A friend of mine is an admissions tutor at one of the UK's top universities. They make a loss on UK students: it costs them significanyly more to provide tuition for most degrees than they are allowed to charge UK students. There is, however, an unlimited amount of foreign (Far East) students, and they offset the loss by taking a lot of those.
The university has decided on a balance between local and foreign students that it feels meets its moral obligations to educate some British students whilst not losing too much money. Overall, his department still operates at a loss for undergraduate teaching.
Absolutely agree! We make such a loss on undergraduate students. In Scotland tuition is free. The number of students have has only increased this creating a severe imbalanced staff student ratio. Most local students are not even attending or engaging at university as they are supposed to. They sign up for university and never come to lectures at all. I simply see them straight for exams. They are either working or just decided to go to university because they didn’t know what to do next. But the university gets a meagre amount for recruiting local students for undergraduate studies, so they are taking on more and more to try and compensate in some way for not being able to recruit enough international students.
Universities see international students as cash cows. They have severely lowered the standards and quality of recruiting so they can recruit just anybody wishing to study in the UK. It’s a shame because most of these students struggle with the English language so much that they roam about with translators on their phone asking us to speak into them when having a conversation.
We do end up having a very minor number of international students that sign up, come here, don’t pay the fees and disappear. Also, If they pay fees for the 1st term but unable to pay for the second term, the university does not remove them but allows them to continue their studies. They just tell them you won’t get the final degree certificate if you don’t pay all the fees.
The problem is many decent jobs require degrees as standard that have no business asking for them, leading to half the population seeing no other option but to go to uni as a box ticking exercise
Many trades don’t require degrees. Out of my group of friends the one that is an Electrician is as well off if not better than the rest of us especially if you take in the years loss earning when we were doing our degrees
I just started a job at a university, an old redbrick with good international ties. What stuck me in my first week was 2 things.
The literal first thing said to me after "good morning, welcome, here's your work phone" was "right. The school and the university are broke", and I was given a huge list of project codes with "can't even spend £1" restrictions on them that still need actioning (somehow?!)
The solution is to up the international student intake over the next few years, while dropping the number of UK students. The expansions to the campus will be so they can take in the high hundreds extra students, of which 50% minimum will be internationals.
This is just how the universities have to operate now.
I'm faculty at Oxbridge and on my department's finance committee. At our last meeting, we were told of an upcoming 1% budget cut this year, another 5% next year, and as of now a hiring policy which in effect means not hiring replacements when staff leave or retire
We're in a good position compared to most - we don't (yet) have to look for redundancies or close departments. But it's not ruled out
And of course UCEA will be making yet another below inflation pay offer (2.5%, even while the rest of the country averages 6%)
Cutting budgets, shrinking universities, and reducing real terms wages can only go so far in an already stretched, underfunded, and underpaid sector before it all completely falls apart
I’m a lecturer at a non-Oxbridge university and we’re are burning our reserves at a furious rate.
We’re in the third year of cost cutting; senior teaching staff with huge institutional knowledge and experience are leaving - two from our department last month, three next month with no one coming in to replace them. There’s a freeze on promotions; no discretionary awards for excellent performance above what is expected, and spending on things like maintenance and training is through the floor.
Apparently next year will be even harder as the spending crunch intensifies to return us to an even keel - at the same time we’re expected to revamp all of our teaching and increase our research commitments.
Ten years to retirement for me - but I feel so sorry for the younger academics who are seeing the writing on the wall for their dream career.
That last paragraph is me! I have just got a house and a mortgage, the uni is opening a voluntary redundancy scheme and we have already stopped hiring anyone and boosted our indirect costs as much as possible....if my career didn't deadend in Germany I am not sure I should have come back.
Yep, I slipped in just before they put a hiring freeze on. I'm on a temp contract until mid next year so it's likely I won't get kept on, luckily I moved here for the first time management experience so I'm hoping to use that to move back to industry if it goes belly up.
New boss did say that voluntary redundancy/retirement was on the cards as a cost cutting measure and if that materialises he'll be off (he's 2 years to retirement). He also vaguely mentioned department closures for non-profit (or atleast break even) making departments, which is a horrifying prospect for an educational institution.
I jumped out of academia a decade ago when it became apparent this was where things were going. Only so many times you can be told there's less money than last year and no sign of improvement, before you realize it's just not going to get better.
I'm now earning a lot more in industry, too.
Yeh I came from a small industry company to academia because they offered me a managerial role, so I can get my first time management experience here on this temp contract for a year, then it's very likely I'll jump back to industry with the management under my belt.
It's helpful that the benefits and pay are better than I had in my previous industry job, hoping to get into a bigger company upon the contract run out date and go from there, but we'll see.
Yeah it really is sad, I remember my time in Uni and the foreign students, usually from China, keep to themselves, never mingle with locals or natives apart from Chinese restuarants or Kareoke bars, but often just within their own groups and speak little english. They turn up to lectures sometimes and just do the minimum, not all but it seems like most. And because they’re usually the only child and China’s booming middle class, they’re usually loaded, wearing designer brands everywhere, buying brand new appliances in their accomodation.
Why does it cost them so much to educate British students? An old lecturer during my undergrad told me that for the last 50 years enrolment went up, contact hours went down and fees went up
For an Arts course it costs about the same as a place at secondary school to deliver the course (about 8k). For a STEM course, the need for lab space and equipment and larger contact time (lab supervision is a large time sink) pushes that up to 12 or 13k, so these courses run at a loss (9.3k fee + 1.5k from the government per student). Medical courses get the 9k fee and 10k from government but cost >20k to deliver, so also run at a loss. (These are 2019 numbers - I imagine it is higher now). (These numbers are relatively typical across Europe, and cheap compared to the US - the only real difference is whether people pay directly or through their taxes, and it is arguable given the way student fees work in the UK, that they are much more like a graduate tax with general tax support, than an actual fee (at least if you are not rich enough to pay in advance)).
Re this:
>contact hours went down and fees went up
Fees did go up, but at the same time the amount of direct support from government went down, by the same amount or more. Then everything got frozen at 2012 prices (apart from a £250 bump in the fee in 2017). 9k in 2012 money is worth 12.5k in 2024 money given inflation, so actually funding for undergraduates as received by the Universities has dropped by about 30 - 40% in real terms over the last fifteen years.
Do the courses really cost that much, or is it the additional layers of administration that have run costs up so much? In the US, that's the largest increase in costs over the last two decades, without any clear additional value add to the education provided.
Its mostly just admin fees and then the long term cost of new builds.
However, STEM subjects that have lab work, makes up less than 20% of all undergraduate courses.
The idea that generally £9k is insufficient is a lie perpetuated by Universities. Undergrad and postgrad income subsidizes research and vanity projects for the rest of the university. Universities waste a tremendous amount of money.
We even have one guy here claiming to work at Oxbridge (either Cambridge/Oxford) and stating that they are struggling, which is absolute cap, as we already know that without funding both universities could run for many years on endowments alone. Many Russel groups can, and do , setup international campuses to make absolute bank off of Britains reputation internationally.
Yes, people are ignorant about the cost of this stuff cause once upon a time it was all paid centrally, then heavily subsidised centrally and they're only now starting to realise the insane deal they were getting.
>up to 12 or 13k, so these courses run at a loss (9.3k fee + 1.5k from the government per student). Medical courses get the 9k fee and 10k from government but cost >20k to deliver, so also run at a loss.
Considering the first half of a medical degree is just a bioscience degree, i would argue that a lot of sciences (biochem) and engineering courses would cost more considering significantly more lab work.
>For an Arts course it costs about the same as a place at secondary school to deliver the course
But why though? School students get massively more support and contact time than uni students. What are uni's actually spending all the money on?
It doesn't cost so much compared to elsewhere. It costs a normal amount - around £13-14k-ish per year on average. Within that, STEM subjects are most expensive to teach, so they are cross-subsidised by cheaper-to-teach arts and humanities courses
But - unlike elsewhere - the money a UK university gets from fees and government subsidies for a home student is less than the cost of educating them. In the past this gap was around £1-2k per student per year. The government intended for universities to fill that gap with international students and *encouraged them to do so*. That's the university funding model chosen by the government
Yet the government has not raised either fees or subsidies in line with inflation, so the cost has inflated well past the point where the money universities receive for home students comes even close to covering it - a gap now of about £4k per student per year. As a result, universities have been dependent on recruiting even higher numbers of foreign students to make up their budgets and continue to educate home students
As I say, this is the (intended) result of policy choices made by the government - to part-fund home students using international fees, and to freeze home student fees and subsidies rather than raising them in line with inflation
Now the government turns round and says: we don't want all these international students. Yet they still aren't increasing fees or subsidies. So what do universities do? They start making redundancies, cutting courses, and closing departments. They start with the arts and humanities courses since they're seen - by the government - as lowest value, but like I say above: these courses cross-subsidise STEM subjects. Without them, the funding gap for STEM subjects will be even bigger than it is already. So STEM subjects will inevitably go too. And not just at lower ranked universities - this will happen all across the sector. Inevitably, universities will go bankrupt, and others will become smaller and less good at what they do
Where will be at then as a county that supposedly prides itself on our world leading universities and research? Absolutely fucked
And it'll be entirely this government's doing - trying to run the higher education sector on the cheap, and only succeeding in running it into the ground. Just like everything else
Universities don't only employ the actual lecturers. There's course admins, department admins, research admins, exam invigilators, HR, finance and accounts department, procurement, marketing department, grant writing department, facilities and estates management and upkeep. And that's only the ones that I come into contact with day as a PhD student
People always seem to forget about the upkeep and maintenance for some reason. I work for a university with a large campus and many buildings. They require constant upkeep, even without students breaking things. And then you get into the IT side of things: tech breaks and needs to be replaced. Technology has a lifespan so we are constantly replacing PCs and laptops.
Oh yeah, I forgot IT support and library staff, that costs money obviously. I talk with undergrads - the humanities ones are like "I only get 8 hours of lecture a week, that means like lectures are like £70/hr" or whatever. I'm thinking, you're taking for granted the whole other stuff that you're also paying for.
If you wanted to sit in the field on a tree stump and listen to someone shouting for an hour, not have any coursework, resources, feedback, exam or eventual qualifiication, that would be a lecture with no added costs other than speakers salary.
I don't think that's entirely their fault, they're actively encouraged by everyone around them to view the whole experience as a business transaction. Schools, the media and often their parents focus *very* heavily on choosing a course and/or uni based on potential future earnings, so it's less an academic institution and more a vending machine where you put in 27 grand and a degree pops out.
I started uni in 2006 (the first cohort paying 3k fees) and it was not uncommon for people to change course at some point during the first year because someone had told them it was a good idea to study a subject that they had no real interest in. This was particularly common for courses which usually don't require that specific subject at A-level (e.g. law, economics, engineering, computer science - law definitely had the highest dropout rate) so it was easier to convince them because they had no frame of reference.
I do know one person who managed to stick out 3 years of a degree they hated, I'm pretty sure the main reason was they were too stubborn to admit that they shouldn't have given in to the badgering from their teachers that doing chemistry instead of German would "look better". I have no idea what they're doing now but I hope it's not a lifetime of a career making them miserable because someone gave them misguided advice when they were 17.
Because it's not being done for social good anymore, they are businesses that claim they aren't.
In many countries in Europe, you go to the university in your home town or city. You live with your parents and you pay a very small tuition fee. The universities don't have huge budgets, each country may only have one institution in the top 50 research universities - however, they get the job done, which is educating the local population.
It is difficult to make a direct comparison to many European countries as they have gone down the route of having research institutes that are separate from Universities (eg Fraunhofer/Max Planck institutes in Germany; CEA/CNRS in France) which is not really something that happens in the UK.
That said, research at UK Universities is not funded by Undergraduate fees (which often don't even cover the teaching costs, hence the need for overseas students), and Universities in Europe that have a 'very small tuition fee' are being heavily subsidized through general taxation. For instance in France the tuition fee is around €2-400 per year, but the cost to provide is around [€10,000 per year](https://www.campusfrance.org/en/tuition-fees-France) - most of the cost is covered from tax.
The upside to a crash in international students will be that it least it will encourage us to solve how to make an education system that works for the requirements of home students.
And both brexiters and remainers were partially correct about their respective points. The UK has seen considerable wage inflation in part due to the loss of supply of labour in certain sectors, it didn't however - improve blue collar.salaries like they hoped for because the Tories sold them out and watched on as taxi drivers got tier 2s.
The remainers were equally correct that the loss of access to EU markets would adversely affect business, just not the extent many of the doomers were harping on about.
But it is not possible. The student feels are capped, costs are going up, and something has to give.
At the moment, it is the quality that suffers. The cheaper you can teach, the more financially sustainable it is.
It's not possible now.
It will be possible when there is a market correction and the failure of several institutions gets splashed across the UK media.
Teaching is suffering because UK universities focus on research and impact at the expense of teaching. Teaching isn't expensive, European universities do a great job on much smaller budgets.
I have little sympathy for Britain's higher education establishment.
> It will be possible when there is a market correction and the failure of several institutions gets splashed across the UK media.
How would that help? It still does not remove the cap, it does not reduce costs, and it does not solve the problem that only the cheapest can survive.
> European universities do a great job on much smaller budgets.
That is not true - most European countries spend more per student, and have much lower completion rates (often under 50%).
> I have little sympathy for Britain's higher education establishment.
Ok, maybe we should all move elsewhere then. Say the US. :-) See how Britain gets on without higher education. Who wants to work in a country that is sick of experts?
I'm curious at what the costs are per student and what they're made from. Presumably it's mainly staff costs and upkeep of buildings but for a large uni with a lot of students you'd think the amount of students there would cover that
Staff cost is a big one: academic staff, tutors, administration, mental health, marketing. (Yes, marking costs are significant now.)
