Students should face paying council tax, Lib Dems say

[BobF64]

So how's that meant to help, exactly? What's the benefit to society? May as well just send them all to prison, afaict ... you're not actually suggesting they do anything productive, or in any way better themselves or society. I do believe that when we had National Service they actually taught people to fight, so they could be of use if they were needed...

In the event of a fairly large conflict, cannon fodder is always useful.

Its no less productive than sitting around unemployed and being handed benefits.

I dont actually suggest that it is an answer, solution or even sensible, but its still a better alternative than sending them all to university or having them lay about.

[mcmiller]

Mandatory paid military service isnt such a bad idea IMO, there are a few chavs with a lot negative energy around here and if somehow that negative energy could be channelled into something positive it would be a win win for everyone.

I'm not sure if training chavs how to fight and use weapons is such a good idea...

[scaryjim]

... its still a better alternative than sending them all to university or having them lay about.

I don't think it is, tbh. At least if you send them all to university then most of them should at least pick up something useful, even if its in their spare time when they're skipping lectures Making them get up early and drill without teaching them anything useful or interesting, as well as telling them they'll have to pay back any "pocket money" they get, will simply lead to a lot of pissed off, disaffected youth with a huge grudge against the system - and last summer we saw how much trouble mildly disaffected youth without much of a grudge could cause - giving them a reason to rebel and riot seems somewhat... foolish?

[pp05]

Typical.

After all people are no longer voters. Just walking £ signs to rob in new and innovative ways.

[BobF64]

Typical.

After all people are no longer voters. Just walking £ signs to rob in new and innovative ways.

I think youll find that almost always been that way, in the past those permitted to vote were invariably the rich, and were permitted to vote precisely because they were asked to "donate" their money to the state.

[billythewiz]

Great. I don't want to be a Civil Engineer though, so tell me why under your plan I should be forced to do an engineering degree?

That's just a straw man. You're not forced to do anything. The point is that we (society) are short of Engineers, so if you help us out, it seems only fair that we encourage you. If you want to study say, English, then go ahead. Under my scheme you'd have be in the same situation as you are now. If you want so study Socio-Economic Scandinavian Mythological Poetry, be my guest, just pay for it yourself.

If I wanted to do Mech Eng, the former, if I wanted to history, the latter.

You're very fortunate not to have your choice affected by any financial consequences.

Having said that, it seems a little pointless discussing your post, since you're just making up bizarre statistics to back up a dodgy argument.

I presume that is just a troll. Let's ask google for some actual statistics to backup my argument.

And since when did a history course take 8 hours a week?

I thought it was just common knowledge that History and many other liberal arts subjects have small numbers of lectures (contact hours) a week. A small amount of googeling reveals this :-

"Students studying subjects such as languages, history and philosophy have access to less than nine hours a week "contact time" ", and for History of Art :-

" In a typical week a student will have 4-6 'contact hours'"

And more generally :-
"Arts and social science courses ... may have 8 hours per week. ... engineering and sciences have a heavier timetable with up to 25 hours per week". When thay say that "Lectures can last for up to 3 hours", they mean the engineering lectures, not Arts and social sciences !
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/courses/scho...iversity-study

Since when did any university have different length terms for different subjects?

Finding google evidence for this is harder so I'll just have to rely on the anecdote of my experience. The uni I attended had three ten week terms. First years often had exams in the first term and everyone usually had them in the third. These usually started in week 5, which meant that some students were all finished by week 6, while others still had exams on the last day of week 10. The last to be examined where always the engineers as they needed the longest to study. Once all exams where finished there was nothing to do. This meant that many "art and social science" students only did ~22 weeks compared to the 27-30 for some engineering courses.

We used to make fun of the Mechanical Engineers who all had to stay for 3 extra weeks at the end of their 2nd year. We just had sympathy for those on MEng degrees (especially those on 5 year sandwich courses), who just seemed to work every summer. Mind you, anyone who is that clever and that hard working deserves everything they get, right ?



