss calculations the percentage of people living in poverty still fell, just not by as much as expected.