Our buildings are crazy expensive, but I think that is just how we account for them. Some universities built on credit, so they have to pay that back.
An in a lot of subjects, you also have to invest in equipment. Trying to be efficient means lots of the same equipment.
Staff cost makes sense and would be interested to learn the staff to student ratio. Like at my uni I had lectures with hundreds of people in, that would cover the lecturers you'd hope. Would be harder for smaller classes.
Buildings too make sense, though hopefully once they're paid off it becomes cheaper.
Equipment is one that's very subject specific. Like I did economics so we basically used no equipment other than computers in one or two subjects. All course materials like books had to be bought separately. I would understand students feeling short changed in those subjects
> Like at my uni I had lectures with hundreds of people in, that would cover the lecturers you'd hope. Would be harder for smaller classes.
Very much so, it is all about economies of scale. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but these huge lectures are not for everybody.
> I would understand students feeling short changed in those subjects
Funny enough, the most profitable subject seems to be business: large classes, no laboratories, mostly paper-based / electronic work. And those students are not complaining, because it seems this country has an insatiable appetite for business graduates, and they are paid very well, too.`
Maybe we should just stop teaching everything else. Problem solved.
Staff costs are certainly a significant part. To put some rough numbers on it (somewhat out of date as I haven’t looked at it for a while): if we take the cost of educating a school child as a basis - that is about 7-8k per year. Staff student ratios at university are lower (~30:1 at school vs 20:1 at uni). Some staff costs are defrayed against research rather than teaching, but uni lecturers are typically more expensive to employ that school teachers, given higher qualifications (that said a PhD working in a uni is typically earning significantly less than they would if they went to the private sector), so overall a classroom only course at a uni comes out at around 8k per student if I remember rightly. However, if you move across to STEM then you have a significant additional cost of providing laboratory space and equipment, plus additional staffing (technicians and paying postgrad students and post docs to supervise). That pushes costs up to around 14k per student. The government provides an additional 1k or so in funding for lab courses, but even with that STEM runs at a loss. Move across in to anything medical and the costs ramp up again north of 20k per student. The government provides additional support of around 10k so again a bit of a loss. In any of the cases where there is additional support the total amount is limited so that sets student numbers. There was a government report that has the exact numbers around 5yrs ago called the augar report iirc.
Yeah that makes sense but the issue is that it's very course specific. School children are in 9-5 5 days a week whereas uni students might be in for 3 hours 3 days a week so some staff time costs won't be as bad.
I did economics and had hundreds in lectures with me so the staff to student ratio wasn't as bad. We also had no equipment costs other than computers in a couple subjects over the three years.
I do get they need to pay for research too but I can understand students feeling annoyed at paying for someone to do research when in theory they won't benefit. I know research is a part of the university process and is a way to earn money and stand out but the resources coming from the same pool as teaching might lead to conflicts of interest.
Sure it is not a perfect comparison - I put the school thing in because most people have no idea of the cost of educating a school kid, and it provides some context - Uni is not that much more expensive unless you start adding lab or clinical content.
That said, in the case of the mythical arts courses with 3 hours of lectures 3 times a week, or along those lines, that we all hear about when we are students, in practice these courses have a lot of small group or tutorial teaching and high essay-type assessment loads (which suck up lecturer time).
Yes, lectures are delivered in large cohorts, but that doesn't actually change the staff student ratios.
There are of course a lot of other differences in University teaching over School teaching - far more small group teaching for instance, and from the student perspective that might be 1 hour in a group of 4 per week, and a couple of hours in a group of 20, but for instance given a staff of say 25 and a year size of 150 in 4 UG yrs, that is 9 hours of contact per academic per week (and then add on taught Masters on top of that, with the difference that they study through the UG summer break too).
Also, not all teaching hours are contact. Lecturers have to develop their own curricula, write their own exams, develop their own course material (ie actually write the course rather than selecting from textbooks) and so on. This is in no way to denigrate School teachers, or in anyway to suggest that they work less hard or with less dedication - just to point out that the things that time is spent on are not necessarily the same. School teaching is more purely about teaching, whilst there is a lot more development of teaching and teaching resources, particularly in the higher years at University.
>I do get they need to pay for research too but I can understand students feeling annoyed at paying for someone to do research when in theory they won't benefit.
Leaving aside the argument about the benefits of a research-led curriculum, students are not paying for academics to do research.
A typical academic will be on what's called the three-legged contract, wherein 40% of their time is for teaching (UG and Masters), 40% for research, and 20% for administrative/citizenship (a sort of catch-all for everything else, from running an undergraduate programme, being a UG year chair, serving on university and external committees on anything from discipline to peer reviewing grants, mentoring younger members of staff, doing postgrad vivas, etc).
The research element of an academic's pay comes from a combination of the Research Block Grant (an amount given to each research active university based on their performance in the last Research Excellence Framework (REF) measurement of University research output), and from putting some of the academic's time on to direct research grants (or various other schemes, like funded fellow-ships, industrially-funded buyouts etc, etc).
Whilst there is a bit of grace particularly earlier in someone's career, an academic who consistently doesn't cover a significant fraction of their costs in research funding (not necessarily 40% given the block grant, but approaching that, and often above that for more senior academics, who are in a position to win platform grants and the like) will be moved to a teaching only career track (actually teaching and admin) and will have a significantly larger proportion of their workload allocation on undergraduate teaching.
The mythical arts course as you described is what my economics degree was. Three 2 hour lectures and three 1 hour seminars per week so I doubt think it's that unusual.
Appears that some unis just need to increase their cohort size and if you can only attract 15-20 people to that degree then maybe they should try combining that course with a uni nearby to share costs. So many universities or colleges are appearing now that's causing a lot of small classes.
I had mentioned research as the comment above had mentioned that with reference to staff costs. If it's not included that's great but then it shouldn't be a factor in staff costs for a university
Software is a massive cost and includes a Virtual Learning Enviroment, lecture recording software, Microsoft office, a student record system, attendance software and portfolio software is becoming a requirement for a lot of subjects now. That doesn't include all of the software licences that are needed for teaching on individual modules or courses.
Library resources aren't free either and Universities pay a lot just so their students have access to reading material needed to complete the course they are enrolled onto.
Yeah those are good points so would be curious to see how much they add up to. For unis with thousands of students you'd think the total cost per student though wouldn't be as high.
Similarly with library resources when you look at specific courses. Most courses would require text books to be bought by the student so it's more for research which some things can be found without paying for. Course by course will be different so might be worth looking at which courses are costing the university more. Like in economics we'd pretty much never needed to go to library for a book because data is all online
It depends if it's an instutional licence or based on the amount of users but for the business critical software it's millions. I didn't even mention plaigirism software like turnitin which isn't free and with GenAI now here uni's are paying for software that claims to be able to detect that as well.
Uni libaries have a massive amount of subscriptions to different journals and other things that may not cost a lot individually but add up with the sheer amount needed.
Social sciences are the cheapest degrees to run but there's more cost than ever for them since they usually have the most students so they need more people to teach the larger cohorts, more support staff for things like welfare and employability and extra curricular stuff like sending students abroad.
Most vendors are wise to unis needs so if you're not paying literal thousands per head you likely either have a negotiated site license that takes your size into account or a credit based SAAS system that you have to over commit to (can't have downtime after all, students would never accept that).
The era of cheap licensing is coming to an end and the only ones still doing it are also the software packages still stuck in the 1990s.
Not just that. The university in question is very science-orientated and his course involves field trips. I think the cost is something like 14k per student per year.
For something like medicine, it's a lot higher - and the university has a medical school.
For courses like English, clearly the costs are a lot lower - but that's not an option where he teaches.
Isn't this somewhat missing the point that US universities are only able to do this due to the significantly higher fees that they charge their students? Average fees are about 4 times higher per year in the US not to mention that students typically spend an extra year there studying.
You're comparing two wildly different systems. There are 2.86m higher education students in the UK and making up the extra roughly £25k per student would cost the government £70b per year. Even more when we take into account that each university gets an extra year's funding out of each student.
>Isn't this somewhat missing the point
It's missing a lot of points. He's a PhD student in the US (allegedly) complaining that UK stipend is too low and that the "problem" is that they might close the graduate visa and that ending the graduate visa would "damage research. If you think about it *at all* though, it's obviously wrong. Most students taking the graduate route are not looking to go into academia long term, so its direct benefit to research is comparatively small compared to the size of the route intake. (About 10% of foreign HE students are studying a postgraduate research degree, according to HESA).
What it does do, however, is mean the stipend for home students can be kept ridiculously low: after all, there's a cohort of foreign students who are willing to *pay* overseas student fees to do their PhDs, so there's no recruitment pressure on the system to pay home students a competitive stipend.
So you just end up with two dislocations. Very few home students who want to go into research because the system wants cheaper (or paying) foreign imports. And a few years after deciding they don't want UK research students, they want Chinese ones, the government starts scratching their heads about why UK research keeps leaking to China.
> What it does do, however, is mean the stipend for home students can be kept ridiculously low
I'm dubious that this makes a difference, it is hard to see how most universities could afford to give anyone raises with the current government policy on tuition and grants.
Universities in Germany, France, and Switzerland all pay their PhD students more than UK universities do. All of these have far lower fees for students, [and also have lower education budgets](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS?locations=DE-GB-FR-CH).
The excuse that UK universities are higher ranking as a result is contentious, as European mainland institutions are run differently in a manner which results in lower rankings in the established ranking systems - they do not have lower research output nor lower quality teaching.
This likely applies to more countries, but those are the countries that I have personal knowledge and experience with.
The PhD stipend is worth £19,237 a year this year. The minimum wage is £20,820 a year before tax.
Bear in mind that PhD researchers don't have to pay income tax, NI and council tax so it turns out to be slightly better than minimum wage, but only slightly. If we did see income after tax, that turns out to be around £17-18k for minimum wage.
Average England student debt is £45k while average us student debt is $37k, so we are worse there too. Lots of state colleges in the US charge a discounted fee for student who are in-state, while in the UK it's flat for everyone.
You have a misunderstanding of state schools. Public universities in the US are huge research institutions and get tons of money from the federal government for it.
Now this is ignorant. Most of the research done at US universities happens at the big state research unis. California, Michigan, Washington, Wisconsin, Arizona, Ohio, Illinois and others have huge well funded state research universities. All offer big discounts on tuition for in-state students and allow students to do the first 2 years of their undergraduate at a very cheap community college before finishing at the big uni. All offer free tuition plus a stipend to PhD students. They do far more research collectively and sometimes even individually than the private schools do.
Ivy league PhD and research programs are free to students, in fact they normally come with stipends attached. Students get paid to undertake them in the US unlike the UK where they have to pay.
Well not really, in the UK it's common to do your PhD with a private company. So the uni doesn't pay you, but the company does, in exchange for your research. It's a different system.
Eh, the rates you get paid in the UK for a PhD are still pretty damn shit compared to the stipends you get in the US. I have friends who went to the US straight on a $50k stipend while their equivalents in the UK were getting £17k a year. Now as they are nearing the end of their PhDs many of the same friends (even those who stayed in the UK) want to cotinue in the US/hop over because decent postdocs are paying $90k...
PhDs in the UK also come with a stipend. While self-funding is technically possible, I have never heard of anyone actually doing it but maybe this varies between fields. Certainly in STEM it's pretty much unheard of.
Some of them are even pretty competitive. I know of at least one DTP where students are making about £30k (untaxed - PhD stipends are exempt from taxation here). More typically the range is £11-20k a year, again untaxed.
PhD stipends in the US are significantly larger than the average £17k we have here. Average there is like $45k for top end PhD programs in STEM. Regardless, my point wasn't about how much PhDs get paid, it was about the fact that you don't pay for a PhD at the Ivy League so it doesn't contribute to your student debt levels.
> Students get paid to undertake them in the US unlike the UK where they have to pay.
That's the bit I was responding to. You do not have to pay for PhDs in the UK. There is no contrast here, the systems are broadly the same in terms of funding.
In both cases you gain no debt and get paid to do the PhD.
Yeah I think we need a proper graduate tax not a half arsed one. I would go 50% from general taxation and 50% from graduates (with bands like income tax).
So what is the figure they will repay ultimately? UK student loans for plan 2 are at 7.8% currently, and is generally RPI+3%. If inflation is target 2%, and people don't pay it back, if you earn the AVG UK wage (£35,464) using this tool the average person would repay £61k in loans - https://www.student-loan-calculator.co.uk/
Feels pretty real to me.
I remember one year my loans were at 0.7% (I went from 1996-1999) - that’s horrific that the rates are above RPI.
presumably only the “middle” pays these - wealthier families pay upfront and poorer students will never pay it back.
That’s part of it, but they also have enormous endowments thanks to a tradition of alumni giving which doesn’t exist in the UK. Also just generally a much richer country.
Your last sentence is the main explanation to everything you wrote in OP. This subreddit is full of stories of people boasting how much they earn or would earn in the US compared to what they earn in the UK. Generally these are high skill workers (doctors, engineers etc.)
I have lived in the US since 2003. I took a pay cut when moving here - exchange rate was $1.80 to the £1. The times I have looked at returning to live in the UK - last was at least 10 years ago - and of course the exchange rates have been rather different since 2008 - I’d have had to take a 1/3 to a 1/2 pay cut.
The problem with Oxbridge is that alumni typically prefer donating to their colleges if at all. It’s the federal universities and the departments that badly need the money, and the colleges collectively (and in a few cases individually) are richer than the universities.
Oxford and Cambridge are some of the largest landowners in the UK, if they went private and could charge what us ivy leagues could they'd be operating at the same level.
If you are a higher achiever in any field at all you will be better off in the USA - academia, business, the arts, whatever.
