What you suggest sounds appealing, but I don’t think it will actually work.

1) Cambridge attracts a large number of students from overseas who will end up working overseas (it is a very cosmopolitan place). How are you going to reclaim money from them when they don’t file tax returns in the UK?

2) Do you really trust central government to collect money and then redirect it to Universities? Is it not better (and cheaper) to have the Unis collect the cash themselves. Then there can be no slip twixt cup and lip …

3) In the “graduate tax” approach you propose, in the long run most of the tax take will come from high earners. How are you going to fund the universities between now and the point where alumni are in well paid jobs? Money is needed in tertiary education now!

Note that Brown’s proposal does effectively mean that students will pay back for their course after the event (through a loan scheme which also limits their liability if they don’t end up earning that much), and also has scope for bursaries and scholarships to support bright kids from less affluent backgrounds.

I am genuinely interested — why do you oppose this??

info@vincentcable.org.uk; john@johndenham.org.uk; contact@edmiliband.org; camerond@parliament.uk; info@gregmulholland.org;

Good afternoon Gentlemen

There is no slur in the order of the email addresses. Some were easier to find than others.

Funding for University education should be sought from the people who have already been to University for free (Vince Cable for instance.). Including those who drop out. (Sorry but the space has been used and someone else has been excluded.) Most of them will probably have children going or trying to get to university, and would be more than happy to pay something if their children did not have to be lumbered with debt. The quantity of people that have been to University for free could be simply charged an increased percentage of personal taxation no matter what they earn. (They are only earning the money because of the education they received for free.)

I hope someone will take notice of this simple funding option.
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Regards

Kathi & Keith Poskitt West Yorkshire.

At the moment the OIA is inaccessible to all but a tiny fraction of students who have experienced problems which their institutions are unwilling to address.

The answer may well be replacing rather than reforming the OIA but there needs to be a body carrying out their role effectively - it could even be an office in the central government department responsible for universities.

With respect to PhD students I think the UK research councils ought be doing a lot more to ensure those they fund are treated fairly. I have suggested that minimum standards should be set for disciplinary and complaints procedures and think that instead of each research council (or other public funder) monitoring compliance that could be a role the OIA could take on.

I agree the OIA is oddly constituted, but as all its members are public bodies it isn’t really a private organisation.

More details on how I think this can be achieved though improved mechanisms for commercialising the results of research can be found at:

http://www.rtaylor.co.uk/cambridge-higher-education-cuts.html#ip

The conservatives were represented by Cllr Chris Howell.

National Union of Students president Wes Streeting encouraged NUS members present to sign up, with their home and university addresses, to a service the NUS will be running to alert its members to candidate’s opinions on tuition fees and perhaps other matters.

Personally I’m not entirely confident with either Zeichner or Streeting’s promises.

I have also been very impressed by the US system (which my brother has gone through) where there is a much greater emphasis on explicit teaching positions (i.e. the TA positions, where the emphasis is very much on the teaching with research slotted in when you can). It is also worth noting that the US system seems to produce good results, although it is hard to know how much of this is the structure and how much the funding levels. But much of the teaching there is essentially done by grad students to fund their own Ph.Ds.

I can’t help feeling, though, that all this slightly misses the point. In the UK, the underlying problem seems to me that we undervalue skilled technical work and so anything other than a classical academic/university education is somehow seen as second class training. This undermined the concept of both secondary moderns and polytechnics. The idea that 50% of people should continue in some sort of training seems very sensible (indeed, why stop at 50%?). The idea that university is the right vehicle for this training seems, to me, absurd.

In the best universities undergraduate courses are influenced significantly by the research work carried out at the institutions. This ensures that the teaching is at the leading edge of the subject and helps inspire students. It keeps the quality of university education high. Quality is really important.

I see the funding link between research and teaching as indirect but critical. Research funding can be used to attract high quality staff, and fund infrastructure and equipment which benefits students’ education.

At an institution like Imperial undergraduate teaching is already a drain on research resources. It is uneconomic for the institution to teach undergraduates at all. It is right and necessary to link research grants to teaching, otherwise an institution like Imperial, left to its own devices, may well decide to become a postgraduate only institution. I don’t think that would be in the national interest.

“Undergraduate teaching ought be closely linked to research. Research funding can, indirectly, subsidise teaching”

Is this really the most sensible way forward? Research and teaching are very different beasts, and I do not think it would be sensible for research council funding streams for research to end up funding all of the teaching load. For instance, how do you see this working in Cambridge where small group teaching is college-funded whereas research grants are often held by the departments?