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Which matters, no?

About 40 per cent of universities in England are expected to run budget deficits this year, according to the Office for Students.

Three universities are thought to be in serious financial peril, and universities believe Labour will pressure the sector to manage its own financial problems rather than provide a taxpayer bailout.

So, which three?

Oxford? Or Cowley School of Grievance Studies?

33 thoughts on “Which matters, no?”

  1. If the tuition fee cap of £9250 had been allowed to rise with inflation then it would be close to £13k by now.

    Regardless of what folks think about the state of the Universities, Government shouldn’t set arbitrary limits and then wash their hands – “nuffin’ to do with us, guv”.

    Yet another example of why price controls are shit.

  2. I am torn. I want to agree with Geoffers (I have an interest as an academic) but I really, really want to see the Cowley School of Grievance Studies and all its clones go broke. They represent an enormous negative contribution to civilisation.

  3. Recalling the Labour government inspired explosion in tertiary education with its open aim being to reduce youth unemployment does anyone else find it amusing that overall unemployment rates, at one time to the forefront of political debating, are now barely mentioned.

    Maybe the wholesale introduction of immigrant groups where upwards of 50% are unlikely ever to work, certainly not to the extent that they become net contributors to the economy, is a factor in this sudden coyness.

  4. Bloke in North Dorset

    Maybe the wholesale introduction of immigrant groups where upwards of 50%* are unlikely ever to work in the formal economy

    FTFY

    *And taking that number at face value.

  5. @BiND
    How else are we going to staff all the “cash only” Turkish barbers that are springing up everywhere? There are three in the small shopping mall where I live.

  6. About 20 years ago, the college I was working at had some meaningless agreement with the local university, which was a bumped-up low-grade Poly. The agreement was that anyone who passed a vocational BTEC at level 3 was guaranteed an interview. Anyway, we wasted a few hours with their managers and “academics” in dreary meetings, and they were desperate to boost their numbers to stay employed.

    Then: shock, horror! Some TV company had done a hit-job on the Uni, getting secret video of lecturers saying that they would allow any moron to enrol, and that their students generally never did any work, and were virtually guaranteed a degree just for signing the enrolment papers. The staff rejoiced in the number of “interventions” that were put in place to help low achievers, openly saying that these were job-creation scams.

    At the next joint meeting of our staff, we expected to see our counterparts severely crestfallen and despondent for being rumbled. But they were ecstatic! Since the programme had gone out, their application numbers had gone through the roof. Some suspected the programme might have been set up by their Vice-Chancellor for that very purpose.

  7. @Mr Womby: same here, two recently set up either side of the train station, and often entirely empty!

    But I’m sure they will be targeted by the new Home Sec’s ‘crackdown’ on these sorts of enterprises…

  8. Mr Womby said:
    “How else are we going to staff all the “cash only” Turkish barbers that are springing up everywhere? There are three in the small shopping mall where I live.”

    Two in the small rural market town near me. Both of them raided last Thursday by burly Immigration officers, to my astonishment. I wouldn’t have expected that under a Labour government.

  9. “How else are we going to staff all the “cash only” Turkish barbers that are springing up everywhere? There are three in the small shopping mall where I live.”

    In Perth, Scotland which has a tiny city centre, there are 7 with a further 2 just going through the motions to open up. It is ludicrous. Most of the times the “Turkish Barbers” are just sat around playing with their phones, with customers as rare as phoenix eggs.

    Quite a few nail salons as well, although these tend to be a bit busier with the female contingent and employing asian types doing the nail things.

  10. The Meissen Bison

    Perhaps those Uni’s that are on their uppers could offer courses in Turkish Studies or Nasal Hair Solutions?

  11. So what is the deal with these Turkish barbers? I would have said good for them if they’re setting up and running successful businesses but if they’re always empty then what are they doing really?

  12. Oh, they are running auccessfuk businesses all right, but not necessarily involving hairdressing. Only one in my village, but six in one street just down the road in Boston.