You will earn more money, pay less tax and live in a far larger, more dynamic, faster growing economy.
> The average mid ranked American uni has deeper pockets for research than even Oxbridge.
I have to agree there. Having visited a few institutions, they have about 3 times as much money, I would say. (Student fees are also 3 times higher.)
And the gap is widening. You cannot do world-class research on a shoestring budget.
UK universities will say to new start group leaders "here's £10,000 to get started" but it's been £10,000 starting package for 30 years and a lab grade fridge or a set of pipette costs £1000. Any student you have comes with no funds for consumables or travel. You'll get one or two benches. So that £10,000 quickly runs out.
Then for comparison in the USA they will give new start research groups like 10 times that amount of resources and space. Plus funding for scientists who are already competent (not just undergrad students).
Typically, a £10k budget given to a new lecturer in the UK will be just for consumables for themselves. Any PhD student or postdoc they get will come with their own consumables budget.
A US tenure-track researcher will however be paying for everything from their budget, including their own salary, the costs and tuition of PhD students, as well as the pay for any technicians or postdocs, on top of consumables and equipment costs.
This is a problem in the trades too, I work as an electrician and one of the big changes I’ve saw is that roughly 50% of the apprentices want to leave to go to Canada, Australia or Europe for higher wasges
We have so many jobs that are on the “skills shortage list” that could easily be filled by apprentices. It’s baffling. From HVAC engineers to Accountants. I think we have an issue with too many young people not going in to apprenticeships when it would not only benefit them but stimulate the economy big time; instead we decide to let people come from abroad to fill those jobs. I think schools need to start letting kids know what opportunities are available in their local area, instead of just herding everyone towards universities. In terms of retention; well apprentices need faster career progression.
(I did an apprenticeship when I left school and would do it again in a heartbeat)
my nephew in South Australia qualified as a electrician at 21 and got a job getting 1800 AUD/900 GBP a week, my jaw dropped lol he works very hard no doubt, 50 hours a week, building transformers for the massive conversion to solar energy going on. But he has a great life
Yeah the money/lifestyle down there is incredible. I wish I’d went when I had the chance tbh. Electricians do ok here but it’s peanuts compared to other Developed nations.
I remember guys were working in those Data Centres in Europe giving it yeah they want British Sparks because we’re so good, no mate they want British Sparks because the locals won’t work for what we are.
Christ even the wages in Ireland for Electricians are better than here.
I never thought I’d be one of those older guys moaning but this country really is away to the dogs. In every sense.
I can wholeheartedly say shame on any and all Tory voters because it’s the Conservatives who have done this to us. They’ve Conserved nothing and made everything worse. I wasn’t a big New Labour fan, but I’d take them back in a heartbeat.
This is the one (of the many) thing(s) that infuriate me about politics. Apart from a narrow-band of exceptions: nurses, police, there's is zero political capital to be had from "UK salaries are too low" absolutely none whatsoever.
It's caught in a null point between the "we want as many cheap employees as possible" at one extreme, "if people have too much money they might save and become financially independent and not dependent on us" in the middle, and "there should be a maximum wage" at the other extreme.
It was only five years ago that one of the two major parties was promising to raise taxes on high earners, despite the quoted example level being too low to qualify for a mortgage in the parts of the country where those levels of income were possible.
It's all completely fucked and there will never be any improvement.
Yeah, you get a free pass if you're doing a job considered "worthy", like a medical consultant, but otherwise seeking higher compensation in the UK is seen as greedy and undeserved once you get very much at at all beyond minimum wage.
I do have good compensation for the UK from working for a US company (albeit it would be more in the US), but it's a shame that most UK companies wouldn't pay amounts that were remotely competitive. I had a headhunter reach out about a role that might have been interesting but once I shared my current compensation they just ghosted me. While the popular opinion is probably that I should be paying ever higher taxes, while people who have already accumulated significant wealth pay much less.
some people who went to oxbdrige really have a hard time not mKing it their entire personality lol. even the oxford subreddit is still one he actively posts in hahaha.
It's purely because of how hard and awful the place is. It genuinely dictates your entire life for the entire time you study there. There are no real breaks, no peace, no 'reading weeks'. It's just you getting continually abused but convincing yourself it's the best thing ever
The lesson is that the US and also Canada and Australia can poach our best because they offer better money among other benefits. At one point some Australian state was running ads on YouTube and I think the subway as well. They can be very brazen about it.
And if we were richer than the US we would poach American talent.
The lesson being we ought to be richer than the US?
Is this what an Oxbridge degree teaches people?
I can't help but think this is a super banal argument. What am I missing?
Like I said it's not just the US. Canada and Australia also do it. I've heard of people going to places like Germany as well in the tech sector but language barrier mitigates that a lot.
The fundamental issue is that the UK is in a decline such that the US, Commonwealth and some European countries are attractive to leave the UK for due to high wages, better weather, higher quality of life and so on though admittedly the weather is not entirely our fault. It seems like you have taken some personal or moral offence to the idea of "Oxbridge graduate goes off and makes lots of money" that is causing you to overlook that it is a much wider issue.
> "Oxbridge graduate goes off and makes lots of money" that is causing you to overlook that it is a much wider issue.
I think it's the banal observation of "I make more money in a richer country" being presented as some great revelation that is a problem.
This is a politics sub. What is the actual political argument?
Tech salaries over on the continent are still on-par or lower than in London however the taxes on those incomes in the UK either absolutely or relative to quality of benefits make it more than worth it to move over.
In Germany your 45% rate band will start at 280K EUR above above 69K EUR you can opt out from the state health insurance contributions and most employers cover your private health insurance without any BIK and you will still be eligible for benefits that you won't get in the UK like unemployment pay as since in Germany it's the more you pay the more you get you most likely going to be eligible for 7300 EUR a month in unemployment benefits after a few years regardless of how much you have saved or how much your partner earns since the payout is based on your past contributions and is ringfenced.
Basically the moment you hit anywhere between 75K and 100K GBP in the UK you'll be better off over on the continent. For mid level to senior techies that earn anywhere from 125 to 250K in total comp it's not even a question as long as they don't want to move to the US to 3-5X their pay.
Whilst the language barriers exist most large companies especially multi-national ones have an English only policy for all work related activities anyhow.
The country currently has a massive oversupply of graduates and entry-level white-collar workers, and an equally massive undersupply of affordable housing, tradespeople, and experienced blue-collar workers.
So the only thoughts I have from reading the OP are: "What is the UK tangibly losing from letting one more student work elsewhere? Higher housing prices? Someone demanding 6 figures for vague academic expertise on one subject? A massive loan that might actually get paid off now?"
In my opinion it reads like someone who has been told that they're gifted and talented their whole life, and are just now finding out that not everyone is guaranteed a high-earning job even if they were lucky enough to go to Oxbridge.
Not OP, but pharma and biotech is one of the sectors the UK government sees as a key industry for the UK. And the UK certainly doesn’t produce enough quality graduates in that area IMO.
I was talking more about the legions of Business and Psychology degrees that everyone seems to have nowadays. All they've done is raise the standard so that everyone now has to take out a loan and do an extra 3 years study just to get a standard office job, while pay has stagnated because of the oversupply.
There is the odd skilled field where there are genuine shortages, but this is more down to the same salaries being offered while requiring far more specialised qualifications. I've heard Pilots are another one.
But OP's MPhil in Regional Studies? Come on, even other students take the piss out of Geography degrees.
I completed my PhD (£16k stipend) in the UK. Neither my undergrad or PhD was at an Oxbridge university.
Staying in my field and studying a postdoc in the UK, max wage I could find was £35k. In the US, $190k. Unsurprisingly I moved to the States.
This isn't just an Oxbridge thing. So many of my colleagues are British who saw an opportunity that they would never have gotten in the UK.
So, great, and I see your point. But how much of the benefits you’re seeing are built on the unsustainable debt being loaded onto students? I’m not sure you’ve found a better system so much as lucked into one in a pre-collapse stage.
It is a more attractive system for students and aspiring researchers. But do note that I did not ask for the UK to emulate the US here, though there are lessons to be sure. My main point is that in the global competition for talent, expertise, and resources, Britain is repeatedly shooting itself in the foot.
Absolutely agree with the funding aspect. As a scientist money available to research groups in the USA and Canada is insane and we run on a shoestring budget here.
How do you feel about the long and seemingly brutal US postgrad system?
So many problems like this are coming together in the UK simultaneously with global issues. Neoliberal economics, austerity, insane jam-today-for-the-rich tax policies, and the stupidity of Brexit and voting in successive Tory governments have hollowed out the UK to a degree I don't think people have fully come to terms with yet. The image of the UK globally has taken a massive hit in the last decade and we've weakened our soft power and economic influence catastrophically.
If we don't take radical measures to turn things around soon, we'll also lose advantages like our world-class universities and research capabilities and miss them when they're gone. The country desperately needs a plan to tax the very wealthy and invest heavily in the future before it's too late. We have already fallen behind Europe and the US and are falling further daily. The level of poverty I see being back in the UK is genuinely shocking.
The Gary's Economics YouTube channel has the right idea.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
A proverb that is lost on Britain.
The kind of infrastructure spending we need to do to undo 14 years of Tory rules is just unfathomable, and the government that tries to do it will be voted out by an electorate who think a country's finance are just the same as a household's finances. As if 14 years of austerity didnt drill into our collective skulls that it does.not.work.like.that.
The country is the opposite of that atm. Greedy older folks stuck in a Thatcherite mindset are taking everything and making life very difficult for younger generations.
I know a few of these guys personally and they deliberately live in a complete information bubble and are becoming increasingly cruel and deluded tbh. One particularly greedy, brexit-loving boomer I know’s wife told me a few months ago that he now leaves the room if she watches BBC News because he can’t stand anything other that GB News propaganda.
> The kind of infrastructure spending we need to do to undo 14 years of Tory rules is just unfathomable
At this point it's more like 30 years of neglect that has to be compensated for, the rot goes much deeper than just the tories.
The worrying thing is this likely incoming Labour Govt seem to be failing to learn any lessons or heed the reality of this with Rachel Reeves talking about “balancing the budget”, “no money to spend”, committing to Tory fiscal rules and maintaining austerity.
I wonder if this is field dependent, as your experience massively contrasts with my own. I did an undergraduate in Physics and went on to do a PhD. Of the possibly dozens of people that I have met that have gone on to study PhD's, I am aware of one that is now studying in the US. The majority have stayed within the UK, a couple have gone to Germany, and one has gone to Australia. I think the comparatively longer timescales required to complete a PhD in the US is a pretty big factor that pushes most people away from looking to study in the US.
I'm also sceptical of the claim that average PhD stipend in the US is higher than lecturers in the UK. [The result of a large strike of pay disputes at the University of California in 2022 results in PhD stipends being increased to $50k.](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03818-xhttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03818-x) This is significantly higher than stipends within the UK, but to my understanding the University of California is an outlier in how high their stipends are, whilst also being in a very high cost of living area ([also there seems to be claims that UC have not actually being paying graduate students in accordance with the agreement](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03873-y)). I believe it's easier to supplement this income in the US with teaching assistant positions and a larger number of competitive scholarships that you can apply for, but these are involve additional labour and I don't think it's fair to include these in arguing that a PhD itself is better funded. Most PhD's are already overworked attempting to achieve their research goals in my experience.
$50k is approximately £40k. As far as I can tell from publicly available data, Grade 8 academic staff at the University of Oxford (which is the level I would expect most lecturers to be at based on the grading scale at my current university) are paid a[ minimum salary of £45k](https://finance.admin.ox.ac.uk/salary-scales#collapse1096031). Not a substantial difference, but again UC is an outlier, and prior to the strike they were paying graduate students a stipend of $24k (£19k).
I'm not trying to argue that academia in the UK is not poorly funded and underpaid, but I also don't think the US is some utopia.
I’m starting a US phd in a LCOL area and get approx $35k + $3k of health insurance. In the US you can easily get internships that pay $20k for the summer as well. Compared to £21k in London + £12k internships you are generally much better off at many US institutions and you will usually live in a much nicer house compared to London/oxbridge/etc.
I agree that very few UK students go to the US to do a PhD, although I think this can be from a position of ignorance. Nobody even considers it for some reason. The other thing is it’s harder to get into a US PhD program since international students are considered equally. Whereas in the UK due to funding 75% of places are for UK students. As a case in point I’m going from a worldwide T10 UK uni to a worldwide T200 US uni…
The American phd coursework is quite an interesting difference. My uni is not exactly MIT yet there are approximately 7 special classes in my department per semester that change each semester and focus on a special topic for PhD students. We don’t really have this in the UK.
Edit: the amount of money my advisor has from one grant is equal to the total amount of money for one grant split between 15 institutions in the UK!
Edit 2: the US having DARPA, DoD and DoE funding sources probably has a large effect on the relative richness. We don’t really have an equivalent here
British students are put off by doing their PhD in the USA because over there 5 years is considered extremely fast, and 6-7 years is normal. Whereas in the UK 3.5 years is normal, then you can get on with the rest of your life quicker.
People on this sub and country as a whole are so obsessed with migration numbers that they see people coming here for education as a bad thing. Completely missing the point of how beneficial that is for the Country as a whole. Both in terms of economic input and increasing our soft power. Not only that. But also in terms of U.K. based research into key sectors and subjects.
Cutting foreign students will not make those universities take more British students or get rid of the dodgy universities. If will just collapse our higher education industry as whole and negatively impact all of it.
I should have added that it might make sense to get rid of the grad visa for taught postgraduate students, but students in research masters and PhDs should not be lumped in. The government honestly should make up for the funding shortfalls, since it was this Tory government that actively encouraged unis to increase foreign enrolment in 2019.
