Quote:
Originally Posted by Maggy J
I do and I wouldn't IF I had had to pay tuition fees..This is my point entirely that many useful and highly intelligent possible future teachers,doctors,solicitors,research scientists,engineers etc are put right off because of tuition fees.I KNOW this for a fact as I see many students who won't even consider accepting the burden.A country gets the workforce it deserves if it won't pay the necessary basic funding for it..
However I don't want to derail this thread too far.
---------- Post added at 10:11 ---------- Previous post was at 10:08 ----------
Thanks for the link.  |
If the level of commitment is such that if a few thousand pounds extra, ignoring the prodigious maintenance loans, is too much to invest in their future perhaps it's best they don't follow that course. My wife took her degree, tuition fees and all, on without a second thought or a moment's hesitation because it's what she wanted to do. It's a fairly simple equation and if the frankly fairly small tuition fee scares people away one has to question their dedication, especially if it is specifically tuition as you suggest rather than maintenance loan and other costs that is the issue.
If you want tuition fees have a look at
this.
The experiences of Canada, the USA, Australia and several other countries throughout the world would appear to disagree that tuition fees are a critical impediment to educating the work force. The amount of people piling into university to study a variety of somewhat precariously relevant courses appears to suggest it isn't greatly dissuading people.
No-one likes paying but they can either take out a loan and pay it back on a means tested basis or pay higher taxes later. They pay either way with the difference that one way takes account of ability to pay while the other to an extent does not.
Winding this into the thread I find the Tories' suggestion of keeping tuition fees but expanding bursaries far more realistic than the abolition of tuition fees which was the point I was trying to make somewhere along the line, that with finances as they will be for the foreseeable future tuition fees will at best be held static.