  13. A Cowley School of Grievance Studies shouldn’t be the one to go bust. Overheads would be low, and a low entry criteria means there should be little problem filling the course with students “unjustly rejected” by other universities due to the having zero ability.

    Pack the lecture theaters full, or online if you run out of space, and let the tutorial groups be led by the students themselves. Looks like 8 to 9k profit per student before tax. Low standards? Who cares.

  14. Agree with Andy F but for different reasons. Cowley School of Grievance Studies should definitely be the one to continue. Like Andy says it could even be profitable. And it isn’t really doing much harm. It’s unlikely anyone who attended it will rise to a position of importance & be making crucial decisions. It’s also getting money out the hands who so stupid we’re safer if they don’t have any.
    Now Oxford has given the country all but three of its pot war Prime Ministers. And with a single notable exception, what a bunch of failures they’ve been. The place is a positive hazard. The ruin of the UK. Close it!

  15. “They represent an enormous negative contribution to civilisation.”

    No doubt. But if we were to close a university on the grounds of the damage it has done to the human race I’d point at – no, not BiS’s hated Oxford – but Imperial College.

    Will Professor Ferguson be eventually viewed as responsible for more human deaths than Hitler? God knows . It will presumably depend on (i) reality: for how long will the Covid vax keep causing excess deaths, and (ii) perception: when will the majority of the population acknowledge the enormity of the Covid responses.

  16. Stony,

    There was a informative court case recently. Two illegals were working as barbers using forged documents. They paid the boss (who might possibly have supplied the paperwork) for their chairs plus a percentage of takings plus rent as they were living above the shop. It doesn’t take a genius to work out they’d need a little income on the side to top up their payments. Needless to say one had a wife and kid over here so was never going to be deported.

    That scenario might explain why the numerous barbers in my town have very few customers but always a couple of hefty tanned lads sitting around playing with their phones and keeping a close eye on what is presumably the bosses expensive car parked illegally outside.

  17. andyf,

    “A Cowley School of Grievance Studies shouldn’t be the one to go bust. Overheads would be low, and a low entry criteria means there should be little problem filling the course with students “unjustly rejected” by other universities due to the having zero ability.”

    But overheads have been rising because these are no longer just a place to study, they’re like your mum and dad, they’re campuses, they have huge amounts of more stuff than when my mother was teaching poly-level courses at a college. That college used to just have a load of classrooms, some mobiles, some offices. A basic student union bar And that was about it. It now has a gym, coffee areas, beautifully tended grounds with ponds, pastoral care, chaplaincy, mental health, a fancy union bar, some sort of eco-digester thing.

    And this is a lot about universities just spending money on their pet things. It’s like someone getting a nice pay rise and buying a Porsche.

    “Pack the lecture theaters full, or online if you run out of space, and let the tutorial groups be led by the students themselves. Looks like 8 to 9k profit per student before tax. Low standards? Who cares.”

    That won’t work. Most of the people going to uni don’t want to be online. This isn’t about academic study, it’s about socialisation, being away from mum and dad, getting away from your school of Morlocks and getting into the Eloi.

  18. At Western Bloke…it’s also about differentiation. If you can’t appeal on price then you need another avenue, and quality of the on-campus is one of those. Inefficient targeting of resources because…guess what…stupid manipulation of the price.

    Yet again…price controls are shit.

  19. Thanks to everyone who confirmed what I already suspected about the Turkish barber shops. A few more thoughts. It is my opinion that UK taxes are too high for us to have a healthy economy. In that case, is it an overall benefit if even criminal activities are happening in the black economy and so are not being taxed? Are there a proportion of immigrants, either legal or illegal, that having come from countries that have governments even more incompetent than ours, have really useful skills for being successful under the most testing circumstances?

  20. It is my opinion that UK taxes are too high for us to have a healthy economy

    Exactly, which is why the cockroaches from low trust economies come here, because they know they can come here, earn money without paying any tax and then send that back home to their 3rd world sh1thole AGAIN without tax.

    Think of all of those barbers (who paid full corporation tax, PAYE, NI, etc.), being effectively undercut by untaxed labour without enforcement.