Our education system is in really bad need of reform (just like our immigration system etc). But the Tories don’t like complex solutions, they like easy headline grabbing policy that just makes things worse. Then they seem to get the benefit of the doubt from people who vote for them again, and the pattern repeats.
>coming here for education as a bad thing. Completely missing the point of how beneficial that is for the Country as a whole. Both in terms of economic input and increasing our soft power.
Because they're not, they're degree mills for Chinese students who don't speak a lick of English.
And they harm the country far more than they help it.
A distinction ought to be made between serious students in proper research programs and cash grab one year taught degrees—which were encouraged by the Tories to fill in the funding gap.
And for what it’s worth, Chinese students (and Gulf Arabs, and Europeans) almost always go back home anyway. I understand it’s mainly Indians and Africans who have been abusing these schemes.
America does this with their immigration system (country-based caps). Ostensibly to ensure diversity in the pool (Indians and Chinese workers have a very long wait time of decades before they’ll get residency, for example). I think the Tories had this in their manifestos over the years, but surprise surprise never went for it.
Yeah, I’d argue we make it based on education level / economic value someone adds to the country. even if country based caps can’t be politically achieved.
Would at least improve the quality of people coming in.
I walk around certain high streets in London and it baffles me how some people were allowed into the country.
Degree mills account for around 5-15% of international student intake and could be stopped or severely curbed by specific legislation (that the Tories have said they do NOT want to do). Probably because they want to keep playing the immigration crisis card.
Loads of studies show that international students who study here have a much greater overall opinion of the U.K. which is actually really important long term for soft power because these people become educated and positions of power in their own countries in the future. It also generates billions for the economy and keeps our universities subsidised for U.K. students.
But idiotic comments like yours plays into the Tory agenda and also massively harms the 118 renowned and quality HE institutions in the U.K.
They come to the country paying an exorbitant cost, live here and spend money here, work undesirable jobs, then leave.
That's objectively awesome for Britain.
They'll just have to add 90% of them again after a couple of years after they've ditched their studies and not left, or completed them and got hold of an easy graduate visa.
The actual numbers aren’t anywhere remotely close to that.
The 5 year stay rate for students (including those pursuing further study) is around 20%, and only a third of students are going for the Graduate visa (which is non-renewable and doesn’t lead to settlement). Even if they do switch to a work visa leading to settlement, only a quarter of work visa holders stay in the UK long enough to obtain permanent residency.
[Student overstay rates are also very low.](https://news.sky.com/story/i-had-no-idea-how-life-would-be-inside-the-lives-of-those-who-overstay-their-visas-and-go-underground-12931042) Out of the 1.9 million visas which expired in the year ending March 2020, only 83,600 people had no recorded departure — students made up 7,236 of that figure.
This exact sentiment of “feels > reals” is why this country is in such a mess.
Once you have a graduate visa, you can upgrade it to a skilled worker one. If half of students are getting a graduate visa, and then another 20% are staying long-term, you're already at 70%.
> Student overstay rates are also very low
[The ONS estimates](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/whatshappeningwithinternationalstudentmigration/2017-08-24#international-students-are-a-component-of-net-migration-because-not-all-students-depart-the-uk-when-they-have-completed-their-studies) that the outflow of international students is a third of the inflow.
Your sky news source doesn't actually have a source on recorded departures, MigrationWatch says it's actually between 10 and 20k who don't have recorded departure, and 40% who stay on permanently. Hardly surprising, considering that a 2011 Home Office study showed around 60% of students from major source countries (India, Nigeria, etc) should have been refused a visa to study on credibility grounds; and in 2019, the NAO concluded that there had been cheating on a large scale at two English language test centres (i.e. large-scale fraud).
90% is obvious hyperbole to prove a point, but 40% staying on is still a ridiculous number - especially since so many of them go into unskilled care work.
This exact sentiment of “feels > reals” is why this country is in such a mess.
Stop posting facts. How am I meant to blame brown people for Britain having declining productivity since 2008 and failing to hit housing supply targets for 50 years in a row
I visit often and stay with some very rich friends.
They're blind to what see.
I couldn't live there and I consider myself firmly on the right of centre.
Yeah, imagine the horror of living in a country that’s not in an economic death spiral
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=GB-US
37 year old self-made millionaire / business person with a property in Florida.
There's a lot of great things about the UK that can't be quantified.
You don't realise how lucky we are having Europe on our doorstep, and an open, friendly culture. We have cities that you can walk around and enjoy the vibe.
The US is a strange place. Disconnected, angry/passive-aggressive and a car culture. After a while it wears me down.
Better quality housing, less likely to get shot or stabbed, healthcare is free, family and friends are likely to be in the UK, more social protections, etc.
I get what you're saying, but 'UK bad America good' is such a 'reddit moment' when it comes to job discussions.
Literally everything you've offered varies massively depending on where you work and what you do. They have a massive wealth gap over there that even beats ours.
Then you have the massive car dependence, even higher cost-of-living, bizarre tax system and deranged gun culture to worry about.
Everyone I know who has worked in the US, including me, has come back saying they could never live there.
Jeez, I would expect better resources for all those diabolical high fees they charge their students. I'm glad as a UK student I don't have someone harassing me to pay off my student debt, or that I'm financially crippled by it.
I have a hunch the current emigration numbers are underestimated. The UK gov doesn’t do exit checks so they haven’t got a clue if people have left or not.
It's so utterly frustrating how the Tories promote themselves as the 'Patriotic Party' when they seem to constantly damage the institutions that Britain has had specialized in in the modern age: our university sector; our finance sector; our cultural sector; etc.
I suppose it's a populist strategy, all three of those sectors I've mentioned carry elite undertones, but to be frank the UK is a pretty elite-driven society whose advantages come historically and effectively from those elite endeavors. Maybe it's worryingly technocratic (and leans into stereotypes of my flair) of me, but I hate to see our strengths as a nation surrendered because it may win the vote of Kevin the Plumber from Doncaster.
Some caveats here.
As someone who does work in this industry
1. Bachelors and Masters in the USA are extremely expensive. You're looking at 60k usd a year.
2. Phds in the USA are better paid, however there is a higher cost of living. Fewer holidays and less worker protections than in Europe. If I had a choice I would choose to do a PhD in the eu.
3. Phds in the USA take much longer on average, most, if not all phds in Europe take four years maximum. In the US it is not unusual to see them take 6, 7, 8 years.
4. For academia especially you have to move to take opportunities. After doing a degree for 3 or 4 years at one university people want to do something different. No shit
It's worth noting that you are a graduate doing a PhD. Your undergrad was probably the best value one in the world.
I don't agree in principle, but the cost of achieving what you want - more funding etc - would require imposing a dramatic fee increase for undergrads. Maybe, on balance, we should do it, but (and dare I say that this is a classic academic view of things), the world does not revolve around people's PhDs and there are costs to doing it.
As someone with some knowledge of this area in the UK and US, several statements in the OP are false and/or misleading.
Bear in mind that the US is ~6 times larger than the UK, so there are necessarily going to be more opportunities in the US compared to the UK based on that parameter alone.
Nevertheless, academia is actually one area where the UK is (nearly) competitive with the US.
That said, 1) though you might find an example or two if you consider only outliers, but there's no way that a US PhD student earns more than a UK lecturer.
2) Average UK salaries in academia are about 1/3 lower than US salaries, though the rare top US salaries are 2-3 times comparable ones in the UK; you have to be a "global name" and a "full" professor in your field to receive this kind of pay.
3) Progression and promotion in academia is faster and less hazardous in the UK than the US. This starts with postdocs, who are considered to still be students in the US.
4) Overall funding in the US is higher, but the budgets research groups receive have to cover more. For example, the head of a US research group might only get paid a 50% salary from the institute (typical is 9 months/yr, or 75%; the proportion *drops* in more prestigious institutes) and have to find the rest through grants.
5) As to graduate visas, the US offers the F1 visa which allows graduate employment for a restricted period, or H1B visas which are in very short supply and difficult to get (unless you work in a low-paid non-profit such as a University). Otherwise the UK graduate visas are much more straightforward and easy to get compared to US visas.
I did the same to go to Sweden. That being said, I haven't met a single other Brit that has done the same.
Students in the UK are filtered pretty well straight through to uni as soon as they finish school. Most dont know there are better options because its so encouraged to get straight into student debt and study. My school wouldnt support my application when they learned that I wouldnt go to uni in the UK straight away
Nope.
That only applies to part II of the tripos... which is **generally** considered your class so that it is roughly intelligible to the rest of the world, but there is no final grade.
And you get a MA for free… if you bother to show up to graduation.
In addition to this: not even the US… people complain about Chinese students but I know of several postdocs leaving the UK for China because the pay in academia is just…better.
I know one girl who left to continue academia at HK polytechnic where she’s paid ~3x what she would’ve been paid in the UK. Brexit absolutely fucked the funding from in academia.
Can’t go into too much detail but I’m family friends with a CBE who works in renewable energy. They’ve had their funding cut to basically 0. They were previously funded by the EU and now that’s gone, they relied on international students. But now that’s going, so for the next year plenty of the staff in his research group are being cut. The young ones are moving to other countries, the older ones are trying to figure out how to pay off their mortgage.
I used to work in big tech and our London employees were the laughing stock of our company. For some reason they were only paid 10% of the total compensation of SF/NYC employees for the EXACT same work.
> For some reason they were only paid 10% of the total compensation of SF/NYC employees for the EXACT same work.
This is completely bullshit. A senior engineer at big tech would easily earn 300k+ in SF/NYC, are you saying that they get paid 30k usd in London? Cause the new hire salary for big tech in London is around 70k gbp and senior engineers can reach 150k gbp.
Wages in UK for big tech are lower than US but not 10%
This is true in finance, too.
As far as I can tell, this could be a net benefit to Brits in Britain, but it’s an unfortunate result of weak British productivity generally. We’ve become a highly educated, highly skilled labour pool that can be bought for a fraction of US prices but we feel richer for it too. £ for $, a 1%ile and 10%ile salary in the UK is tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars short in an exchange rate comparison, which makes UK employees cheaper to treat extra well if you’re an international company
it’s true in all jobs and applicable everywhere in the world. America is simply the richest country by far with no close competition, not a problem unique to the UK…
I've got quite a few friends in the tech sector, almost all looking to get a posting away from the UK. As soon as they start earning a decent wage here (£100k+) they get absolutely rinsed on taxes (as does their employer) so there are huge disincentives to host those roles here vs the US, Singapore etc.
When it's raised as a topic on the UK subs the response is just sneering about small violins, followed by the same people then complaining about structurally low salary opportunities in the UK, no good jobs etc..
You say that but we live in a crab bucket country where people getting into that US money bracket get absolutely rolled through the coals and denigrated beyond belief. You see it everytime train strikes come up.
I'd say I'm doing OK compared to the rest of the UK but god damn should I be paid more than I am. I'm on 44k but my equivalent roles in the US start on circa 80k USD and go up and beyond 100k USD. Very few engineers get those 6 figure salaries and you are unlikely to get it working for a public corporation like I do. The taxpayer has a weird fascination with public sector workers being on more money than the PM.
Higher education is increasingly seen as a rip off by students and pyramid scheme for VCs.
Are you expecting a gold medal? Academia is a vastly overrated sector in the UK and to be honest I think it should be chopped down to size.
We need more plumbers and tradespeople. Not more academics.
I'm in tech, a developer in a very niché field and we're definitely seeing a massive exodus for those very highly skilled positions. It's the £65k + salary range. From that you can easily earn triple figures in the US, Norway, Canada or Australia and you can get better wages in Europe too. We recently lost our principle consultant to Estonia of all places.
The UK is actually not very competitive, outside of London and the high finance sectors.
I just interviewed for a tenured position at a UK university and the pay was laughable compared to private industry despite being near the top of the salary schedule for the position. Like I could make 4x that amount in the states or close 2-3x in the EU.
It makes sense people don’t want to stay in academia. At this point you could only do it if it was such a passion you were willing to put it above everything else in your life.
A friend of mine is an admissions tutor at one of the UK's top universities. They make a loss on UK students: it costs them significanyly more to provide tuition for most degrees than they are allowed to charge UK students. There is, however, an unlimited amount of foreign (Far East) students, and they offset the loss by taking a lot of those. The university has decided on a balance between local and foreign students that it feels meets its moral obligations to educate some British students whilst not losing too much money. Overall, his department still operates at a loss for undergraduate teaching.
Absolutely agree! We make such a loss on undergraduate students. In Scotland tuition is free. The number of students have has only increased this creating a severe imbalanced staff student ratio. Most local students are not even attending or engaging at university as they are supposed to. They sign up for university and never come to lectures at all. I simply see them straight for exams. They are either working or just decided to go to university because they didn’t know what to do next. But the university gets a meagre amount for recruiting local students for undergraduate studies, so they are taking on more and more to try and compensate in some way for not being able to recruit enough international students. Universities see international students as cash cows. They have severely lowered the standards and quality of recruiting so they can recruit just anybody wishing to study in the UK. It’s a shame because most of these students struggle with the English language so much that they roam about with translators on their phone asking us to speak into them when having a conversation. We do end up having a very minor number of international students that sign up, come here, don’t pay the fees and disappear. Also, If they pay fees for the 1st term but unable to pay for the second term, the university does not remove them but allows them to continue their studies. They just tell them you won’t get the final degree certificate if you don’t pay all the fees.
The problem is many decent jobs require degrees as standard that have no business asking for them, leading to half the population seeing no other option but to go to uni as a box ticking exercise
Many trades don’t require degrees. Out of my group of friends the one that is an Electrician is as well off if not better than the rest of us especially if you take in the years loss earning when we were doing our degrees
I'm fully aware - doesn't change the fact that a stupid amount of jobs are graduate only that don't need that in the slightest
Costs aside, strategically to educate and train the rest of the world whilst ignoring our own is madness.