Getting back to the original topic (sorry to distract you lot from your fascinating discussion on conscription), WRT council taxing students, we should be honest that it will penalise and discourage the poor and have no affect on the wealthy. We should be encouraging intellect, not wealth. Currently our immigration policy is such that scientist and engineers are not prevented from coming here. We have a need for them. While this need continues, I think we should be encouraging our own to study these subjects. If we did, then I'd have less issue with council taxing them. The engineers would be able to afford it and so would the History of Artists (via rich daddy).

[jim]

That's just a straw man. You're not forced to do anything. The point is that we (society) are short of Engineers, so if you help us out, it seems only fair that we encourage you. If you want to study say, English, then go ahead. Under my scheme you'd have be in the same situation as you are now. If you want so study Socio-Economic Scandinavian Mythological Poetry, be my guest, just pay for it yourself.

If society is short of engineers, then that's a fair point, but it's not what you said. You named some subjects deemed worthwhile, and some deemed not worthwhile, and acted as though all we need are the former. I fully agree that if one particular area lacked experienced graduates, then we should encourage people to study that subject, but that's a very different proposition to a wholesale categorising of degrees.

Furthermore, you say that it's a straw man and I'm not forced to do anything. Well, I can't afford to pay for my degree myself, so to me my point still stands. Should I be denied a degree in the subject of my choice because my parents aren't wealthy enough?

You're very fortunate not to have your choice affected by any financial consequences.

Your assumption is incorrect, but cheers for the insinuation.

I presume that is just a troll. Let's ask google for some actual statistics to backup my argument.

I thought it was just common knowledge that History and many other liberal arts subjects have small numbers of lectures (contact hours) a week. A small amount of googeling reveals this :-

"Students studying subjects such as languages, history and philosophy have access to less than nine hours a week "contact time" ", and for History of Art :-

" In a typical week a student will have 4-6 'contact hours'"

And more generally :-
"Arts and social science courses ... may have 8 hours per week. ... engineering and sciences have a heavier timetable with up to 25 hours per week". When thay say that "Lectures can last for up to 3 hours", they mean the engineering lectures, not Arts and social sciences !
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/courses/scho...iversity-study

No, it's not a troll. It's me pointing out the flaws in your argument. You are indeed correct, history degrees have typical contact hours of around 4-6 hours even in top universities (although the new fees will increase that to 10 hours as part of the government's plans). Your original post though didn't say that - it said "with 8 hours a week".

The idea that a history student spends 8 hours a week studying and then goes out drinking for the rest of it is just wrong. There's a reason that history students have a very small amount of contact hours - it's because they're meant to think for themselves. The lectures purposefully contain nothing more than a cursory outline of the subject. They're meant to do the work themselves, research themselves, read themselves, and write for themselves. If you think it would be wise for the university to have 20 hours supervised study in the library per week, then that's fair enough, but I think most students would find that heavy-handed and unnecessary.

Sure, some people can do the bare minimum for 3 years and get away with it. Then they fail. That's their choice. University is all about choices and their consequences.

Finding google evidence for this is harder so I'll just have to rely on the anecdote of my experience. The uni I attended had three ten week terms. First years often had exams in the first term and everyone usually had them in the third. These usually started in week 5, which meant that some students were all finished by week 6, while others still had exams on the last day of week 10. The last to be examined where always the engineers as they needed the longest to study. Once all exams where finished there was nothing to do. This meant that many "art and social science" students only did ~22 weeks compared to the 27-30 for some engineering courses.

We used to make fun of the Mechanical Engineers who all had to stay for 3 extra weeks at the end of their 2nd year. We just had sympathy for those on MEng degrees (especially those on 5 year sandwich courses), who just seemed to work every summer. Mind you, anyone who is that clever and that hard working deserves everything they get, right ?

