A local alternative newspaper stated that the US is “just about the only” developed nation that does not provide tuition-free college education for its citizens. I want to ask those who live in such countries (British need not answer)if that is true in their respective countries. “Just about the only” to me indicates a lack of research and someone stating something off the cuff. But it may be true.
(I was only kidding about you British folk.)
This depends on several things in the UK.
Time was when all you had to do was get the right grades and apply to the Universities and off you went.You claimed a state grant to pay for your smester living expenses and off semester you could claim unemployment benefit.
In those days the income of your family was not taken into account either.
This may seem very egalitarian but in practice university palces were limited and the imperative for the majority of working folk was to get employment and gain skills as fast as possible, such people could only go to college as part of their apprenticeships and the like.
The better off, the children of managerial and proffessional grades benefitted disproportionally from this system.
Time moves on first to the 60’s and an expansion in higher education.University palces are still hard to obtain but there are a large number of vocational higher educational institutions set up called Poly-technics, the degrees offered soon rival the standards of the traditional universities but the methods of education are rather differant, being based on higher student lecturer ratios and subjects taught in a mixture of compulsory and elective modules rather than the OxBridge model of 1 to 1 mentoring.
Things move on a little and grants are means tested but the real values of grants goes down yet the real value of thresholds used to disqualify students from grants due to parental income fall.This effectively forces students to work at least for the summer months and in many cases at the weekends during semesters.
Reports came out detailing the drop out rate for students who are benefitting from all this investment and politics of the day (the 80’s) dictates that colleges will get higher payments for students doing vocational and especially science, engineering, maths courses than for students doing --ologies such as sociology and arts based courses, this disparity leads some colleges to claim that they cannot run the latter courses unless students can contribute to tuition fees.
Massive unemployment in the UK means that any young person with any sense realises that
1)The employment market is very poor so don’t try to get in just yet
2)To get any kind of decent work you need qualifications
The result was an enormous expansion in higher education places(you get the grades you are automatically entitled to higher education)
This suited the government of the day as it helped disguise the true unemployment figures.
It is increasingly the norm to go on to higher education in the UK but it is very costly to the state.
In an effort to reduce this cost and making use of precedents in tuition fee paying on some students there is now no such thing as free higher education.
If your parents income is below a certain level you can obtain a grant but that income is so low as to disqualify most students and anyway the grant itself has not kept pace with the cost of living.
As a student you are given the ‘right’ to take out a student loan of fixed amounts per semester and this is repayed at very low rates, but if you drop out you may be asked to pay your tuition fees up to that point too.
Until very recently the cost of tuition itself was free but colleges have slowly brought this in too, very highly subsidised but the bills will only go one way.
Parents typically foot most of the cost of the education of their offspring.Many parents will not allow their children to take out the student loans as they do not want young lives to be blighted by debt so early on in their careers when they finally graduate.
All our higher education is highly subsidised but even so a student especially on one of the longer degree courses such as architecture, medicine can end up with a debt in excess of £7000 or more.
You could end up paying lots more at some colleges and much less at others.
Part-time further education such as day release and nightschool is a a subject in its own right.
Thanks for the detailed explanation of the British system, Casdave. By the way, what is the monetary rate of a sterling pound these days, $2.50?
barbitu8 wrote:
$1.4226, according to CNNfn.