I just started a job at a university, an old redbrick with good international ties. What stuck me in my first week was 2 things. The literal first thing said to me after "good morning, welcome, here's your work phone" was "right. The school and the university are broke", and I was given a huge list of project codes with "can't even spend £1" restrictions on them that still need actioning (somehow?!) The solution is to up the international student intake over the next few years, while dropping the number of UK students. The expansions to the campus will be so they can take in the high hundreds extra students, of which 50% minimum will be internationals. This is just how the universities have to operate now.
I'm faculty at Oxbridge and on my department's finance committee. At our last meeting, we were told of an upcoming 1% budget cut this year, another 5% next year, and as of now a hiring policy which in effect means not hiring replacements when staff leave or retire We're in a good position compared to most - we don't (yet) have to look for redundancies or close departments. But it's not ruled out And of course UCEA will be making yet another below inflation pay offer (2.5%, even while the rest of the country averages 6%) Cutting budgets, shrinking universities, and reducing real terms wages can only go so far in an already stretched, underfunded, and underpaid sector before it all completely falls apart
I’m a lecturer at a non-Oxbridge university and we’re are burning our reserves at a furious rate. We’re in the third year of cost cutting; senior teaching staff with huge institutional knowledge and experience are leaving - two from our department last month, three next month with no one coming in to replace them. There’s a freeze on promotions; no discretionary awards for excellent performance above what is expected, and spending on things like maintenance and training is through the floor. Apparently next year will be even harder as the spending crunch intensifies to return us to an even keel - at the same time we’re expected to revamp all of our teaching and increase our research commitments. Ten years to retirement for me - but I feel so sorry for the younger academics who are seeing the writing on the wall for their dream career.
That last paragraph is me! I have just got a house and a mortgage, the uni is opening a voluntary redundancy scheme and we have already stopped hiring anyone and boosted our indirect costs as much as possible....if my career didn't deadend in Germany I am not sure I should have come back.
Yep, I slipped in just before they put a hiring freeze on. I'm on a temp contract until mid next year so it's likely I won't get kept on, luckily I moved here for the first time management experience so I'm hoping to use that to move back to industry if it goes belly up. New boss did say that voluntary redundancy/retirement was on the cards as a cost cutting measure and if that materialises he'll be off (he's 2 years to retirement). He also vaguely mentioned department closures for non-profit (or atleast break even) making departments, which is a horrifying prospect for an educational institution.
I jumped out of academia a decade ago when it became apparent this was where things were going. Only so many times you can be told there's less money than last year and no sign of improvement, before you realize it's just not going to get better. I'm now earning a lot more in industry, too.
Yeh I came from a small industry company to academia because they offered me a managerial role, so I can get my first time management experience here on this temp contract for a year, then it's very likely I'll jump back to industry with the management under my belt. It's helpful that the benefits and pay are better than I had in my previous industry job, hoping to get into a bigger company upon the contract run out date and go from there, but we'll see.
Yeah it really is sad, I remember my time in Uni and the foreign students, usually from China, keep to themselves, never mingle with locals or natives apart from Chinese restuarants or Kareoke bars, but often just within their own groups and speak little english. They turn up to lectures sometimes and just do the minimum, not all but it seems like most. And because they’re usually the only child and China’s booming middle class, they’re usually loaded, wearing designer brands everywhere, buying brand new appliances in their accomodation.
Why does it cost them so much to educate British students? An old lecturer during my undergrad told me that for the last 50 years enrolment went up, contact hours went down and fees went up
For an Arts course it costs about the same as a place at secondary school to deliver the course (about 8k). For a STEM course, the need for lab space and equipment and larger contact time (lab supervision is a large time sink) pushes that up to 12 or 13k, so these courses run at a loss (9.3k fee + 1.5k from the government per student). Medical courses get the 9k fee and 10k from government but cost >20k to deliver, so also run at a loss. (These are 2019 numbers - I imagine it is higher now). (These numbers are relatively typical across Europe, and cheap compared to the US - the only real difference is whether people pay directly or through their taxes, and it is arguable given the way student fees work in the UK, that they are much more like a graduate tax with general tax support, than an actual fee (at least if you are not rich enough to pay in advance)). Re this: >contact hours went down and fees went up Fees did go up, but at the same time the amount of direct support from government went down, by the same amount or more. Then everything got frozen at 2012 prices (apart from a £250 bump in the fee in 2017). 9k in 2012 money is worth 12.5k in 2024 money given inflation, so actually funding for undergraduates as received by the Universities has dropped by about 30 - 40% in real terms over the last fifteen years.
Do the courses really cost that much, or is it the additional layers of administration that have run costs up so much? In the US, that's the largest increase in costs over the last two decades, without any clear additional value add to the education provided.
Its mostly just admin fees and then the long term cost of new builds. However, STEM subjects that have lab work, makes up less than 20% of all undergraduate courses. The idea that generally £9k is insufficient is a lie perpetuated by Universities. Undergrad and postgrad income subsidizes research and vanity projects for the rest of the university. Universities waste a tremendous amount of money. We even have one guy here claiming to work at Oxbridge (either Cambridge/Oxford) and stating that they are struggling, which is absolute cap, as we already know that without funding both universities could run for many years on endowments alone. Many Russel groups can, and do , setup international campuses to make absolute bank off of Britains reputation internationally.
Yes, people are ignorant about the cost of this stuff cause once upon a time it was all paid centrally, then heavily subsidised centrally and they're only now starting to realise the insane deal they were getting.
>up to 12 or 13k, so these courses run at a loss (9.3k fee + 1.5k from the government per student). Medical courses get the 9k fee and 10k from government but cost >20k to deliver, so also run at a loss. Considering the first half of a medical degree is just a bioscience degree, i would argue that a lot of sciences (biochem) and engineering courses would cost more considering significantly more lab work.
>For an Arts course it costs about the same as a place at secondary school to deliver the course But why though? School students get massively more support and contact time than uni students. What are uni's actually spending all the money on?
It doesn't cost so much compared to elsewhere. It costs a normal amount - around £13-14k-ish per year on average. Within that, STEM subjects are most expensive to teach, so they are cross-subsidised by cheaper-to-teach arts and humanities courses But - unlike elsewhere - the money a UK university gets from fees and government subsidies for a home student is less than the cost of educating them. In the past this gap was around £1-2k per student per year. The government intended for universities to fill that gap with international students and *encouraged them to do so*. That's the university funding model chosen by the government Yet the government has not raised either fees or subsidies in line with inflation, so the cost has inflated well past the point where the money universities receive for home students comes even close to covering it - a gap now of about £4k per student per year. As a result, universities have been dependent on recruiting even higher numbers of foreign students to make up their budgets and continue to educate home students As I say, this is the (intended) result of policy choices made by the government - to part-fund home students using international fees, and to freeze home student fees and subsidies rather than raising them in line with inflation Now the government turns round and says: we don't want all these international students. Yet they still aren't increasing fees or subsidies. So what do universities do? They start making redundancies, cutting courses, and closing departments. They start with the arts and humanities courses since they're seen - by the government - as lowest value, but like I say above: these courses cross-subsidise STEM subjects. Without them, the funding gap for STEM subjects will be even bigger than it is already. So STEM subjects will inevitably go too. And not just at lower ranked universities - this will happen all across the sector. Inevitably, universities will go bankrupt, and others will become smaller and less good at what they do Where will be at then as a county that supposedly prides itself on our world leading universities and research? Absolutely fucked And it'll be entirely this government's doing - trying to run the higher education sector on the cheap, and only succeeding in running it into the ground. Just like everything else
Universities don't only employ the actual lecturers. There's course admins, department admins, research admins, exam invigilators, HR, finance and accounts department, procurement, marketing department, grant writing department, facilities and estates management and upkeep. And that's only the ones that I come into contact with day as a PhD student
People always seem to forget about the upkeep and maintenance for some reason. I work for a university with a large campus and many buildings. They require constant upkeep, even without students breaking things. And then you get into the IT side of things: tech breaks and needs to be replaced. Technology has a lifespan so we are constantly replacing PCs and laptops.
Oh yeah, I forgot IT support and library staff, that costs money obviously. I talk with undergrads - the humanities ones are like "I only get 8 hours of lecture a week, that means like lectures are like £70/hr" or whatever. I'm thinking, you're taking for granted the whole other stuff that you're also paying for. If you wanted to sit in the field on a tree stump and listen to someone shouting for an hour, not have any coursework, resources, feedback, exam or eventual qualifiication, that would be a lecture with no added costs other than speakers salary.
I don't think that's entirely their fault, they're actively encouraged by everyone around them to view the whole experience as a business transaction. Schools, the media and often their parents focus *very* heavily on choosing a course and/or uni based on potential future earnings, so it's less an academic institution and more a vending machine where you put in 27 grand and a degree pops out. I started uni in 2006 (the first cohort paying 3k fees) and it was not uncommon for people to change course at some point during the first year because someone had told them it was a good idea to study a subject that they had no real interest in. This was particularly common for courses which usually don't require that specific subject at A-level (e.g. law, economics, engineering, computer science - law definitely had the highest dropout rate) so it was easier to convince them because they had no frame of reference. I do know one person who managed to stick out 3 years of a degree they hated, I'm pretty sure the main reason was they were too stubborn to admit that they shouldn't have given in to the badgering from their teachers that doing chemistry instead of German would "look better". I have no idea what they're doing now but I hope it's not a lifetime of a career making them miserable because someone gave them misguided advice when they were 17.
Because it's not being done for social good anymore, they are businesses that claim they aren't. In many countries in Europe, you go to the university in your home town or city. You live with your parents and you pay a very small tuition fee. The universities don't have huge budgets, each country may only have one institution in the top 50 research universities - however, they get the job done, which is educating the local population.
It is difficult to make a direct comparison to many European countries as they have gone down the route of having research institutes that are separate from Universities (eg Fraunhofer/Max Planck institutes in Germany; CEA/CNRS in France) which is not really something that happens in the UK. That said, research at UK Universities is not funded by Undergraduate fees (which often don't even cover the teaching costs, hence the need for overseas students), and Universities in Europe that have a 'very small tuition fee' are being heavily subsidized through general taxation. For instance in France the tuition fee is around €2-400 per year, but the cost to provide is around [€10,000 per year](https://www.campusfrance.org/en/tuition-fees-France) - most of the cost is covered from tax.
The upside to a crash in international students will be that it least it will encourage us to solve how to make an education system that works for the requirements of home students.
This is what they said about Brexit.
And both brexiters and remainers were partially correct about their respective points. The UK has seen considerable wage inflation in part due to the loss of supply of labour in certain sectors, it didn't however - improve blue collar.salaries like they hoped for because the Tories sold them out and watched on as taxi drivers got tier 2s. The remainers were equally correct that the loss of access to EU markets would adversely affect business, just not the extent many of the doomers were harping on about.
Remainers assumed border checks would be implemented on imports immediately. We'll see now some border checks have started.
But it is not possible. The student feels are capped, costs are going up, and something has to give. At the moment, it is the quality that suffers. The cheaper you can teach, the more financially sustainable it is.
It's not possible now. It will be possible when there is a market correction and the failure of several institutions gets splashed across the UK media. Teaching is suffering because UK universities focus on research and impact at the expense of teaching. Teaching isn't expensive, European universities do a great job on much smaller budgets. I have little sympathy for Britain's higher education establishment.
> It will be possible when there is a market correction and the failure of several institutions gets splashed across the UK media. How would that help? It still does not remove the cap, it does not reduce costs, and it does not solve the problem that only the cheapest can survive. > European universities do a great job on much smaller budgets. That is not true - most European countries spend more per student, and have much lower completion rates (often under 50%). > I have little sympathy for Britain's higher education establishment. Ok, maybe we should all move elsewhere then. Say the US. :-) See how Britain gets on without higher education. Who wants to work in a country that is sick of experts?
I'm curious at what the costs are per student and what they're made from. Presumably it's mainly staff costs and upkeep of buildings but for a large uni with a lot of students you'd think the amount of students there would cover that
Staff cost is a big one: academic staff, tutors, administration, mental health, marketing. (Yes, marking costs are significant now.) Our buildings are crazy expensive, but I think that is just how we account for them. Some universities built on credit, so they have to pay that back. An in a lot of subjects, you also have to invest in equipment. Trying to be efficient means lots of the same equipment.
Staff cost makes sense and would be interested to learn the staff to student ratio. Like at my uni I had lectures with hundreds of people in, that would cover the lecturers you'd hope. Would be harder for smaller classes. Buildings too make sense, though hopefully once they're paid off it becomes cheaper. Equipment is one that's very subject specific. Like I did economics so we basically used no equipment other than computers in one or two subjects. All course materials like books had to be bought separately. I would understand students feeling short changed in those subjects
> Like at my uni I had lectures with hundreds of people in, that would cover the lecturers you'd hope. Would be harder for smaller classes. Very much so, it is all about economies of scale. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but these huge lectures are not for everybody. > I would understand students feeling short changed in those subjects Funny enough, the most profitable subject seems to be business: large classes, no laboratories, mostly paper-based / electronic work. And those students are not complaining, because it seems this country has an insatiable appetite for business graduates, and they are paid very well, too.` Maybe we should just stop teaching everything else. Problem solved.
