Officialdom seems to have opened a new front in its battle against those who commit the terrible sin of studying while black.
One of my students has been sent a summons to appear in court for not paying full Council Tax. The problem arises because non-EU students come in on a visa that specifies they must be recorded as being actively taught in college for at least 15 hours per week in college premises.
However, to be exempt from Council Tax a “full-time” student must study for 21 hours per week. Hands up anyone who got a degree at university and averaged more than 21 hours per week in classrooms or laboratories!
Obviously any diligent student spends at least the missing 6 hours per week working at home and in libraries. However, we all know that not all students are diligent, and in this particular case it seems that a stubborn council official is determined to argue to the magistrates that my student is not diligent.
In fact, this student must spend extra time on a work placement to get her diploma, so it ought to be an open-and-shut case to humiliate the council in court. However, she cannot start that placement without a Criminal Records check, which takes ages to get, even though it is completely useless since she only just arrived.
Has anyone else heard of councils playing this particular card? Has it started cropping up in councillors’ advice surgeries yet? Do students at prestigious universities get the same hassle?
My borough contains at least five thousand students in an essentially identical situation in private colleges and I don’t know yet if our student has been particularly singled out as a test case. What I do know from past experience is that councils do not pay the true cost of all the cases they shovel into magistrates’ courts.
Whenever they imagine that someone owes them money they have no incentive to engage brain, and ask themselves (a) if the money is really due and (b) whether there is a simpler way to collect it, such as picking up the phone. A systemic inefficiency that the coalition ought to jump on.
However, I deviate from my main point, which is that UK plc treats its foreign students abominably in many different ways. This may please the Daily Mail, but it is wrecking a major foreign currency earner, damaging our reputation abroad, and causing much human misery.
Anthony Durham helps to run a small private college.
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18 Comments
Could you please explain why you are playing the race card? What has the students colour got to do with anything?
I spent over 21 hours per week studying for my degree and am appalled that someone involved in education seems to support the view that a degree is a part time exercise. I recently undertook a Masters as a mature student and was shocked by attitudes such as yours that mock anyone who puts in the hours and wants to achieve.
If your qualifications are so easy to get in terms of time input maybe you should question whether you are delivering value for money. It is you that views students as a source of income not the council I would suggest. They just want to make sure that the rules are applied fairly. Your rant playing the race card does not suggest to me that attending your college would be a good investment.
A Liberal Democrat run council ?
I did in excess of thirty hours a week every year of my three year degree; infact in my final year I had more than thirty hours a week just of laboratory practicals, each of which I was obliged to write up. I echo the sentiments that you may wish to reassess how you run your degrees.
Clearly you are educating students in a range of less than useful areas and don’t know many engineering students. We had 18 hrs of lectures, 12 hrs of labs plus other study in the library.
These are skills in short supply here and in many non eu countries
I studied Philosophy (more useful than you’d think) and spent well over 21 hours a week studying. However, I’ll give this the benefit of the doubt and assume that you mean 21 hours in a specific college-based location, when much studying can be outside this context.
To add a bit of balance, I will admit that I studied history and politics and I certainly did not study for 21 hours a week.
Hands up anyone who got a degree at university and averaged more than 21 hours per week in classrooms or laboratories.
Me, I averaged around 27 timetabled hours per week. I must have done a real degree 😉
I am intrigued by these hostile comments, because almost no universities timetable more than 21 hours for their students. Is it selective memory ? Like Simon the engineer, I fondly imagined that my own student labours (back in the days of free tuition and maintenance grants) comfortably exceeded 21 timetabled hours per week, but on checking I find that the actual figure was 18. Is it intellectual snobbery? Are you commenters implying that your time in the laboratory was more noble than our student’s time learning (unpaid) how to care for bedridden old people?
As it happens, our student can prove total study time comfortably exceeding 21 hours. The interesting question is why the council has not backed down after being told where it is wrong in law. Has its official made a sober calculation that a gentle young lady on a vocational course and with an obviously Afro name makes a softer target to intimidate in court than the hundreds of law students just down the road?
It’s not intellectual snobbery, it’s a defensive response to having our time, hard work and commitment so casually dismissed.
You want to win someone over to support your argument, base it on facts and don’t start by insulting them.
I’m with you Anthony. Methinks these other comments are indicative of the tory-lite membership that has flooded into the party since our dear leader signed a pact with the party most of us were in politics to fight against….
“I studied Philosophy (more useful than you’d think) and spent well over 21 hours a week studying. However, I’ll give this the benefit of the doubt and assume that you mean 21 hours in a specific college-based location, when much studying can be outside this context.”
It would help if you had read what was written – “more than 21 hours per week in classrooms or laboratories.”
Obviously the point is that there’s a difference between school and university, and that undergraduates are expected to spend a substantial proportion of their time in private study rather than in a classroom. Having said that, judging from some of the comments above, things have changed since I was at university, and some students expect to be treated like school children.
@Anthony, I was wondering if the council-tax guidelines referred to this specific terminology (classroom and laboratory) or whether this term was just in the next sentence added by Anthony Durham. It wasn’t entirely clear, and many of the subsequent comments seem to mis-understand, so I did read it, and was making precisely that point…
@Felix – Don’t automatically write people you disagree off as ‘tory-lite’. I am centre-left, member from way before the coaltion, or in fact Clegg’s leadership, and have always experienced the ‘mine was a real degree because I spent x hours in the Lab’ from all wings of the party. This has absolutely nothing to do with the coalition.
“I was wondering if the council-tax guidelines referred to this specific terminology (classroom and laboratory) …”
It’s evident from the article that they don’t.
@Anthony: I disagree – para 3 makes it sound like it is the council official who uses [for 21 hrs] the para 2 (EU) guidelines [for 15 hrs], and it is their error – so to me it reads like it was the council official who unfairly does use this definition, and therefore was at fault.
I think the comments above, and the differences that you perceive as having arisen since you were at college/uni are, in some cases true, but more importantly represent an often mis-used distinction between sciences, where lab. time is clocked in easily and humanities, where more private [therefore less provable] study occurs (I am being loose with definitions of science and humanities).
Ian Sanderson writes: Sorry, I seemed to have messed up the Blockquote tags in my previous posting. Everything in the posting is my wording, but it should have started with the following quote from the Anthony Durham’s post at the head of the thread:
“Hands up anyone who got a degree at university and averaged more than 21 hours per week in classrooms or laboratories!”
As I say, whenever there’s an opportunity, in this sun, I am browner than half those defined as black/brown [1] and I’m an ethnic teuchter.
[1] Ali Dizaei was President of the Black Police Association although the only thing black about him was his hair dye.