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Top Up Fees are coming into 'fewer hours'
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Ok so the idea of top up fees was to 'improve' universities right? So how does giving students less hours for paying more improve their chances of doing well? Top up fees are a joke and this is more so.
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It’s misleading to imply any connection between a drop in tuition hours and the introduction of top-up fees. You’re surely not seriously trying to argue that top-up fees have not improved universities and have in fact worsened them.
While British universities are the best in Europe they risk falling further behind US unis and Australian unis are beginning to rival our universities. We can either simply allow our universities to become like many of those in Europe – underfunded, inferior in every sense to US unis but free to attend. Or we can try and maintain decent unis by funding them properly.
And funding has got to come from somewhere and there ain’t a magical unlimited pot of money. Given that for many careers a university education is not essential and that for those that do attend university they will probably earn more than their counterparts who didn’t it seems fair that students going to uni should have to pay a bit for their education. And £3,000 a year is still a fraction of what it really costs – the government is still largely subsidising the cost. It’s unjustifiable to expect people on low wages to pay more on the basic income tax rate to fund high-flyers doing law degrees or timewasters doing mickey mouse degrees.
Topup fees probably don’t go far enough but it’s a move in the right direction. And lets not forget students on low incomes still get a grant from the government and in many cases a bursary from the university. Topup fees mostly affect the middle class and the rich the greatest – before top up fees the middle classes got a helping hand up the career ladder subsidised by the state, now they’re having to pay their way which is only fair. The people just over the threshold to get a grant but not exactly financially comfortable do lose out but there are bursaries and scholarships from universities available – and further nobody has to pay anything back until they graduate and are in employment.