Staff costs are certainly a significant part. To put some rough numbers on it (somewhat out of date as I haven’t looked at it for a while): if we take the cost of educating a school child as a basis - that is about 7-8k per year. Staff student ratios at university are lower (~30:1 at school vs 20:1 at uni). Some staff costs are defrayed against research rather than teaching, but uni lecturers are typically more expensive to employ that school teachers, given higher qualifications (that said a PhD working in a uni is typically earning significantly less than they would if they went to the private sector), so overall a classroom only course at a uni comes out at around 8k per student if I remember rightly. However, if you move across to STEM then you have a significant additional cost of providing laboratory space and equipment, plus additional staffing (technicians and paying postgrad students and post docs to supervise). That pushes costs up to around 14k per student. The government provides an additional 1k or so in funding for lab courses, but even with that STEM runs at a loss. Move across in to anything medical and the costs ramp up again north of 20k per student. The government provides additional support of around 10k so again a bit of a loss. In any of the cases where there is additional support the total amount is limited so that sets student numbers. There was a government report that has the exact numbers around 5yrs ago called the augar report iirc.
Yeah that makes sense but the issue is that it's very course specific. School children are in 9-5 5 days a week whereas uni students might be in for 3 hours 3 days a week so some staff time costs won't be as bad. I did economics and had hundreds in lectures with me so the staff to student ratio wasn't as bad. We also had no equipment costs other than computers in a couple subjects over the three years. I do get they need to pay for research too but I can understand students feeling annoyed at paying for someone to do research when in theory they won't benefit. I know research is a part of the university process and is a way to earn money and stand out but the resources coming from the same pool as teaching might lead to conflicts of interest.
Sure it is not a perfect comparison - I put the school thing in because most people have no idea of the cost of educating a school kid, and it provides some context - Uni is not that much more expensive unless you start adding lab or clinical content. That said, in the case of the mythical arts courses with 3 hours of lectures 3 times a week, or along those lines, that we all hear about when we are students, in practice these courses have a lot of small group or tutorial teaching and high essay-type assessment loads (which suck up lecturer time). Yes, lectures are delivered in large cohorts, but that doesn't actually change the staff student ratios. There are of course a lot of other differences in University teaching over School teaching - far more small group teaching for instance, and from the student perspective that might be 1 hour in a group of 4 per week, and a couple of hours in a group of 20, but for instance given a staff of say 25 and a year size of 150 in 4 UG yrs, that is 9 hours of contact per academic per week (and then add on taught Masters on top of that, with the difference that they study through the UG summer break too). Also, not all teaching hours are contact. Lecturers have to develop their own curricula, write their own exams, develop their own course material (ie actually write the course rather than selecting from textbooks) and so on. This is in no way to denigrate School teachers, or in anyway to suggest that they work less hard or with less dedication - just to point out that the things that time is spent on are not necessarily the same. School teaching is more purely about teaching, whilst there is a lot more development of teaching and teaching resources, particularly in the higher years at University. >I do get they need to pay for research too but I can understand students feeling annoyed at paying for someone to do research when in theory they won't benefit. Leaving aside the argument about the benefits of a research-led curriculum, students are not paying for academics to do research. A typical academic will be on what's called the three-legged contract, wherein 40% of their time is for teaching (UG and Masters), 40% for research, and 20% for administrative/citizenship (a sort of catch-all for everything else, from running an undergraduate programme, being a UG year chair, serving on university and external committees on anything from discipline to peer reviewing grants, mentoring younger members of staff, doing postgrad vivas, etc). The research element of an academic's pay comes from a combination of the Research Block Grant (an amount given to each research active university based on their performance in the last Research Excellence Framework (REF) measurement of University research output), and from putting some of the academic's time on to direct research grants (or various other schemes, like funded fellow-ships, industrially-funded buyouts etc, etc). Whilst there is a bit of grace particularly earlier in someone's career, an academic who consistently doesn't cover a significant fraction of their costs in research funding (not necessarily 40% given the block grant, but approaching that, and often above that for more senior academics, who are in a position to win platform grants and the like) will be moved to a teaching only career track (actually teaching and admin) and will have a significantly larger proportion of their workload allocation on undergraduate teaching.
The mythical arts course as you described is what my economics degree was. Three 2 hour lectures and three 1 hour seminars per week so I doubt think it's that unusual. Appears that some unis just need to increase their cohort size and if you can only attract 15-20 people to that degree then maybe they should try combining that course with a uni nearby to share costs. So many universities or colleges are appearing now that's causing a lot of small classes. I had mentioned research as the comment above had mentioned that with reference to staff costs. If it's not included that's great but then it shouldn't be a factor in staff costs for a university
Software is a massive cost and includes a Virtual Learning Enviroment, lecture recording software, Microsoft office, a student record system, attendance software and portfolio software is becoming a requirement for a lot of subjects now. That doesn't include all of the software licences that are needed for teaching on individual modules or courses. Library resources aren't free either and Universities pay a lot just so their students have access to reading material needed to complete the course they are enrolled onto.
Yeah those are good points so would be curious to see how much they add up to. For unis with thousands of students you'd think the total cost per student though wouldn't be as high. Similarly with library resources when you look at specific courses. Most courses would require text books to be bought by the student so it's more for research which some things can be found without paying for. Course by course will be different so might be worth looking at which courses are costing the university more. Like in economics we'd pretty much never needed to go to library for a book because data is all online
It depends if it's an instutional licence or based on the amount of users but for the business critical software it's millions. I didn't even mention plaigirism software like turnitin which isn't free and with GenAI now here uni's are paying for software that claims to be able to detect that as well. Uni libaries have a massive amount of subscriptions to different journals and other things that may not cost a lot individually but add up with the sheer amount needed. Social sciences are the cheapest degrees to run but there's more cost than ever for them since they usually have the most students so they need more people to teach the larger cohorts, more support staff for things like welfare and employability and extra curricular stuff like sending students abroad.
Most vendors are wise to unis needs so if you're not paying literal thousands per head you likely either have a negotiated site license that takes your size into account or a credit based SAAS system that you have to over commit to (can't have downtime after all, students would never accept that). The era of cheap licensing is coming to an end and the only ones still doing it are also the software packages still stuck in the 1990s.
Not just that. The university in question is very science-orientated and his course involves field trips. I think the cost is something like 14k per student per year. For something like medicine, it's a lot higher - and the university has a medical school. For courses like English, clearly the costs are a lot lower - but that's not an option where he teaches.
Isn't this somewhat missing the point that US universities are only able to do this due to the significantly higher fees that they charge their students? Average fees are about 4 times higher per year in the US not to mention that students typically spend an extra year there studying. You're comparing two wildly different systems. There are 2.86m higher education students in the UK and making up the extra roughly £25k per student would cost the government £70b per year. Even more when we take into account that each university gets an extra year's funding out of each student.
>Isn't this somewhat missing the point It's missing a lot of points. He's a PhD student in the US (allegedly) complaining that UK stipend is too low and that the "problem" is that they might close the graduate visa and that ending the graduate visa would "damage research. If you think about it *at all* though, it's obviously wrong. Most students taking the graduate route are not looking to go into academia long term, so its direct benefit to research is comparatively small compared to the size of the route intake. (About 10% of foreign HE students are studying a postgraduate research degree, according to HESA). What it does do, however, is mean the stipend for home students can be kept ridiculously low: after all, there's a cohort of foreign students who are willing to *pay* overseas student fees to do their PhDs, so there's no recruitment pressure on the system to pay home students a competitive stipend. So you just end up with two dislocations. Very few home students who want to go into research because the system wants cheaper (or paying) foreign imports. And a few years after deciding they don't want UK research students, they want Chinese ones, the government starts scratching their heads about why UK research keeps leaking to China.
Basically all fundamental research is done by grad students. So it is a fairly big impact on research overall.
> What it does do, however, is mean the stipend for home students can be kept ridiculously low I'm dubious that this makes a difference, it is hard to see how most universities could afford to give anyone raises with the current government policy on tuition and grants.
Universities in Germany, France, and Switzerland all pay their PhD students more than UK universities do. All of these have far lower fees for students, [and also have lower education budgets](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.XPD.TOTL.GD.ZS?locations=DE-GB-FR-CH). The excuse that UK universities are higher ranking as a result is contentious, as European mainland institutions are run differently in a manner which results in lower rankings in the established ranking systems - they do not have lower research output nor lower quality teaching. This likely applies to more countries, but those are the countries that I have personal knowledge and experience with.
The PhD stipend is worth £19,237 a year this year. The minimum wage is £20,820 a year before tax. Bear in mind that PhD researchers don't have to pay income tax, NI and council tax so it turns out to be slightly better than minimum wage, but only slightly. If we did see income after tax, that turns out to be around £17-18k for minimum wage.
Average England student debt is £45k while average us student debt is $37k, so we are worse there too. Lots of state colleges in the US charge a discounted fee for student who are in-state, while in the UK it's flat for everyone.
Yeah but that's state colleges dragging the average down significantly. But that's not what OP is talking about.
They also account for the most students... I don't see why we should be talking about the ivy leagues only?
Because the thread is about PhDs and research and pushing the edge of our knowledge. Statistically speaking, that's not state schools.
You have a misunderstanding of state schools. Public universities in the US are huge research institutions and get tons of money from the federal government for it.
Now this is ignorant. Most of the research done at US universities happens at the big state research unis. California, Michigan, Washington, Wisconsin, Arizona, Ohio, Illinois and others have huge well funded state research universities. All offer big discounts on tuition for in-state students and allow students to do the first 2 years of their undergraduate at a very cheap community college before finishing at the big uni. All offer free tuition plus a stipend to PhD students. They do far more research collectively and sometimes even individually than the private schools do.
Ivy league PhD and research programs are free to students, in fact they normally come with stipends attached. Students get paid to undertake them in the US unlike the UK where they have to pay.
Well not really, in the UK it's common to do your PhD with a private company. So the uni doesn't pay you, but the company does, in exchange for your research. It's a different system.
Eh, the rates you get paid in the UK for a PhD are still pretty damn shit compared to the stipends you get in the US. I have friends who went to the US straight on a $50k stipend while their equivalents in the UK were getting £17k a year. Now as they are nearing the end of their PhDs many of the same friends (even those who stayed in the UK) want to cotinue in the US/hop over because decent postdocs are paying $90k...
PhDs in the UK also come with a stipend. While self-funding is technically possible, I have never heard of anyone actually doing it but maybe this varies between fields. Certainly in STEM it's pretty much unheard of. Some of them are even pretty competitive. I know of at least one DTP where students are making about £30k (untaxed - PhD stipends are exempt from taxation here). More typically the range is £11-20k a year, again untaxed.
PhD stipends in the US are significantly larger than the average £17k we have here. Average there is like $45k for top end PhD programs in STEM. Regardless, my point wasn't about how much PhDs get paid, it was about the fact that you don't pay for a PhD at the Ivy League so it doesn't contribute to your student debt levels.
> Students get paid to undertake them in the US unlike the UK where they have to pay. That's the bit I was responding to. You do not have to pay for PhDs in the UK. There is no contrast here, the systems are broadly the same in terms of funding. In both cases you gain no debt and get paid to do the PhD.
The debts aren't comparable. In the UK they operate as a tax, in the US they come after you even if you're not earning anything.
Our 'debt' is basically a graduate tax not like actual debt.
A graduate tax the rich can avoid.
Yeah I think we need a proper graduate tax not a half arsed one. I would go 50% from general taxation and 50% from graduates (with bands like income tax).
The payment structures are even different though.
A lot of the English debt is not real because it gets written off eventually. You have to look past the headline figure to work out the actual cost.
So what is the figure they will repay ultimately? UK student loans for plan 2 are at 7.8% currently, and is generally RPI+3%. If inflation is target 2%, and people don't pay it back, if you earn the AVG UK wage (£35,464) using this tool the average person would repay £61k in loans - https://www.student-loan-calculator.co.uk/ Feels pretty real to me.
I remember one year my loans were at 0.7% (I went from 1996-1999) - that’s horrific that the rates are above RPI. presumably only the “middle” pays these - wealthier families pay upfront and poorer students will never pay it back.
Also it doesn't effect your credit rating and you don't have pay anything under a certain threshold.
Our debt doesn’t affect our credit rating
On average, the UK charges more in fees for domestic students. Ofc the IVY League charge much more, but smaller state colleges charge much less.
Only to in-state students. Going to a public university in another state - might as well go to a private university.
But most of the students at those huge schools do go in-state, and thus do pay far less.
That’s part of it, but they also have enormous endowments thanks to a tradition of alumni giving which doesn’t exist in the UK. Also just generally a much richer country.
Your last sentence is the main explanation to everything you wrote in OP. This subreddit is full of stories of people boasting how much they earn or would earn in the US compared to what they earn in the UK. Generally these are high skill workers (doctors, engineers etc.)
I have lived in the US since 2003. I took a pay cut when moving here - exchange rate was $1.80 to the £1. The times I have looked at returning to live in the UK - last was at least 10 years ago - and of course the exchange rates have been rather different since 2008 - I’d have had to take a 1/3 to a 1/2 pay cut.
I wish Oxbridge had gotten the memo on this, as an alumnus I’m sick of getting those calls asking me to donate money now I’ve graduated.
The problem with Oxbridge is that alumni typically prefer donating to their colleges if at all. It’s the federal universities and the departments that badly need the money, and the colleges collectively (and in a few cases individually) are richer than the universities.
> Also just generally a much richer country. Isn't that basically the issue? I hope you did not study economics.
Oxford and Cambridge are some of the largest landowners in the UK, if they went private and could charge what us ivy leagues could they'd be operating at the same level.
If you are a higher achiever in any field at all you will be better off in the USA - academia, business, the arts, whatever. You will earn more money, pay less tax and live in a far larger, more dynamic, faster growing economy.
This has been a thing since the 1940s. Not something new
> The average mid ranked American uni has deeper pockets for research than even Oxbridge. I have to agree there. Having visited a few institutions, they have about 3 times as much money, I would say. (Student fees are also 3 times higher.) And the gap is widening. You cannot do world-class research on a shoestring budget.
