Tories reveal plan to privatise universities They would like the relationship between the state and university "to be a purchaser/provider relationship, rather than the current one, which is arguably that of master and slave."
I see the tories are conveniently forgetting, as usual, that the current funding mess was almost completely of their making. They were the ones who cut the funding per student and then told universities to recruit more. Of course, as exempt educational charities, there's nothing (apart from a huge overdraft) stopping any university from unilaterally opting out of undergraduate funding and tying to fund undergraduate teaching from fees, endowments and other general income. At the postgraduate level, it already happens. EBS is self-funding, and I'm willing to bet that the London Business School, Warwick Business School and the Cass School at City come pretty close to 100% self-fundinfg at the graduate level. However, as most universities have absolutely derisory endowments and rely on the block grant as their baseline funding, they'd have to be very brave indeed to give up the block grant. Mind you, I'd love to see the numbers on which the tories are basing this policy. Do they really think that auctioning off the spectrum is going to produce the billions necessary for an endownment policy to work? The 3G auction may have produced 20 billion, but that's still a long way short of the amount needed to pursue such a policy for the Russell group alone! Angela
Interesting: First the conservative party (just recently) opposed allowing universities to charge fees, now they want to privatize them. I guess they'll be non-profit companies! <g>
More today in The Economist (no subscription required for these articles) http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=2367742 http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=2367332 Last week's interesting story about the cost of an Oxford degree has now moved to the free section http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2353190 It seems I was underestimating how much Oxford was losing per student! And for the third week running, no mill adverts in the classifieds. Angela
As I recall, the only private university in the UK is the University of Buckingham ??? I'd hate to think that the Tories would sell off the universities to special interests like the railroads or railways. What I hear is that the railroads are in poor condition - profits come first.
Yes. Interestingly, only 170 (i.e. less than a quarter) of the students at Buckingham are from the U.K. Most of the students are from outside the EU. Someone from Buckingham was recently reported as saying that it might consider become a public university if top-up fees become a reality.
All the universities in the UK are private. The only difference between Buckingham and the rest is that Buckingham does not accept undergraduate funding from the government and the restrictions on student recruitment that come with that funding. The ex-polys were originally owned by local educational authorities, which gave them a status somewhat analogous to state universities in the US, but when the binary divide was "abolished" in 1992, the ex-polys were granted the same self-managing status as the pre-1992 universities. All the universities are educational charities. Effectively, all the UK universities have the same legal status as a private university would have in the States. Angela
