@zaire@fedi.absturztau.be "we're making it more accessible by taking away their ability to access things" . what

>fuck it, apologists - come at me and get blocked: #GNOME

nor is introducing a toxic waste sinkhole the right answer either..

@zaire@fedi.absturztau.be

dont worry guys zivi is here to save us from the non-profit that is working on a genuinely useful, optional tool for parents who aren't neglectful enough to give their kids unrestricted internet access

@kiana

The UK’s higher education system is financially broken, but in a different way. Most universities – even Oxford and Cambridge! – are public universities. As part of accepting state funding, they must adhere to regulation by the Government, including caps on domestic tuition fees, regular inspections, and marketisation reforms. There are only five private universities in the entire country (their funding and operating model is very different).

The key problem is that university funding at the undergraduate level is primarily through tuition fees. These are guaranteed by the Dept for Education via the Student Loans Company Ltd, who issues loans to borrowers (ie students). These tuition fees are capped at £9.5k/year. They have only increased a couple of times since the modern scheme was introduced in 2013 (there were tuition fees beforehand, but it was a nominal amount).

The Government has cracked down on immigration, which includes student visas. Overseas students can be charged unlimited money for tuition (and don’t get loans), and they are used to subsidise domestic students. Since there’s a drop in these students, universities lose money. Also, Brexit means that there are now almost zero EU students (who would have paid domestic rates), so on the domestic side there are fewer students.

This means there is a death spiral, where the Government refuses to raise tuition fees to cover the cost of education, and also is reducing the number of overseas students that can attend universities, but also creating a dependency on universities for foreign students (especially those from China and India).

Paying back those tuition fee loans is also now a problem of importance, as those who started university from 2013 onwards are now at the age where the repayments are starting to bite. A caveat: you only need to pay back the money from when you earn above a threshold, and repayments are capped at 9% of income above that. However, the interest rate is extraordinarily high – even when the UK had near-zero interest rates, tuition fees had an interest rate of 4%! This means that a lot of young people are paying back a huge chunk of their salary, but are not actually paying down their interest, let alone the loan itself.

In addition, the Government has frozen the threshold several times – it currently stands at ~29.9k. If it had actually increased with inflation – as was promised in 2013, it would be nearly 40k. The Government has frozen the threshold until 2030! This will force more poorer graduates to start paying back when they need that 9% the most.

The money does not actually go towards your university, it is instead collected by the Treasury as an additional levy on your salary. Since the UK is a gerontocracy, this means tuition fee repayments are essentially taking from struggling young people and giving them to richer, older people.