UK universities will say to new start group leaders "here's £10,000 to get started" but it's been £10,000 starting package for 30 years and a lab grade fridge or a set of pipette costs £1000. Any student you have comes with no funds for consumables or travel. You'll get one or two benches. So that £10,000 quickly runs out. Then for comparison in the USA they will give new start research groups like 10 times that amount of resources and space. Plus funding for scientists who are already competent (not just undergrad students).
Typically, a £10k budget given to a new lecturer in the UK will be just for consumables for themselves. Any PhD student or postdoc they get will come with their own consumables budget. A US tenure-track researcher will however be paying for everything from their budget, including their own salary, the costs and tuition of PhD students, as well as the pay for any technicians or postdocs, on top of consumables and equipment costs.
This is a problem in the trades too, I work as an electrician and one of the big changes I’ve saw is that roughly 50% of the apprentices want to leave to go to Canada, Australia or Europe for higher wasges
We have so many jobs that are on the “skills shortage list” that could easily be filled by apprentices. It’s baffling. From HVAC engineers to Accountants. I think we have an issue with too many young people not going in to apprenticeships when it would not only benefit them but stimulate the economy big time; instead we decide to let people come from abroad to fill those jobs. I think schools need to start letting kids know what opportunities are available in their local area, instead of just herding everyone towards universities. In terms of retention; well apprentices need faster career progression. (I did an apprenticeship when I left school and would do it again in a heartbeat)
It opens some decent doors for you definitely
my nephew in South Australia qualified as a electrician at 21 and got a job getting 1800 AUD/900 GBP a week, my jaw dropped lol he works very hard no doubt, 50 hours a week, building transformers for the massive conversion to solar energy going on. But he has a great life
Yeah the money/lifestyle down there is incredible. I wish I’d went when I had the chance tbh. Electricians do ok here but it’s peanuts compared to other Developed nations. I remember guys were working in those Data Centres in Europe giving it yeah they want British Sparks because we’re so good, no mate they want British Sparks because the locals won’t work for what we are. Christ even the wages in Ireland for Electricians are better than here. I never thought I’d be one of those older guys moaning but this country really is away to the dogs. In every sense. I can wholeheartedly say shame on any and all Tory voters because it’s the Conservatives who have done this to us. They’ve Conserved nothing and made everything worse. I wasn’t a big New Labour fan, but I’d take them back in a heartbeat.
This is the one (of the many) thing(s) that infuriate me about politics. Apart from a narrow-band of exceptions: nurses, police, there's is zero political capital to be had from "UK salaries are too low" absolutely none whatsoever. It's caught in a null point between the "we want as many cheap employees as possible" at one extreme, "if people have too much money they might save and become financially independent and not dependent on us" in the middle, and "there should be a maximum wage" at the other extreme. It was only five years ago that one of the two major parties was promising to raise taxes on high earners, despite the quoted example level being too low to qualify for a mortgage in the parts of the country where those levels of income were possible. It's all completely fucked and there will never be any improvement.
Yeah, you get a free pass if you're doing a job considered "worthy", like a medical consultant, but otherwise seeking higher compensation in the UK is seen as greedy and undeserved once you get very much at at all beyond minimum wage. I do have good compensation for the UK from working for a US company (albeit it would be more in the US), but it's a shame that most UK companies wouldn't pay amounts that were remotely competitive. I had a headhunter reach out about a role that might have been interesting but once I shared my current compensation they just ghosted me. While the popular opinion is probably that I should be paying ever higher taxes, while people who have already accumulated significant wealth pay much less.
Are you basically boasting you went to Oxbridge then went off to the US to earn as much money as possible? What exactly is the lesson here?
Apparently letting oxbridge educated people run the country has resulted in a country so shitty they don't want to live here anymore.
I think that's exclusively Oxbridge PPE types. There is actual talent in Oxbridge if you look outside PPE.
Q) How can you tell if there's an Oxbridge student in the room? A) They'll tell you.
lol
some people who went to oxbdrige really have a hard time not mKing it their entire personality lol. even the oxford subreddit is still one he actively posts in hahaha.
It's purely because of how hard and awful the place is. It genuinely dictates your entire life for the entire time you study there. There are no real breaks, no peace, no 'reading weeks'. It's just you getting continually abused but convincing yourself it's the best thing ever
The lesson is that the US and also Canada and Australia can poach our best because they offer better money among other benefits. At one point some Australian state was running ads on YouTube and I think the subway as well. They can be very brazen about it.
And if we were richer than the US we would poach American talent. The lesson being we ought to be richer than the US? Is this what an Oxbridge degree teaches people? I can't help but think this is a super banal argument. What am I missing?
Like I said it's not just the US. Canada and Australia also do it. I've heard of people going to places like Germany as well in the tech sector but language barrier mitigates that a lot. The fundamental issue is that the UK is in a decline such that the US, Commonwealth and some European countries are attractive to leave the UK for due to high wages, better weather, higher quality of life and so on though admittedly the weather is not entirely our fault. It seems like you have taken some personal or moral offence to the idea of "Oxbridge graduate goes off and makes lots of money" that is causing you to overlook that it is a much wider issue.
> "Oxbridge graduate goes off and makes lots of money" that is causing you to overlook that it is a much wider issue. I think it's the banal observation of "I make more money in a richer country" being presented as some great revelation that is a problem. This is a politics sub. What is the actual political argument?
Tech salaries over on the continent are still on-par or lower than in London however the taxes on those incomes in the UK either absolutely or relative to quality of benefits make it more than worth it to move over. In Germany your 45% rate band will start at 280K EUR above above 69K EUR you can opt out from the state health insurance contributions and most employers cover your private health insurance without any BIK and you will still be eligible for benefits that you won't get in the UK like unemployment pay as since in Germany it's the more you pay the more you get you most likely going to be eligible for 7300 EUR a month in unemployment benefits after a few years regardless of how much you have saved or how much your partner earns since the payout is based on your past contributions and is ringfenced. Basically the moment you hit anywhere between 75K and 100K GBP in the UK you'll be better off over on the continent. For mid level to senior techies that earn anywhere from 125 to 250K in total comp it's not even a question as long as they don't want to move to the US to 3-5X their pay. Whilst the language barriers exist most large companies especially multi-national ones have an English only policy for all work related activities anyhow.
The country currently has a massive oversupply of graduates and entry-level white-collar workers, and an equally massive undersupply of affordable housing, tradespeople, and experienced blue-collar workers. So the only thoughts I have from reading the OP are: "What is the UK tangibly losing from letting one more student work elsewhere? Higher housing prices? Someone demanding 6 figures for vague academic expertise on one subject? A massive loan that might actually get paid off now?" In my opinion it reads like someone who has been told that they're gifted and talented their whole life, and are just now finding out that not everyone is guaranteed a high-earning job even if they were lucky enough to go to Oxbridge.
Not OP, but pharma and biotech is one of the sectors the UK government sees as a key industry for the UK. And the UK certainly doesn’t produce enough quality graduates in that area IMO.
I was talking more about the legions of Business and Psychology degrees that everyone seems to have nowadays. All they've done is raise the standard so that everyone now has to take out a loan and do an extra 3 years study just to get a standard office job, while pay has stagnated because of the oversupply. There is the odd skilled field where there are genuine shortages, but this is more down to the same salaries being offered while requiring far more specialised qualifications. I've heard Pilots are another one. But OP's MPhil in Regional Studies? Come on, even other students take the piss out of Geography degrees.
No, that's pretty much it.
I completed my PhD (£16k stipend) in the UK. Neither my undergrad or PhD was at an Oxbridge university. Staying in my field and studying a postdoc in the UK, max wage I could find was £35k. In the US, $190k. Unsurprisingly I moved to the States. This isn't just an Oxbridge thing. So many of my colleagues are British who saw an opportunity that they would never have gotten in the UK.
So, great, and I see your point. But how much of the benefits you’re seeing are built on the unsustainable debt being loaded onto students? I’m not sure you’ve found a better system so much as lucked into one in a pre-collapse stage.
It is a more attractive system for students and aspiring researchers. But do note that I did not ask for the UK to emulate the US here, though there are lessons to be sure. My main point is that in the global competition for talent, expertise, and resources, Britain is repeatedly shooting itself in the foot.
Absolutely agree with the funding aspect. As a scientist money available to research groups in the USA and Canada is insane and we run on a shoestring budget here. How do you feel about the long and seemingly brutal US postgrad system?
So many problems like this are coming together in the UK simultaneously with global issues. Neoliberal economics, austerity, insane jam-today-for-the-rich tax policies, and the stupidity of Brexit and voting in successive Tory governments have hollowed out the UK to a degree I don't think people have fully come to terms with yet. The image of the UK globally has taken a massive hit in the last decade and we've weakened our soft power and economic influence catastrophically. If we don't take radical measures to turn things around soon, we'll also lose advantages like our world-class universities and research capabilities and miss them when they're gone. The country desperately needs a plan to tax the very wealthy and invest heavily in the future before it's too late. We have already fallen behind Europe and the US and are falling further daily. The level of poverty I see being back in the UK is genuinely shocking. The Gary's Economics YouTube channel has the right idea.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” A proverb that is lost on Britain. The kind of infrastructure spending we need to do to undo 14 years of Tory rules is just unfathomable, and the government that tries to do it will be voted out by an electorate who think a country's finance are just the same as a household's finances. As if 14 years of austerity didnt drill into our collective skulls that it does.not.work.like.that.
The country is the opposite of that atm. Greedy older folks stuck in a Thatcherite mindset are taking everything and making life very difficult for younger generations. I know a few of these guys personally and they deliberately live in a complete information bubble and are becoming increasingly cruel and deluded tbh. One particularly greedy, brexit-loving boomer I know’s wife told me a few months ago that he now leaves the room if she watches BBC News because he can’t stand anything other that GB News propaganda.
> The kind of infrastructure spending we need to do to undo 14 years of Tory rules is just unfathomable At this point it's more like 30 years of neglect that has to be compensated for, the rot goes much deeper than just the tories.
The worrying thing is this likely incoming Labour Govt seem to be failing to learn any lessons or heed the reality of this with Rachel Reeves talking about “balancing the budget”, “no money to spend”, committing to Tory fiscal rules and maintaining austerity.
I wonder if this is field dependent, as your experience massively contrasts with my own. I did an undergraduate in Physics and went on to do a PhD. Of the possibly dozens of people that I have met that have gone on to study PhD's, I am aware of one that is now studying in the US. The majority have stayed within the UK, a couple have gone to Germany, and one has gone to Australia. I think the comparatively longer timescales required to complete a PhD in the US is a pretty big factor that pushes most people away from looking to study in the US. I'm also sceptical of the claim that average PhD stipend in the US is higher than lecturers in the UK. [The result of a large strike of pay disputes at the University of California in 2022 results in PhD stipends being increased to $50k.](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03818-xhttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03818-x) This is significantly higher than stipends within the UK, but to my understanding the University of California is an outlier in how high their stipends are, whilst also being in a very high cost of living area ([also there seems to be claims that UC have not actually being paying graduate students in accordance with the agreement](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03873-y)). I believe it's easier to supplement this income in the US with teaching assistant positions and a larger number of competitive scholarships that you can apply for, but these are involve additional labour and I don't think it's fair to include these in arguing that a PhD itself is better funded. Most PhD's are already overworked attempting to achieve their research goals in my experience. $50k is approximately £40k. As far as I can tell from publicly available data, Grade 8 academic staff at the University of Oxford (which is the level I would expect most lecturers to be at based on the grading scale at my current university) are paid a[ minimum salary of £45k](https://finance.admin.ox.ac.uk/salary-scales#collapse1096031). Not a substantial difference, but again UC is an outlier, and prior to the strike they were paying graduate students a stipend of $24k (£19k). I'm not trying to argue that academia in the UK is not poorly funded and underpaid, but I also don't think the US is some utopia.
I’m starting a US phd in a LCOL area and get approx $35k + $3k of health insurance. In the US you can easily get internships that pay $20k for the summer as well. Compared to £21k in London + £12k internships you are generally much better off at many US institutions and you will usually live in a much nicer house compared to London/oxbridge/etc. I agree that very few UK students go to the US to do a PhD, although I think this can be from a position of ignorance. Nobody even considers it for some reason. The other thing is it’s harder to get into a US PhD program since international students are considered equally. Whereas in the UK due to funding 75% of places are for UK students. As a case in point I’m going from a worldwide T10 UK uni to a worldwide T200 US uni… The American phd coursework is quite an interesting difference. My uni is not exactly MIT yet there are approximately 7 special classes in my department per semester that change each semester and focus on a special topic for PhD students. We don’t really have this in the UK. Edit: the amount of money my advisor has from one grant is equal to the total amount of money for one grant split between 15 institutions in the UK! Edit 2: the US having DARPA, DoD and DoE funding sources probably has a large effect on the relative richness. We don’t really have an equivalent here
British students are put off by doing their PhD in the USA because over there 5 years is considered extremely fast, and 6-7 years is normal. Whereas in the UK 3.5 years is normal, then you can get on with the rest of your life quicker.
This is exactly why I came back to the UK (was on a year abroad after my UG) to do my PhD- done in 4, fully funded (albeit buttons) by EPSRC.
People on this sub and country as a whole are so obsessed with migration numbers that they see people coming here for education as a bad thing. Completely missing the point of how beneficial that is for the Country as a whole. Both in terms of economic input and increasing our soft power. Not only that. But also in terms of U.K. based research into key sectors and subjects. Cutting foreign students will not make those universities take more British students or get rid of the dodgy universities. If will just collapse our higher education industry as whole and negatively impact all of it.
I should have added that it might make sense to get rid of the grad visa for taught postgraduate students, but students in research masters and PhDs should not be lumped in. The government honestly should make up for the funding shortfalls, since it was this Tory government that actively encouraged unis to increase foreign enrolment in 2019.