Exam timetabling is a bit of an odd example to put forward for claims of longer terms, but fair enough if that's how it went when you were at uni. I can inform you that it doesn't work like that for me, but it doesn't mean a lot.

There are some departments where they definitely do have longer terms, like geology where they're expected to go off on field trips during their holidays. I'm sure archaeology and palaeontology are the same. I'm not aware of any difference in actual stated term dates though, they're fixed. And besides, as I pointed out earlier, in an arts subject you are expected to do your own work. I know English students who spend half of their summers reading massive quantities literature to prepare for the next year. However relevant you think it is, they're still working in their holidays... whilst, for all we know, the engineers might be sunbathing. Or rainbathing if they can't leave England.

Getting back to the original topic (sorry to distract you lot from your fascinating discussion on conscription), WRT council taxing students, we should be honest that it will penalise and discourage the poor and have no affect on the wealthy. We should be encouraging intellect, not wealth. Currently our immigration policy is such that scientist and engineers are not prevented from coming here. We have a need for them. While this need continues, I think we should be encouraging our own to study these subjects. If we did, then I'd have less issue with council taxing them. The engineers would be able to afford it and so would the History of Artists (via rich daddy).

You're still wrong though. You know something? I wanted to do a physics degree or a chemistry degree and go into science. Then I looked at the back of the New Scientist at job opportunities. Pages and pages of "£20k, Ph.D required". One of my closest friends just got a 1st in Biology from a good university, after fighting his way through a terrible school with no money whatsoever from his parents. Presumably, in your eyes, the ideal situation, unless you don't rate biology. He's now absolutely screwed, because nobody will touch him with a bargepole. He applied for around 50 jobs IIRC in the year after he graduated, inside and outside of science without a single offer. He's got to go and get a Ph.D now to have any hope of ever getting a job, and the market is still very bleak when he comes out.

If we have a need for scientists, then the salaries should be higher. That would've convinced me to go into chemistry or physics.

My current degree has absolutely no relation to the field I'm going to work in, but it's taught me a lot of valuable skills. Under your plan, I would have saved the cash and done the physics or chemistry degree instead. Do you really think, though, that I would actually go into scientific research with the job market the way it is? No, I'd have taken your cut price degree and gone straight into the same business I'm looking at right now, without benefiting the nation in any way different to how I am now.

The thing that I suspect we're never going to agree on here is that I believe a breadth of subjects is necessary for a decent workforce. If companies were built up of physics and engineering students it would be very one-dimensional. I'm not saying that we should be encouraging "Socio-Economic Scandinavian Mythological Poetry", and in fact I would love for all of the invented degrees to be kicked into touch. And that goes for sciences as well as arts - Forensic Science BSc for instance needs getting rid of. We need to accept that we can't force people to do what we want them to. If we need more scientists, we can't force them to do a physics degree and force them to become a researcher. There's a free job market, and most of them will end up working in some area of business. We need people from all backgrounds, and as long as they've had a rigorous degree then they will have incredibly valuable skills.

Having seen the appalling English used on some displays in my university's engineering department, it's fairly clear that the engineers at my university might be excellent planners, designers and thought processors, but they're pretty rubbish communicators. Obviously not all of them are, but judging by the displays most of them are. Likewise, a lot of arts students will be terrible designers, but excellent communicators. We need people will different skill sets.

And your suggestion that the arts become the exclusive club of the wealthy really grates on me - we need to get away from the snobbery of the 1960s and 1970s re: classics, and we're finally starting to do that. We shouldn't be going back to it.

[petercook7]

If the wage level isnt there then people will choose other subjects, if companies dont want to pay a higher wage for engineer graduates then its their problem, don't expect people to study for something that returns little in the future, people mirror business.

