Massive funding cuts are seeing universities having to raise their fees, there could be tough times ahead in higher education. The Linc’s spreadsheet manipulation correspondent Maken Eetup explains.
Across the country, universities are turning in to a game of “Play Your Cards Right” as rising fees are announced with cries of “Shall we go higher? HIGHER!”
Sadly, when most places are going to charge £9,000 it’s not very fun game to play as you already know the answer.
It’s essentially an inevitability that people will be choosing based on cost – so it’s only so long before the GoCompare man vomits on the screen with another advert singing: “Go Compare, Go Compare! It’s just loony, going to uni, with the costs there…”
There are a few people who may find comfort in a cost-based system of choice. In particular the members of the Conservative party, who consider class a form of natural selection.
The advertising of fees is actually an improvement at some institutions like Oxford and Cambridge. One parent, Reynolds Huntington-Smyth told me: “It’s much easier than bribing now they make the amount clear. Normally you’re coincidentally donating well over £9,000 and ending up with a place!”
There’ll be difficulties attracting students to Lincoln with a high cost, as it’s a university where the entrance requirements have previously been just checking that your IQ is higher than your number of fingers. It’s why so few people from Norwich apply here.
But if they do set fees higher than eight grand the university is getting ready to promote the city as “the best second rate education you’ll ever get”.
Hopefully they won’t quote further from “The Inbetweeners” with how they describe the city.
Sources within the university have hinted that they will either charge £9k or 90p depending on whether they can figure out how to work Microsoft Excel.
The rise in fees is necessary for universities to continue as like anything else in the country that has a social benefit, most of the funding has been taken away – so it’s likely there’ll still be cuts elsewhere.
The university has claimed that it has many options open for funding. However, applying to Wonga.com for some quick cash might not be the best backup.
Various cost saving measures have already been tested including a recent experiment where no money was spent on maintenance, leaving doors around the university broken and closed.
The idea was that if people couldn’t go to lectures, there would be no need wasting money on secondary services like “teaching” – freeing up the budget to be spent on more staff parties.
After discussions with consultancy firm Ocean Finance, another option is to consolidate all of the existing lectures in to one affordable monthly lecture.
“Most of the time people don’t bother going to lectures anyway,” explained university spokesperson Lotta Cutts, “so if we combine each of the lectures of about seven or eight people we’d only need one of the three theatres.”
“We could probably rent the other two to some business enterprise thing that nobody understands. A bit like the EMMTEC building we’ve got now,” she added, “nobody knows what that’s for anyway. Who cares? We’ve paid for it now.”
The University of Lincoln has already announced that it will shut the Hull campus due to the funding cuts as it would cost two million pound to bring it up to the standards of the Brayford campus – though the most shocking bit was that they think the Brayford campus has “standards”.
But if they’re closing campuses due to cost, don’t be surprised when they realise they spend the most money and the Brayford campus closes and we’ll all have to move to Riseholme to learn equine sciences.
So let’s have a practice and join me in singing… “I love horses, best of all the animals, I love horses, they’re my friends…”