Tag Archives: universities

Rennie challenges SNP to set fair access test for Scottish universities

By The Voice | Published 14th November 2011 - 8:12 am

The Press Association reports:

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie called on the Scottish Government to put a fair access policy in place, or extend the remit of the the Office of Fair Access north of the border. He said this would not only address the fair access gap for poorer students from England and Wales, but also improve the chances of Scottish students deciding to go to university.

Mr Rennie said: “With Scottish universities now able to set fees of up to £9,000 a year, and Edinburgh and St Andrews universities now the most expensive place to study in the

…

Posted in News, Scotland | Also tagged higher education, tuition fees, willie rennie | Leave a comment

Opinion: Pity the Scottish school-leavers when English fees rise

By Ewan Hoyle | Published 30th October 2011 - 2:10 pm

I’m a candidate in a council by-election in the Hillhead ward in Glasgow. I’m a Liberal Democrat, and the ward has a big old university slap bang in the middle of it. You’d think I’d be bricking it, wouldn’t you? After the tuition fees betrayal, students hate the Liberal Democrats, don’t they? Well they might do, but I’d like to explain how the real villains in Scotland are the SNP.

The SNP are in fact imposing thousands of pounds of up-front fees on each and every Scottish student and their families. “But the SNP have preserved free tuition!” I hear …

Posted in Op-eds, Scotland | Also tagged higher education, snp, tuition fees | 36 Comments

The Independent View: Coalition’s social mobility strategy failing

By Jonathan Clifton | Published 28th October 2011 - 9:54 am

The government’s plan to improve social mobility has been dealt a series of blows over the past week. New education data show that trends towards a more ‘socially mobile’ Britain are pointing in the wrong direction.

Nick Clegg launched the government’s social mobility strategy last April, promising to ‘open the doors of opportunity’ to children from disadvantaged homes as they move into adulthood. Children from poor homes are half as likely to achieve five good GCSEs as their better off peers, and they account for less than one in a hundred Oxbridge students. Clegg rightly pointed out that …

Posted in Op-eds, The Independent View | Also tagged education, higher education, nick clegg, pupil premium, social mobility, tuition fees | 8 Comments

How do the university application figures match up against my five questions?

By Mark Pack | Published 24th October 2011 - 11:00 pm

On Sunday, ahead of the publication of the first tranche of university application figures, I posed five questions for judging what they meant. Now the full figures are out, how to do they compare to those five tests?

Let’s see…

Posted in News | Also tagged featured, higher education, tim leunig, tuition fees | 22 Comments

Five questions you should ask to make sense of the university application figures

By Mark Pack | Published 23rd October 2011 - 10:16 am

Tomorrow the first UCAS application figures for this year are officially published, with some leaked figures having appeared in the Sunday Times today. Superficially the headline figures are not great with an apparent 10% drop. But I’m holding off forming a view until I’ve seen the full figures, because there are five key questions to ask about the figures:

1. Some courses, such as medicine, tend to have much earlier application deadlines than those for other courses. Are applications for those early closing courses dropping (which would indicate a problem) or is it that early applications for courses with later deadlines …

Posted in News | Also tagged higher education, tuition fees | 24 Comments

Opinion: Why free university tuition for all is deeply regressive in today’s Britain

By David Thorpe | Published 30th September 2011 - 3:50 pm

Political speeches are usually replete with statistics, numbers culled without context and thrown in the path of critics like metaphorical stingers strewn across a motorway.

But one statistic from Nick Clegg’s conference speech which deserves to live and breathe in its own right is that in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham (where I currently live) more than half of children progress from school to university. In the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (where I lived before moving to Hammersmith) the figure is that just 4% of children go to University. These Boroughs are thirty minutes away from ach other …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged higher education, tuition fees | 34 Comments

Opinion: What Nick should say about tuition fees at the 2015 general election

By George Potter | Published 27th September 2011 - 4:25 pm

More than any other issue, tuition fees have damaged the view of our party in the country as a whole. For what it’s worth, here’s what I think our leader should say about fees when going into the next general election:

I would just like to say a few brief words about tuition fees.

As a party, we entered the last election with a promise to oppose any increase in tuition fees. As a party, we then broke that pledge. That was wrong.

Nothing can justify breaking a promise like that. Nothing. We made a mistake and we have been punished

…

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged higher education, nick clegg, tuition fees | 49 Comments

Labour’s odd messaging: how the party was for reversing Coalition cuts before it was against them

By Stephen Tall | Published 27th September 2011 - 9:15 am

Mark Pack has already highlighted the pitfalls of political opponents commentating on other parties’ conferences. And he’s right of course. But it didn’t stop him, so I won’t let it stop me…

I am genuinely puzzled by Labour’s key messages based on the first two days of their conference. Day 1 kicked off with the Big Announcment by Ed Miliband that Labour is now committed to doubling tuition fees (dressed up as only The Observer could as Labour committing to ‘slashing’ fees).

