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Are Tories welcome at Glastonbury


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16 minutes ago, KingPin said:

You do know that that's how the current system works right?

No it isn't because we are not taxing people who got their education for free (or cheaper like me). And there are no guarantees that those loans can't be sold and have their terms changed.

But yeah for new students it is effectively a graduate tax so might as well make it like that for everyone if you're happy with it!

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4 hours ago, eFestivals said:

And I know I'm going to regret this, but .....

I agree with you.

In many ways I do, I know exactly where you're coming from. But anger and intolerance is not the way to a better society, that's the way to a bitter society.

For Glastonbury, I very much want tories to be welcome - because exposing them to things which they've not experienced before stands the chance of altering their view points, and more-so than calling them a c**t does.

They are welcome, never said they aren't and yes you'd hope they'd be persuaded to change their minds on a lot of things upon seeing much of what goes on......but  what's not welcome is dafties like this op going to Glastonbury and then whining about something that is and always has been a large part of the fest......the very arrogance of suggesting the festival should basically change its entire outlook so as not to offend Tories! 

Anyway so in other news looks like trump is toast.....at the hands of his own son....what a donut lol

Edited by waterfalls212434
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I think there should be a committee which decides how many state funded places there are for each course. e.g. we need a certain amount of media studies graduates but probably nowhere near as many as we're pumping out. Maybe such a committee already exists (don't know the ins and outs of the system so much) but it's nowhere near selective enough.

I recall reading criminology was barely that popular, then CSI happened and loads of people wanted to do it. The amount of places went up (though it still became more competitive). People came out with degrees which there was nowhere near enough demand for. When you consider nursing students are also paying £9,000 fees as well as people doing courses which society doesn't need anywhere near as much of it seems an imbalance. 

If you are good enough in your application, you qualify for one of the places. I'd consider setting fees at the £1,000 a year as when I was a student - I do think there's an argument to say putting a price on a university education that people will find relatively easy to pay back does help emphasise the value of the education. That said, it would leave it more open for future governments to hike.

If you still want to study the subject of your choice but the committee has decided we only need so many, you can pay the £9,000 fees under the current system. 

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35 minutes ago, arcade fireman said:

I think there should be a committee which decides how many state funded places there are for each course. e.g. we need a certain amount of media studies graduates but probably nowhere near as many as we're pumping out. Maybe such a committee already exists (don't know the ins and outs of the system so much) but it's nowhere near selective enough.

I recall reading criminology was barely that popular, then CSI happened and loads of people wanted to do it. The amount of places went up (though it still became more competitive). People came out with degrees which there was nowhere near enough demand for. When you consider nursing students are also paying £9,000 fees as well as people doing courses which society doesn't need anywhere near as much of it seems an imbalance. 

If you are good enough in your application, you qualify for one of the places. I'd consider setting fees at the £1,000 a year as when I was a student - I do think there's an argument to say putting a price on a university education that people will find relatively easy to pay back does help emphasise the value of the education. That said, it would leave it more open for future governments to hike.

If you still want to study the subject of your choice but the committee has decided we only need so many, you can pay the £9,000 fees under the current system. 

Yeah Tories should have to pay a £9000 fee to come Glastonbury, agreed.

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4 hours ago, Teddington said:

Not a difficult concept to grasp.

There's nothing confusing about that at all, but the quotes are half from a line of conversation about ending student fees and half from a conversation about nationalising railways. Which is confusing when they're stuck together to try and make a point.

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6 hours ago, frostypaw said:

There's nothing confusing about that at all, but the quotes are half from a line of conversation about ending student fees and half from a conversation about nationalising railways. Which is confusing when they're stuck together to try and make a point.

Not in anything I quoted and addressed, they're not. I quoted a line about yours which was *only* about students. The proof is in its mention of students and nothing about railways.
It's strange - how did we once afford students at all? 

If that's what you did, that's nowt to do with me.

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12 hours ago, DeanoL said:

Graduate tax. Let everyone pay for their university education, but only in retrospect. More students means you make more in the future, so can fund more students.

Don't saddle people with debt, saddle them with an obligation to help others in the future. 

I think exactly this. I am 53 years old and went to university twice for free and I wouldn't mind paying it if they decided it applied to everyone from now. It would be fair, it would stop setting young against old, as the older generation would be actually start paying for the education the young people are having right now, and later on, today's young people will pay for the next generation.

Put an extra penny on the £ after a threshold of say £25,000 and let people pay to the extent they benefit from it. If your degree is in nursing and you never earn a fantastic salary, you will pay less than someone who did say, accountancy, IT, etc (I actually don't know what degrees earn you a fortune as I did teaching and then social work!) and you went on to earn a fortune. To me this makes perfect sense. 