[petercook7]

I don't think it is, tbh. At least if you send them all to university then most of them should at least pick up something useful, even if its in their spare time when they're skipping lectures Making them get up early and drill without teaching them anything useful or interesting, as well as telling them they'll have to pay back any "pocket money" they get, will simply lead to a lot of pissed off, disaffected youth with a huge grudge against the system - and last summer we saw how much trouble mildly disaffected youth without much of a grudge could cause - giving them a reason to rebel and riot seems somewhat... foolish?

I think they had reason to rebel, to say that they did'nt is foolish, governments have let down the working to favor the well off, the current crisis was developed by the wealthy and currently being paid by the poor. There is one thing a poor person does that the majority rich person will not, fight for his country.
80 years ago they were building 700k homes a year, we just build 120k a year yet we are supposed to be more advanced.

[neonplanet40]

I always notice on these forums that Arts students get hammered on a regular basis

I studied English with History so I could be an English teacher. I don't see how this is a stupid degree. English teachers are important in education are they not? If so then people studying the Arts is also needed, no?

People should be allowed to study whatever they want, it is their life after all although sometimes it doesn't feel like it. I find it interesting to read that people think the only decent areas of study in university are engineering and doctors. A society wouldn't get very far if this was all people knew.

[TheAnimus]

I think they had reason to rebel, to say that they did'nt is foolish, governments have let down the working to favor the well off, the current crisis was developed by the wealthy and currently being paid by the poor. There is one thing a poor person does that the majority rich person will not, fight for his country.
80 years ago they were building 700k homes a year, we just build 120k a year yet we are supposed to be more advanced.

Wait what?!

We built new towns and such after the world war, we also radically shifted what was considered housing poverty. We had an influx of immigration and had to rebuild stock damaged by the war.

What does this have to do with Students and Council Tax?

Also if you want to have any meaning on numbers like that you need to include the number standing empty, population growth, average occupants, which IIRC is at an all time high thanks to failed local council regeneration projects......

[BobF64]

People should be allowed to study whatever they want, it is their life after all although sometimes it doesn't feel like it. I find it interesting to read that people think the only decent areas of study in university are engineering and doctors. A society wouldn't get very far if this was all people knew.

I dont think most people think that the arts etc arent worth studying or that people shouldnt be allowed to, its just that they dont think it should be funded by the public purse.

But because society is full of complainy, legal happy ungrateful people, you dont seem to be able to fund some courses and demand others pay for theirs, so you either fund all, which isnt sensible or viable, or you fund none, and everyone pays.

[dave87]

I dont think most people think that the arts etc arent worth studying or that people shouldnt be allowed to, its just that they dont think it should be funded by the public purse.

But because society is full of complainy, legal happy ungrateful people, you dont seem to be able to fund some courses and demand others pay for theirs, so you either fund all, which isnt sensible or viable, or you fund none, and everyone pays.

Thing is, how many different things do Arts graduates end up doing? I can't think of a sector where they couldn't end up in. Arts degrees such as History etc are the most versatile degrees you can get.

How many of the top lawyers, accountants, writers, etc were Arts graduates? I'd wager more than a lot of people expect.

[BobF64]

How many of the top lawyers, accountants, writers, etc were Arts graduates? I'd wager more than a lot of people expect.

Yes, but the view, correctly or not, is that those people would probably still be in the same place if they hadnt done a degree at all, or would have been better suited if they had done it in law, accountancy or working in starbucks (where ever it is writers are supposed to hang out with their laptops).

[jim]

Yes, but the view, correctly or not, is that those people would probably still be in the same place if they hadnt done a degree at all, or would have been better suited if they had done it in law, accountancy or working in starbucks (where ever it is writers are supposed to hang out with their laptops).

On that point, I've met some people who studied accountancy at university, and they would be a lot worse at accountancy than many arts graduates.

[neonplanet40]

Its easy to say something is useless when you haven't done it yourself I guess. As far as I'm concerned everyone should pay the same. Given that Arts students only have 8 contact hours per week they should technically pay less. Given how little contact time they need their fee's already subsidise other courses.