A group of York students has won the opportunity to have their very own I-phone application developed after winning The App Challenge final, held at the Ron Cooke Hub on Wednesday, January 18.
YUSU Welfare officer Bob Hughes has warned students to be vigilant after a student loans phishing scam has been revealed.
Her Majesty the Queen will be visiting York on Maundy Thursday, 5th April, as part of the 800th anniversary of York’s Charter for the traditional “Royal Maundy” ceremony.
A flood caused by a heating system “failure” forced the university IT services to shut down many essential systems on Sunday night, causing problems for many students on the eve of their exams and assignment due-dates.
We often complain about the cost of being engaged in study at university, and the massive debt we will have to pay back when we leave. As an arts student, doing 4 to 6 hours of contact time a week, I am often left wondering, where does the money go? And this question is even more relevant with Labour trying to push through a bill that will allow universities to increase tuitions fees to as much as £5,000 a year. But is this increase necessary, and will our education be at a loss without it?
A claim came today (reported in the Independent) from Professor Michael Farthing, the vice-chancellor of Sussex University, that universities would need to start charging students £7,500 per year in order to maintain a quality standard of education. Sussex is one of 14 colleges and universities in the country where lecturers have gone on strike because of fear that they will lose their jobs. After the University threatened to make 107 lecturers redundant, members of the University and College Union, have considered boycotting the marking of students’ summer exams in protest, a prospect that will leave many students quaking in their boots.
Professor Fathing’s budget has been reduced significantly this year due to a lack of funding to universities. As a result, he has called for a proper government review, which will come later this year, of an increase on the current cap on fees, currently at £3,240 per year. He explained that in his view, universities should be allowed to charge as much as £5,000 per year, in order to get back on track in terms of funding, but that eventually the cap would need to increase to as much as between £7,000 and £7,500 per year.
According to a source, evidence has already been presented to the review, suggesting that top up fees should increase to between £5,000 and £7,000 per year. While the Liberal Democrats are planning to phase out tuition fees over a period of six years, Labour and Conservatives want to wait on the outcome of the review before deciding whether an increase is necessary.
A pledge, orchestrated by the National Union for Students, has been signed by 200 Labour candidates, and 400 Liberal Democrat candidates, while only 13 Conservatives have done so. This means it is very unlikely that there will be a substantial rise, whatever the outcome of the General Election.
But what will the effect be on universities if the bill is not passed? Will it mean the ‘dumming’ down of university education?
A survey by the University and College Union has said that 6,863 people are at risk of losing their jobs due to budget cuts in British Universities. In some British institutions, lecturers face the possibility of redundancy every day, many of these lecturers being highly educated and extremely talented in their field. While it has emerged that some London universities cannot afford to pay their cleaners a living wage and some universities even have to cut back departments.
While there is also a strong increase in the number of young people applying for university, many students will face an inferior quality of education because there will be fewer lecturers to nourish students’ talents. It might also mean that students do not have access to a broad range of knowledge, with perhaps fewer lecturers who are experts in more unusual aspects of a subject.
While Labour and the Conservative party have pledged an extra 10,000 university places, there are still around 200,000 university applicants who are likely to miss out this year because of inadequate funding.
YUSU told Nouse that they oppose any increase in tuition fees and “any marketisation of higher education.” But with significant cuts to the Higher education budget being made, the government and students should be prepared to make a choice between paying more for a university education that is of good quality, and is available to more people; or less for an education that is of an even poorer quality than our parent’s generation, that is forced to become more elitist because of a lack of places.
With the economy increasingly unstable, the prospect of the government funding places themselves seems unlikely, and so in time universities will either have to raise fees in order to maintain this standard of education, or make greater cuts in order to avoid closure. One day we may have to face facts, that while paying so much for education is not nice, it may be necessary and also inevitable.
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