worth the cost?
With the Government’s decision to follow the US model of charging tuition fees for university degrees, the question of ‘worth’ will be increasing asked. In a recent survey, the answer for a typical US college diploma, costing as much as $200k, was a resounding ‘no’. It highlighted half of the students were not required to write more than 20 pages a term, a third didn’t need to read more than 40 pages a week and a the same proportion did not work anymore than five hours a week.
You could potentially argue that this is evidence of a lazy student generation, but I would counter with the fact that the problem lies with the university system itself. In increasingly viewing the students as customers or clients it seeks to both pamper them in a comfortable existence and consequently has no real momentum to change. Cleaners are cheaper than lecturers and if they can get away with more of the former and less of the latter then where’s the incentive to change?
I would like to think that we won’t follow necessarily this example and will, perhaps even go the other way. Having to pay tuition fees should encourage UK students to demand a better further education and an education more suited to their potential lives following college. I could even see the establishment of a body arguing for the delivery of equal status degree courses completed in only two years. If this rational and long-overdue argument captures the public’s imagination then such useful and beneficial courses can only be a short step away…even though the one body that should be behind it, the universities themselves, may not be the most enthusiastic – ‘it’s not what our clients demand’ they’ll claim. A valuable and relevant university education surely has to be more than merely an opportunity to expand your facebook contacts, further enhance a hedonistic lifestyle and ‘take it easy’.