    It’s not just unfair it is destabilising.

  21. Western Bloke,

    Staffordshire Uni, a decade ago, did a decent MA in Intelligence and International Relations for about £4k over two years of part-time study (if you were a reservist with relevant rank & experience, able to skip a couple of modules – maybe £6k over three years if you came in cold as a civilian)

    But, it was a targeted course at a military audience, priced to be paid for by Service Learning Credits and designed to be flexible.

    There’s no way on Earth I’d have forked out £27,000 in tuition for it, but an interesting and (for both my weekend-warrior and day job lives) useful qualification, I broke even on it since it just cost me two years of RNR bounty.

    Good model – target your audience, offer them something they value and want, do it in a flexible, inexpensive way that recognises “you’re doing this remote, we’d be taking the Mick charging you full-time tuition for it”.

  22. Excellent by jgh. There’s no need for government to grant asylum or international protection to any foreigner. The cost for this anyway comes out of the total compensation in society and based on experience societal groups and individuals would deal with it better in their own homes and community buildings if they can’t afford a roof of their own.
    Government should check identities, deport the criminals, and give those who are not an NI number and a biometric stamped no recourse to public funds. And no more.

  23. “give those who are not an NI number and a biometric stamped no recourse to public funds”

    Its all very well sticking ‘no recourse to public funds’ on an immigrants papers, the problem is that the public sector would then steadfastly refuse to ‘discriminate’ against brown people by asking for ‘Ausweis bitte!’. Hospitals now do SFA to determine who exactly should be getting free healthcare, and just treat everyone regardless (badly of course). Ditto GPs, schools, welfare payments, the works.

    The Public sector is a 5th column within the UK, it does as it pleases, regardless of what Parliament may or may not say.

  24. @dearieme

    if we were to close a university on the grounds of the damage it has done to the human race I’d point at – no, not BiS’s hated Oxford – but Imperial College.

    I take your point!

  25. I did a Masters at my local ( 1960s) Uni a few years ago. I had the time and the money and the next year they were going to jack up the prices so I decidef to go for it.

    It was crap.

    The standard of teaching was abysmal, the library was a scandal, my Poly alma mater in the 1980s had a far better one.

    I told the professor that he hadn’ thought the course through properly and I knew because I had made exactly the same mistakes that he had when designing commercial courses. Academics are so vain.

  26. Otto: a few years ago I also looked into doing a Masters, and on investigating the course and going to an open day it turned out to be lower level than my undergraduate course 30 years ago – the one that was at a lower level than stuff I’d done six years before even going to uni in the first place!

  27. Bugger, I had written a long comment non the changes in universities from 2000 to 2020 (based on my experience teaching them), and that the high fees and low standards are largely down to capture of the institutions by useless bureaucrats. But the damn thing has disappeared into the ether.

  28. Jim said:
    “Its all very well sticking ‘no recourse to public funds’ on an immigrants papers, the problem is that the public sector would then steadfastly refuse to ‘discriminate’ against brown people by asking for ‘Ausweis bitte!’.”

    Good point. And that won’t change unless their funding is changed, so they have to claim the costs of treatment from central government against specific patients’ NI numbers.

  29. @ Richard T
    The check on the NI numbers will take weeks by which time any dodgy applicants will have disappeared into the undergrowth. OTOH if the NHS didn’t treat anyone until they had checked their NI number and had the DWP confirm the guy/gal was eligible anyone knocked by a drunk driver on Friday evening would be rotting before the DWP authorised the A&E department to treat him/her.

  30. john77 said:
    “The check on the NI numbers will take weeks by which time any dodgy applicants will have disappeared into the undergrowth. OTOH if the NHS didn’t treat anyone until they had checked their NI number and had the DWP confirm the guy/gal was eligible anyone knocked by a drunk driver on Friday evening would be rotting before the DWP authorised the A&E department to treat him/her.”

    True, given their current systems. But when I was involved in an autobahn accident, the German hospital wouldn’t treat me until they had proof that I was covered. And the waiting time was still less than an NHS A&E. It can be done.

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