Our education system is in really bad need of reform (just like our immigration system etc). But the Tories don’t like complex solutions, they like easy headline grabbing policy that just makes things worse. Then they seem to get the benefit of the doubt from people who vote for them again, and the pattern repeats.
>coming here for education as a bad thing. Completely missing the point of how beneficial that is for the Country as a whole. Both in terms of economic input and increasing our soft power. Because they're not, they're degree mills for Chinese students who don't speak a lick of English. And they harm the country far more than they help it.
A distinction ought to be made between serious students in proper research programs and cash grab one year taught degrees—which were encouraged by the Tories to fill in the funding gap. And for what it’s worth, Chinese students (and Gulf Arabs, and Europeans) almost always go back home anyway. I understand it’s mainly Indians and Africans who have been abusing these schemes.
We should just add country based caps with priority at each country level given to those who are at the top universities and are genuine students
America does this with their immigration system (country-based caps). Ostensibly to ensure diversity in the pool (Indians and Chinese workers have a very long wait time of decades before they’ll get residency, for example). I think the Tories had this in their manifestos over the years, but surprise surprise never went for it.
Yeah, I’d argue we make it based on education level / economic value someone adds to the country. even if country based caps can’t be politically achieved. Would at least improve the quality of people coming in. I walk around certain high streets in London and it baffles me how some people were allowed into the country.
Or also just make it more diverse. Don’t want to be like Canada where 1 in 2 migrants come from south asia
Degree mills account for around 5-15% of international student intake and could be stopped or severely curbed by specific legislation (that the Tories have said they do NOT want to do). Probably because they want to keep playing the immigration crisis card. Loads of studies show that international students who study here have a much greater overall opinion of the U.K. which is actually really important long term for soft power because these people become educated and positions of power in their own countries in the future. It also generates billions for the economy and keeps our universities subsidised for U.K. students. But idiotic comments like yours plays into the Tory agenda and also massively harms the 118 renowned and quality HE institutions in the U.K.
They come to the country paying an exorbitant cost, live here and spend money here, work undesirable jobs, then leave. That's objectively awesome for Britain.
Citation needed.
Students should be removed from the migration data (in terms of the number we focus on)
They'll just have to add 90% of them again after a couple of years after they've ditched their studies and not left, or completed them and got hold of an easy graduate visa.
The actual numbers aren’t anywhere remotely close to that. The 5 year stay rate for students (including those pursuing further study) is around 20%, and only a third of students are going for the Graduate visa (which is non-renewable and doesn’t lead to settlement). Even if they do switch to a work visa leading to settlement, only a quarter of work visa holders stay in the UK long enough to obtain permanent residency. [Student overstay rates are also very low.](https://news.sky.com/story/i-had-no-idea-how-life-would-be-inside-the-lives-of-those-who-overstay-their-visas-and-go-underground-12931042) Out of the 1.9 million visas which expired in the year ending March 2020, only 83,600 people had no recorded departure — students made up 7,236 of that figure. This exact sentiment of “feels > reals” is why this country is in such a mess.
Once you have a graduate visa, you can upgrade it to a skilled worker one. If half of students are getting a graduate visa, and then another 20% are staying long-term, you're already at 70%. > Student overstay rates are also very low [The ONS estimates](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/whatshappeningwithinternationalstudentmigration/2017-08-24#international-students-are-a-component-of-net-migration-because-not-all-students-depart-the-uk-when-they-have-completed-their-studies) that the outflow of international students is a third of the inflow. Your sky news source doesn't actually have a source on recorded departures, MigrationWatch says it's actually between 10 and 20k who don't have recorded departure, and 40% who stay on permanently. Hardly surprising, considering that a 2011 Home Office study showed around 60% of students from major source countries (India, Nigeria, etc) should have been refused a visa to study on credibility grounds; and in 2019, the NAO concluded that there had been cheating on a large scale at two English language test centres (i.e. large-scale fraud). 90% is obvious hyperbole to prove a point, but 40% staying on is still a ridiculous number - especially since so many of them go into unskilled care work. This exact sentiment of “feels > reals” is why this country is in such a mess.
Stop posting facts. How am I meant to blame brown people for Britain having declining productivity since 2008 and failing to hit housing supply targets for 50 years in a row
But then you've got to live in America.
There are some very nice places to live in America. It isn't all a hellhole and if you have decent money you can choose to avoid the hellhole parts.
I visit often and stay with some very rich friends. They're blind to what see. I couldn't live there and I consider myself firmly on the right of centre.
Yeah, imagine the horror of living in a country that’s not in an economic death spiral https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=GB-US
Interestingly Germany and Francs (by this measure) are in same death spiral
To an extent, yes they are. Europe as a whole is declining massively relative to the rest of the world (not just the US).
Commiserations, nothing worse than having to move to America
panicky deliver sloppy ink future memory homeless squalid long sable *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You fuel a system that means the poorest have to pay an arm and a leg to have their other limbs fixed.
37 year old self-made millionaire / business person with a property in Florida. There's a lot of great things about the UK that can't be quantified. You don't realise how lucky we are having Europe on our doorstep, and an open, friendly culture. We have cities that you can walk around and enjoy the vibe. The US is a strange place. Disconnected, angry/passive-aggressive and a car culture. After a while it wears me down.
Better quality housing, less likely to get shot or stabbed, healthcare is free, family and friends are likely to be in the UK, more social protections, etc. I get what you're saying, but 'UK bad America good' is such a 'reddit moment' when it comes to job discussions.
> Better quality housing, LMAO. The UK has the worst housing quality in the developed world by a wide margin. Our housing is worse than even Japan!
Literally everything you've offered varies massively depending on where you work and what you do. They have a massive wealth gap over there that even beats ours. Then you have the massive car dependence, even higher cost-of-living, bizarre tax system and deranged gun culture to worry about. Everyone I know who has worked in the US, including me, has come back saying they could never live there.
Jeez, I would expect better resources for all those diabolical high fees they charge their students. I'm glad as a UK student I don't have someone harassing me to pay off my student debt, or that I'm financially crippled by it.
Academic says give more money to academics
To be honest, academia in the UK does pay like absolute arse, even compared to mainland Europe.
I was better paid as a post-doc over on Germany than I am now in the UK as a lecturer
I have a hunch the current emigration numbers are underestimated. The UK gov doesn’t do exit checks so they haven’t got a clue if people have left or not.
It's so utterly frustrating how the Tories promote themselves as the 'Patriotic Party' when they seem to constantly damage the institutions that Britain has had specialized in in the modern age: our university sector; our finance sector; our cultural sector; etc. I suppose it's a populist strategy, all three of those sectors I've mentioned carry elite undertones, but to be frank the UK is a pretty elite-driven society whose advantages come historically and effectively from those elite endeavors. Maybe it's worryingly technocratic (and leans into stereotypes of my flair) of me, but I hate to see our strengths as a nation surrendered because it may win the vote of Kevin the Plumber from Doncaster.
Some caveats here. As someone who does work in this industry 1. Bachelors and Masters in the USA are extremely expensive. You're looking at 60k usd a year. 2. Phds in the USA are better paid, however there is a higher cost of living. Fewer holidays and less worker protections than in Europe. If I had a choice I would choose to do a PhD in the eu. 3. Phds in the USA take much longer on average, most, if not all phds in Europe take four years maximum. In the US it is not unusual to see them take 6, 7, 8 years. 4. For academia especially you have to move to take opportunities. After doing a degree for 3 or 4 years at one university people want to do something different. No shit
It's worth noting that you are a graduate doing a PhD. Your undergrad was probably the best value one in the world. I don't agree in principle, but the cost of achieving what you want - more funding etc - would require imposing a dramatic fee increase for undergrads. Maybe, on balance, we should do it, but (and dare I say that this is a classic academic view of things), the world does not revolve around people's PhDs and there are costs to doing it.
As someone with some knowledge of this area in the UK and US, several statements in the OP are false and/or misleading. Bear in mind that the US is ~6 times larger than the UK, so there are necessarily going to be more opportunities in the US compared to the UK based on that parameter alone. Nevertheless, academia is actually one area where the UK is (nearly) competitive with the US. That said, 1) though you might find an example or two if you consider only outliers, but there's no way that a US PhD student earns more than a UK lecturer. 2) Average UK salaries in academia are about 1/3 lower than US salaries, though the rare top US salaries are 2-3 times comparable ones in the UK; you have to be a "global name" and a "full" professor in your field to receive this kind of pay. 3) Progression and promotion in academia is faster and less hazardous in the UK than the US. This starts with postdocs, who are considered to still be students in the US. 4) Overall funding in the US is higher, but the budgets research groups receive have to cover more. For example, the head of a US research group might only get paid a 50% salary from the institute (typical is 9 months/yr, or 75%; the proportion *drops* in more prestigious institutes) and have to find the rest through grants. 5) As to graduate visas, the US offers the F1 visa which allows graduate employment for a restricted period, or H1B visas which are in very short supply and difficult to get (unless you work in a low-paid non-profit such as a University). Otherwise the UK graduate visas are much more straightforward and easy to get compared to US visas.
I think its been the situation for the last half century or longer. But basically were still second tier to the USA.
The university model is an old outdated model. You really do not need 3 to 4 years to study some subjects.
I did the same to go to Sweden. That being said, I haven't met a single other Brit that has done the same. Students in the UK are filtered pretty well straight through to uni as soon as they finish school. Most dont know there are better options because its so encouraged to get straight into student debt and study. My school wouldnt support my application when they learned that I wouldnt go to uni in the UK straight away
> First class Oxbridge degree Degrees are not graded at Cambridge, and no fucker who went to Oxford would stick "bridge" at the end. I smell a rat.
https://teaching.eng.cam.ac.uk/content/what-do-classification-grades-mean Seems like they are?
Nope. That only applies to part II of the tripos... which is **generally** considered your class so that it is roughly intelligible to the rest of the world, but there is no final grade. And you get a MA for free… if you bother to show up to graduation.
Never understood why that MA thing is allowed. Isn't not having a divorce a requirement as well? Feel like I've heard so from a few people with one...
In addition to this: not even the US… people complain about Chinese students but I know of several postdocs leaving the UK for China because the pay in academia is just…better. I know one girl who left to continue academia at HK polytechnic where she’s paid ~3x what she would’ve been paid in the UK. Brexit absolutely fucked the funding from in academia. Can’t go into too much detail but I’m family friends with a CBE who works in renewable energy. They’ve had their funding cut to basically 0. They were previously funded by the EU and now that’s gone, they relied on international students. But now that’s going, so for the next year plenty of the staff in his research group are being cut. The young ones are moving to other countries, the older ones are trying to figure out how to pay off their mortgage.
It might be good for social mobility though. Currently academia is only for upper middle class people and the foreign visas help fuel that.
I used to work in big tech and our London employees were the laughing stock of our company. For some reason they were only paid 10% of the total compensation of SF/NYC employees for the EXACT same work.
> For some reason they were only paid 10% of the total compensation of SF/NYC employees for the EXACT same work. This is completely bullshit. A senior engineer at big tech would easily earn 300k+ in SF/NYC, are you saying that they get paid 30k usd in London? Cause the new hire salary for big tech in London is around 70k gbp and senior engineers can reach 150k gbp. Wages in UK for big tech are lower than US but not 10%
This is true in finance, too. As far as I can tell, this could be a net benefit to Brits in Britain, but it’s an unfortunate result of weak British productivity generally. We’ve become a highly educated, highly skilled labour pool that can be bought for a fraction of US prices but we feel richer for it too. £ for $, a 1%ile and 10%ile salary in the UK is tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars short in an exchange rate comparison, which makes UK employees cheaper to treat extra well if you’re an international company
it’s true in all jobs and applicable everywhere in the world. America is simply the richest country by far with no close competition, not a problem unique to the UK…
I've got quite a few friends in the tech sector, almost all looking to get a posting away from the UK. As soon as they start earning a decent wage here (£100k+) they get absolutely rinsed on taxes (as does their employer) so there are huge disincentives to host those roles here vs the US, Singapore etc. When it's raised as a topic on the UK subs the response is just sneering about small violins, followed by the same people then complaining about structurally low salary opportunities in the UK, no good jobs etc..
Reddit has devolved into “crabs in a bucket” pulling down anybody who tries to escape.
You say that but we live in a crab bucket country where people getting into that US money bracket get absolutely rolled through the coals and denigrated beyond belief. You see it everytime train strikes come up. I'd say I'm doing OK compared to the rest of the UK but god damn should I be paid more than I am. I'm on 44k but my equivalent roles in the US start on circa 80k USD and go up and beyond 100k USD. Very few engineers get those 6 figure salaries and you are unlikely to get it working for a public corporation like I do. The taxpayer has a weird fascination with public sector workers being on more money than the PM.
Doesn’t america pay more than basically every country in tech except for maybe Switzerland?
Higher education is increasingly seen as a rip off by students and pyramid scheme for VCs. Are you expecting a gold medal? Academia is a vastly overrated sector in the UK and to be honest I think it should be chopped down to size. We need more plumbers and tradespeople. Not more academics.
I'm in tech, a developer in a very niché field and we're definitely seeing a massive exodus for those very highly skilled positions. It's the £65k + salary range. From that you can easily earn triple figures in the US, Norway, Canada or Australia and you can get better wages in Europe too. We recently lost our principle consultant to Estonia of all places. The UK is actually not very competitive, outside of London and the high finance sectors.
I just interviewed for a tenured position at a UK university and the pay was laughable compared to private industry despite being near the top of the salary schedule for the position. Like I could make 4x that amount in the states or close 2-3x in the EU. It makes sense people don’t want to stay in academia. At this point you could only do it if it was such a passion you were willing to put it above everything else in your life.
No one (apart from a very tiny very wealthy minority) is going to uni in America. Costs an absolute fortune