Also - I hate to agree with Teddington, but I don't think a massive expansion of access to university education has necessarily been a good thing. I have employed many graduates who can't even spell or lay out a letter correctly. Staff who sent out letters to service users without paragraphs, full stops of capital letters anywhere in them. I think it should be OK to assume someone with a degree should be able to do this stuff quite well. My brother is a university lecturer and he has been told he cannot fail anyone because they are paying for their degree and therefore should get one. He has some who do none of the necessary work, then put in a complaint about him when they only get a 2-2.

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It does make me laugh when I see the older generations whining, when they had grants not loans for higher education, when as young people buying your own home or more then that being able to `afford` to buy your own home was a lot easier....where access to social housing rentals for those who couldnt buy was one hell of a lot easier as they were still being built.........im sorry but a lot of the whining just comes across as `we dont want to pay for todays young people to enjoy the same privileges we enjoyed at their age`  

Selfish, angry old gits.....and they wonder why the young want to vote for people who are willing to take their side against such people.

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50 minutes ago, amfy said:

Also - I hate to agree with Teddington, but I don't think a massive expansion of access to university education has necessarily been a good thing.

Access isn't the problem; everyone should be able to go.  I think the issue is more that everyone is told they should go because they can.

I went to a grammar school with its own 6th form, and the careers message I got was "which degree should I do".  The concept of doing something other than a degree, something more vocational, was never even put to me.  It's all turned out well for me so I'm not going to complain, but in terms of what I spend my days doing I would have been much better served by a more rounded approach than "go to university".

It's absolutely right that everyone should have the opportunity to go, but it's not the right path for everyone.

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8 minutes ago, waterfalls212434 said:

when they had grants not loans for higher education

 ... *BUT* ... there were 80% fewer university places available to them, and most people started work at 16. 

Your comment implies that everything else was the same, when it wasn't.

If you want to raise "they had grants not loans for higher education" as tho it should happen today, for equivalence you should also say "but 80% of today's uni students are to lose their place at uni and start working instead, and the school leaving age is to revert back to 16 when the vast majority of kids will leave school to start work at incredibly low wages".

That "incredibly low wages" is (in real terms) about 25% of today's NMW, in case you're wondering.

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4 hours ago, eFestivals said:

Not in anything I quoted and addressed, they're not. I quoted a line about yours which was *only* about students. The proof is in its mention of students and nothing about railways.
It's strange - how did we once afford students at all? 

If that's what you did, that's nowt to do with me.

Yes that was the bit about students. Some of the other bits were about nationalising railways. That's what it means when someone says "half of that was about students and half about railways" *facepalm* you keep telling me what i was thinking and meaning when I wrote stuff though, that's always a winner and never hugely argumentative and going to cause confusion and trouble.

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1 hour ago, Quark said:

Access isn't the problem; everyone should be able to go.  I think the issue is more that everyone is told they should go because they can.

I went to a grammar school with its own 6th form, and the careers message I got was "which degree should I do".  The concept of doing something other than a degree, something more vocational, was never even put to me.  It's all turned out well for me so I'm not going to complain, but in terms of what I spend my days doing I would have been much better served by a more rounded approach than "go to university".

It's absolutely right that everyone should have the opportunity to go, but it's not the right path for everyone.

So much agree - it was one of my biggest grumps with the Brown/Blair years was the fantasy that there was a university degree requiring job out there for everyone if only everyone got a degree.

It seemed to fundamentally ignore the basic truth of the old employment triangle where there are so many more relatively menial jobs than the number of higher-education requiring jobs.

A waste of a vast amount of money and time sadly :(

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1 hour ago, Quark said:

Access isn't the problem; everyone should be able to go.  I think the issue is more that everyone is told they should go because they can.

I went to a grammar school with its own 6th form, and the careers message I got was "which degree should I do".  The concept of doing something other than a degree, something more vocational, was never even put to me.  It's all turned out well for me so I'm not going to complain, but in terms of what I spend my days doing I would have been much better served by a more rounded approach than "go to university".

It's absolutely right that everyone should have the opportunity to go, but it's not the right path for everyone.

This is a very valid point, I went to a similar school and was told exactly the same. "You're going to University" no alternatives, no ifs, buts, or maybes. So in 2000 I went to uni, an 18 year old who had never left lived away from home, plonked down in Manchester and told to get on with it. I wasn't ready for it and couldn't handle my newfound freedom or the pressures of study. The result was I pissed away three years of my life (don't get me wrong, I had a fantastic time doing it) and came out with a shite degree that shamed myself and my family who had paid for it. I'm lucky because I've worked hard for the last decade and now hold a senior position and a decent wage, but realistically I could have got where I am now without bothering with uni.

The moral of this story, as Quark points out, is that university isn't for everyone. Not everyone is suited to it and it shouldn't be a case of people just going because it's the done thing.

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I think University is useful if you have a clear idea about what job you want to do and need a degree to do it. The reality is I had no idea, so I did a photography degree, it was a complete waste of time and money and I dropped out after a year and a half. As people have said I did it because it was the expected norm to go to university, especially as my A levels and GCSEs were good. I would've been better off just getting a job after A levels, getting into work earlier could've given me a better idea of what I did and didn't want to do for a job that little bit earlier. I think it's totally wrong to push everybody into University as if it's the norm.