Regardless of what you think about the policy, and I think I’ve made my views clear …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged ed balls, ed miliband, higher education, labour party, tuition fees | Leave a comment

Tim Leunig writes: The problem with Labour’s proposed tuition fees cap

By Tim Leunig | Published 27th September 2011 - 7:40 am

Ed Miliband has seized the initiative at the start of his conference, announcing that Labour would cap student fees at £6,000 per year. This policy is superficially attractive, and is clearly designed to win over LibDem supporters who remain angry at the rise in tuition fees.

Today I have published an analysis of Labour’s proposal. It uses the Business Innovation and Skills graduate income “ready reckoner”, which is based on data from the ONS Labour Force Survey. The underlying data are as good as they can be, although of course predicting graduate incomes in 30 years time is a dangerous …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged centre forum, higher education, labour party, tuition fees | 15 Comments

Ed Balls has a new take on having your cake and eating it

By Mark Pack | Published 26th September 2011 - 9:19 pm

There are two problems with a Liberal Democrat like myself blogging about Labour Party conference. First, as I’ve so often seen from the other side of the fence, an outside blogging about another party’s conference frequently misreads what is really happening. And second, no blogger can compete with Hopi Sen and his cat.

So caveats deployed and on to the confusion that Ed Balls’s speech today left me in. For he had two messages: first, that Labour can’t promise to undo the government’s cuts and, second, that many of the cuts are wrong. Either on its own would be a …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged centre forum, ed balls, ed miliband, higher education, hopi sen, tuition fees | 2 Comments

Opinion: Ed Miliband’s tuition fees announcement – more a headline than a policy

By David Parkes | Published 26th September 2011 - 5:35 pm

On the eve of the Labour Party conference, Ed Milliband announced in an interview with The Observer, that he plans ‘to slash university tuition fees by a third’, by reducing the cap on tuition fees to £6,000. It’s a headline that appears to have been mistaken for a policy.

These past 15 months Labour has being decidedly light on policy. This surprised no-one. It was said of the previous Brown Government that Labour had run out of ideas; no-one seriously expected the ‘backroom boys’ who picked up Gordon Brown’s mantel to come up with new thoughts any time soon.

However, what …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged ed miliband, higher education, tuition fees | 8 Comments

Opinion: Ed Miliband starts off his conference week with a damp squib

By Paul Walter | Published 26th September 2011 - 10:15 am

Many years ago I knew Tom Baldwin when he was a cub reporter on my local newspaper. He is now Ed Miliband’s chief communications guru. He’s a smart cookie, so I am surprised that Baldwin and Ed Miliband have decided to use the traditional opportunity for a trumpet fanfare for their conference week (i.e the front page of The Observer) to announce a distinctly underwhelming policy.

“It’s the economy, stupid” – no more so than at a time like this. So why waste your golden chance for a big media blast by returning, dog-like, to the site of your own …

Posted in News, Op-eds | Also tagged ed miliband, higher education, tom baldwin, tuition fees | Leave a comment

£6k versus £9k tuition fees: the real impact in pictures

By Stephen Tall | Published 25th September 2011 - 12:35 pm

Today’s announcement by Ed Miliband that Labour would double, not treble, tuition fees from the current £3k pa has prompted much vigorous discussion already. But what would be the actual impact for different income groups of the change in policy?

To find out, I fed different figures into Martin Lewis’s Student Finance Calculator. I made one assumption: that all students would need to take out the maximum maintenance loan to live on while studying. Here’s what the figures show…

Who pays nothing?

With fees at £6k…

… anyone whose salary doesn’t exceed £15,600 in today’s money.

With fees at £9k…

… anyone whose salary doesn’t exceed £15,600 in today’s money.

What if you earn the national average wage?

Posted in News | Also tagged featured, higher education, tuition fees | 26 Comments

Ed Miliband on tuition fees: £6k not £9k. The reaction so far…

By Stephen Tall | Published 25th September 2011 - 11:10 am

Rejoice! Rejoice! Labour has a policy.

Party leader Ed Miliband has vowed that, if Labour were in government now, they would double tuition fees to £6k from the current £3k level set by the last Labour government with immediate effect. In other words, they would undercut the Coalition’s £9k fees by £3k.

Here are some early thoughts:

1) The principle of cutting fees from £9k to £6k

The reality is the cut from £9k to £6k makes no difference to the monthly repayments that poorer students will repay once they’ve graduated and earning more than £21k.

Posted in News | Also tagged ed miliband, higher education, labour party, tuition fees | 34 Comments

Opinion: Why millionaire graduates should stop whingeing about fees

By Jonathan Hunt | Published 27th August 2011 - 1:18 pm

According to new figures published this week by the Office for National Statistics, graduates earn 85 per cent more than people with only GCSE qualifications over their working lives. Extrapolated over a 40-year career lifetime, graduates are likely to earn almost £1 million more than those on current average pay of some £25,000 pa.

The latest statistics show that the differential has fallen from 95 per cent in 1993, though the level of earnings has increased substantially over those 18 years. Their publication may reopen the debate on student fees – and incite some resentment among non-graduate taxpayers …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged higher education, office for national statistics, tuition fees | 85 Comments

Tag Archives: universities

Who pays nothing?

What if you earn the national average wage?

1) The principle of cutting fees from £9k to £6k

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