Diary of a Mature Student: Aphasia means never having to sorry you're say
Believe it or not, in this ongoing attempt to add more letters to my name, there are dark times.
This is not about deadlines, or tutors' office hours, or the rising cost of petrol - at least, the last one, only tangentially - but more about the rising cost on the people I depend upon to continue doing this course.
Here's the thing; I have almost no tangible assets right now. Seriously - people my age, from my generation, whatever, tend to have mortgages, cars, children.
I have a large collection of films on DVD, a collection of unrelated props, and everything else has been invested in, frankly, the space between my ears.
Which, no matter what QVC might try to tell you, you can't sell.
Every now and then it catches me; mostly due to a popular social networking site, where I can see all the people on my electronic acquaintances list telling little one-line stories about weddings, pregnancies, successes, failures, etc.
I, by contrast, spend my days surrounded by tweenagers with postive attitudes but not very much in the way of interpersonal skills (except in the odd case) whose only real worries are whether the SLC will pay them their latest installment of insitutionalised debt so they can pay their fees / rent / pizza bills.
In a way, this makes me feel better, because I love my home, and, ninety to ninety-five percent of my time, I love my life.
But Academia - capitalisation intentional - is such a strange world, even stranger, arguably, than politics. The students are only working towards high grades not out of pride, but for theoretical personal gain - but these marks are awarded arbitrarily by a person of authority who may or may not be being judged on their performance via these grades, which is possibly the only reason there's any kind of Second Marking instituted, because otherwise it's performance-related-pay-rigging on a massive scale.
These tutors don't even necessarily want to be there, because hey - who really likes their job. Except most people's jobs don't mean they only have to post something like four to eight office hours a week during which time they may - may - be available to speak to lowly undergraduates.
The rest of the time is filled up with, and I'm assuming based on Piled Higher and Deeper, supervising research students (although I've yet to meet one on my course, but that doesn't mean they're not hiding somewhere), writing academic papers, being on 'research leave', and generally being nebulous. Add to this between six to sixteen hours of lectures and seminars a week, and marking the results of said seminars, and you still get nowhere near a forty-hour working week, which is what I was used to.
(Well, 37.5 hours, but let's not split hairs.)
I love my faculty - they've always been curteous and helpful whenever I've needed help - but I cannot work out how, exactly, the academic world works. My institution is amazing, but it's not exactly top of the barrel - so I get the feeling that some of them are just serving their time out until something better comes along, whether it means making an actual feature film or moving on to a different tenure or becoming a professor somewhere...
Here's the thing. In Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon makes an interesting point; bad police make bad criminals.
In academia, it's topsy-turvy; bad students make for bad tutors, because why should they bother caring for the top 20% when the bottom 80% are just ticking along until the day they get the certificate and booted out into the real world?
So here's the controversial thing. Enhanced - i.e. increased by around 250 - 300% - tuition fees may not be a bad thing. At the moment the university system feels like at best vocational training (for the majority of practical courses; theoretical courses tend, it seems, to turn out teachers) and at worst like a handy place for parents to put their wayward children for three years, to be sold into debt by the government and the SLC and, crucially, not appear on the unemployment statistics. In this light, New Labour's pledge to get 50% of the young population attending university seems less like an altruistic gester and more like guaranteeing future revenue on student loans that will continue to rise unless paid off, which is increasingly unlikely given the employment market.
Higher tuition fees mean thinking twice about courses, and places, and asking whether you or your offspring really need a degree course that's going to top out at something like £28,000 in fees before you even include living costs.
This in turn will probably precipitate a dropoff - don't misunderstand me, there'll still be people attending for the sake of attending, but more fool them. At the same time, the dropoff may not actually cause any woe fees-wise, because one student will be paying as much as three used to.
This is controversial for me because, well, I was lucky. On the first merry-go-round thanks to some circumstances my Local Education Authority paid my tuition fees - the princely sum of something line £1,050 a year. The classes were huge, the courses were amazingly boring up until the final year, and things were difficult.
This time around, I have a sponsor, so I'm lucky again. But class sizes are smaller than my previous higher education iteration - not by much, but if you take certain routes you can end up in classes of 100+ students, but if you go down other routes it's usually between 20 to 40 per class, split into groups or seminars.
Next year, I expect that number to be even smaller.
And, I would like to think, numbers for the Open University will rise. They may, they may not, but I hope they do, because the OU are boss.
Prospective parents; prospective students. Look at it this way. If you can put up with the children living at home / if you can put up with living with your parents instead of moving out, you can get a degree course for a massively lower rate, because you pay by module and could, if you worked your teenage socks off, finish a degree course in two years.
Their courses are refined every year, their tutors - although you'll most likely never see one - are mostly lovely - and you can pick and choose as you like, or even drop out for up to, I believe, 8 years before coming back.
My name is Eton Crow*, and I Endorse The Open University.
Take the £9,000 a year you'd spend, plus accommodation, plus living expenses, and spend half that much on a distance-learning degree. Then put the other half away for a mortgage, or a fast car, or a kilo of class A drugs, whichever appeals.
You won't meet all the amazing people you'd probably meet, you won't have the University Experience, you won't have the Independence and the joy of finally Moving Out, but you'll be a lot better off financially...
... Of course, money isn't everything. But it helps.
(*Well, nom-de-plume, anyway.)
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