Saturday 9 April 2011

Those University Fees In Full

For starters, an analogy. When the EU emissions trading scheme started, power generators were given free allowances to cover almost all their historical levels of emissions: they'd only need to buy a few allowances at the margin, at whatever was the prevailing price. Politicians (notably in Germany where they don't understand how markets work) convinced themselves the free allocation meant the price of electricity wouldn't go up.

Wrong. Using the allowances they'd been gifted incurred an opportunity- cost because they could have sold them instead. So, as any fule could have told them (this fule did), the price of electricity went up by the full amount of the price of carbon.

Anyhow: those University fees, with rationale in italics.

Oxford £9,000 - best in UK, got to keep up standards
Impressive Coll, London £9,000 - thinks it's the best
Cambridge £9,000 - needs £ to catch up with Oxford
LSE £1,000 - supplemented by Gaddafi bursaries
Oxford Burkes £9,000 - hopes to be mistaken for Oxford
Univ. of Loamshire £10,500 - didn't understand the system
Squalor Metropolitan Uni £9,000 - thinks it will gain status
Groveller 's Coll £7,500 - Vice Chancellor wants peerage, hopes to curry favour with Clegg
Wigan Uni £9,000 - because we're worth it
Sheffield Hellhole £6,000 - because, errr, we're not, & Clegg's our MP
School of Social Engineering £8,500 - thought this was a clever idea, now trying to increase to £9,000
Urban Central Poly £9,000 - taking the piss
University of Life £9,000 - that's just the way it goes

ND

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

As they say, if you think education is expensive - try ignorance.

lilith said...

I really don't see how all bar Oxbridge and one or two others won't shut down. After all we are Europeans now, and the kids may as well go over the thin strip of water and take their degrees where the tuition fees are low or non existant.

APL said...

"the price of electricity went up by the full amount of the price of carbon"

1. It's Carbon Dioxide, not 'Carbon'.

2. Carbon Dioxide cannot possibly be a pollutant as it is one of the fundamentals of the food chain, basically life on Earth depends on Carbon Dioxide in the 'biosphere'. There are only a few organisms, usually found in the deepest oceans where sulfur biology exists

3. Carbon trading, Carbon credits, Carbon sequestration, Carbon Blather. It's all a scam.

As you were!

Electro-Kevin said...

I love it when Oxford Brookes graduates try to pull that one.

I went to quite a few seminars there when studying for my CIT diploma.

(A qualification that is equally BS.)

Anonymous said...

"Carbon Dioxide cannot possibly be a pollutant as it is one of the fundamentals of the food chain, basically life on Earth depends on Carbon Dioxide in the 'biosphere'."

Green plants use CO2 for photosynthesis. This has no connection at all with its physical effect as a greenhouse gas, any more than the fact that humans drink water has any connection with the physical action of water in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

Too little CO2 in the air, and we get an ice age. Too much, and the arctic ice melts.

DC

APL said...

"Too little CO2 in the air, and we get an ice age. Too much, and the arctic ice melts."

Only if you believe the anthropormogenic global warming drivel.

A couple of volcano's erupting produce more CO2 than man has created by human activity since the before the industrial revolution and by the way it's the atmospheric dust produced by the eruptions that are likely to contribute to colder weather.

If you are looking for a driver for terrestrial weather systems, look at H2O. Odd that the Globalists haven't tried to ban that compound.

And the correlation between CO2 and temperature is one where rising CO2 follows not leads increasing temperature.

What drives temperature? It might be .. SHOCK HORROR! The sun.

Mark Wadsworth said...

I must admit I was wrong-footed on this one. I had assumed that Uni's (being run by the cleverest people) would set their price at just above what it actually costs to run a degree course, and/or that they set the price such as to maximise their income/profits in future.

This equates to a price of about £5,000, maybe a bit more for prestige uni's, or those in London (where it's more fun studying).

Either I was hopelessly wrong (as is often the case) or student numbers will plummet, or...

Potential students (being the cleverest people) will realise that the taxes used to collect the arrears are so hopelessly 'progressive' that you are now (in relative terms) better off studying some crap which will never get you a well-paid job than you were before and/or if you do study something useful, you are better off f-ing off abroad once you graduate, in which case the Lib-Cons have just made things a whole lot worse for everybody.

Nick Drew said...

Mark - yes, the extreme progressiveness of it is quite remarkable: of the £9,000 (means-tested on the parents, FFS)something like 3k will be used for social engineering

I am glad my kids cleared the education system with only loans to repay

wrong-footed - the dangers of a priori reasoning on human decision-making

Lil, EK, anon - yes, I fear tertiary education is in for a period of turmoil & daft goings-on

APL, anon(2) - house policy - we tend to steer away from debating AGW around these parts ...

Botogol said...

to a certain extent the universities seem to be caught in a trap : they want to be able to offer an impressive number of free and cheap places for students who have low-income parents, and to finance that they need to charge a lot of money to the others.. hence increasing the pressure to provide bursaries... hence etc etc.

We are also seeing the same effect in the London indenpendent day schools - each of them are slowly and surely increasing the number of means-tested awards. In the first instance they financed them by reducing the value of scholarships, and now it puts upwards pressure on the fees.

Mark Wadsworth said...

ND, the claw back mechanism is insane, you are far better off paying cash up front, even if you have to take out a second mortgage to do so.

The implied interest rate (assuming you get a reasonably well paid job afterwards) is stupendously high.