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Originally Posted by Pilgrim
people should have to pay the full fees for university rather than the heavily subsidised ones people pay in the uk, otherwise you end up with eevryone having a degree and it becoming totally worthless like it is now
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The real problem with the British University system is twofold:
1) Employers don't differentiate between real courses and mickey mouse courses. I heard on the radio recently that of the top 5 courses studied at University only 1 of them was a "traditional" (ie not mickey mouse) course, this one being English. More often than not a graduate employer will ask that the applicant has a 2:1 grade, regardless of what course they studied.
2) Employers don't particularly care what University you went to. They'll pay attention if you say you went to Oxford or Cambridge but everywhere else is all the same to them.
The government can do a lot to tackle these problems. For example they can go back to the polytechnic system. Back in the old days we had Universities and polytechnics, either one gave you a degree but a degree from a University was worth more. Then in 1995 (or thereabouts) all polytechnics magically became Universites. The quality of the teaching didn't get any better, it was just decided that this would be done.
If we cut back on institutions that call themselves Universities (by renaming the crap ones as something else) and we reduce the number of people doing mickey mouse courses then degrees will suddenly become worth something again.
Also, forcing people to pay full tuition fees is fair enough but the devil is in the detail. If you force people to pay this up front then sure, you're going to get fewer people going to University but all you're getting is the richest kids going, not the smartest.
If on the other hand you're going to have a low interest loan which is paid back through means testing (what we currently have) then the deterrent for poor people will be less. Some people will see the huge debt that they will have once they've graduated and decide not to bother with it but that's not necessarily a bad thing.