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Here's my daft idea for paying for university education.....

Just take every year being at university and up the state pension age by the same. i.e. if you're 3 years at uni, that's 70 for you. You get paid your state pension at 18-21 instead. Pays for most of the university.

(because graduates on average live longer than non-graduates, this isn't quite so insane)

Also, the state should chip in for expensive subjects instead of the arts students who have a few lectures a week for 2 terms having to subsidise sciences. (and I'm a physicist!!!)

Edited by hfuhruhurr
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I won't deny there are some degrees of questionable worth unless you really want to practically get into that field. Photography etc. - things that would be better suited to apprenticeships anyway.

But a lot of the more academic subjects that don't have many practical applications (History, Art, Literature, etc.) still teach you things beyond the degree itself. You learn how to learn, you learn self motivation, you learn critical thinking and so on. Even "hard" sciences do the same: few would argue that physics isn't a valuable subject, but reality is that we don't need that many physicists. But you're not going to figure out at 18 who the future physicists are either...

Likewise I did computer science as a degree but that's complete overkill if you just want to be a software developer. Learn to code, start making things and the rest is best learned on the job. 90% of whatever else you learn will be useless. Knowledge of how super computers work isn't going to help you develop the online shopping cart for Tesco.

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3 hours ago, eFestivals said:

 ... *BUT* ... there were 80% fewer university places available to them, and most people started work at 16. 

Your comment implies that everything else was the same, when it wasn't.

If you want to raise "they had grants not loans for higher education" as tho it should happen today, for equivalence you should also say "but 80% of today's uni students are to lose their place at uni and start working instead, and the school leaving age is to revert back to 16 when the vast majority of kids will leave school to start work at incredibly low wages".

That "incredibly low wages" is (in real terms) about 25% of today's NMW, in case you're wondering.

but then youd have to go on to say how much cheaper cost of living was back then to balance out that low wage.....yes wages were lower....but not many were paying out half their income or even more monthly on privately renting a mould ridden shithole because its all they could do to get a roof over their heads either......so swings and roundabouts as you say!

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But hey if these elderly people dont think `their taxes` should go towards things that benefit young people....maybe I dont want my taxes going towards looking after the elderly generations in their later years either? see where this road goes down? 

This is a battle elderly generations seem to want to start but dont seem to realise they will never and can never win.

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2 hours ago, frostypaw said:

Yes that was the bit about students. Some of the other bits were about nationalising railways. That's what it means when someone says "half of that was about students and half about railways" *facepalm* you keep telling me what i was thinking and meaning when I wrote stuff though, that's always a winner and never hugely argumentative and going to cause confusion and trouble.

erm ... we could go round this a million times, but I'm realising that's there's nothing I might have done that wasn't also done by yourself. Only one of us threw a strop.

Anyway, let's move on.

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1 minute ago, waterfalls212434 said:

But hey if these elderly people dont think `their taxes` should go towards things that benefit young people....maybe I dont want my taxes going towards looking after the elderly generations in their later years either? see where this road goes down? 

This is a battle elderly generations seem to want to start but dont seem to realise they will never and can never win.

I don't expect a state pension which is why I made sure throughout my working life I budgeted for retirement ... not all OAP's will be relying on the state to look after them  in their dotage ...so don't worry your hard earned won't be contributing to my twilight years ;)

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16 minutes ago, waterfalls212434 said:

But hey if these elderly people dont think `their taxes` should go towards things that benefit young people....maybe I dont want my taxes going towards looking after the elderly generations in their later years either? see where this road goes down?

to a place where you have paid towards a state pension, but decide to throw that money away to spite a group of people? :P

There's plenty of old gits but everything in your comparison isn't equal.

You're asking today's old gits to pay 5 times as much towards Uni now as the old gits in their day paid towards them.

If 'the people' want more, 'the people' have to pay more in taxes cos it doesn't happen by magic.

 

16 minutes ago, waterfalls212434 said:

This is a battle elderly generations seem to want to start but dont seem to realise they will never and can never win.

and guess which group of people will predominantly pay those taxes?

i'll give you a clue. Elderly generations tend to not have jobs or high incomes. 

This old git is ready to open his wallet to pay more of those taxes for uni. Are you?

Edited by eFestivals
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19 minutes ago, waterfalls212434 said:

but then youd have to go on to say how much cheaper cost of living was back then to balance out that low wage.....yes wages were lower....but not many were paying out half their income or even more monthly on privately renting a mould ridden shithole because its all they could do to get a roof over their heads either......so swings and roundabouts as you say!

some of us were paying 2/3rds of our income for a manky mouldy bedsit, because funnily enough the housing stock back then was MUCH worse than today.

There's a lot of twaddle getting talked about decades gone by. The 70s were much shitter than today in many ways.

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