How did university work pre-UCAS and pre-tuition fees?

I have no idea how people do it now paying the massive tuition fees.

I went to uni for 4 years, had max load (4k a year) no tuition fees due to low income family, graduated in 2007 and still owe 18k in student loan!

I did travel for a year costing 10k though and paid nothing or minimum loan amounts for 2 or 3 years
 
Mat said:
So how did it work going back further; to the 50's and 60's? Was it up to your school headmaster to approach a university on your behalf?
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Before UCCA each university had it's own application process and you needed to make separate applications for each university.
 
Mucky_Pup said:
This pretty much, everyone looks at the headline figure and ***** their pants about it, if you're investing in your future it shouldn't really be that much of a problem, if you're going for a three year **** up; maybe you should re-evaluate the plan. Which is what I have seen, friends who studied stupid subjects giving them very little job prospects, spent the time ****ing it up the wall and spending their student loan on tattoo's, etc. and now either can't find a job or are working low skilled, low paid jobs they could have started after leaving school and would probably be higher up the career ladder by now.
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However if they're just working the same ****** jobs they would have done anyway then why not blow £40k of taxpayers money that they're never going to pay back and have 3 fun years at uni?

Free university education worked when only a small number of people did it, the current system is a mess though and doesn't address the massive cost of giving people generally useless degrees.
 
logicfry said:
450k x £9k = £4-6 million??
450k students X £9k tuition fees/year =

so your degree wasn't in maths then?
even if it was the outdated £3k/year fees, that still doesn't make sense
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How so? I did use £3K and the assumption that universities would not have been allowed to charge tuition fees had the grant not been abolished.

Therefore:

New Students (S) = 450,000 p/year (approx.)
Average Degree Course Duration (D) = 3 years
Grant Amount (G) = £3000

Cost to government = S x D x G = £4,050,000 p/year

Given that there were less than 450,000 new students in previous years, some degrees last 4 years or students take foundation years and retakes I added another 50% and stated 4 - 6 million.


What did I do wrong?
 
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trentlad said:
What did I do wrong?
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Your multiplication is suspect given that in your example S*G alone gives you an answer of £1.35bn so you've removed three zeros somewhere in the calculation and that means you're confusing millions and billions (US billions as they're sometimes called). S*D*G gives you £4.05bn (£4,050,000,000), less than some things the government spends money on but a not insubstantial chunk of change. If it really were £4-6m for grants then the debate would be a very different one, that's a large sum to most individuals but to governments it's barely more than a rounding error.

A basic sense check would show that S*£10 would give you £4.5m (or £4,500,000) which is more than you've estimated the total to be despite suggesting that the grant is £3,000 (or 300*£10).
 
Ah, now i see. Oops! I use £3 instead of £3000.

Yeah maybe I can see why they abolished the grant if it would have cost then £4,000,000,000. Slight difference.
 
Castiel said:
Grants were means tested from the late 80s.
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Early eighties. I was at uni until 1982, and I was on the last intake year that got full grant regardless of parental income. IIRC, they were already cutting back by the time I left.

Back then it was still UCCA, and five applications. As stated above, many of the unis were still polys - from memory, there were about 65 actual unis at that time.
 
amigafan2003 said:
IBM are almost as bad, think they only took on 10 non graduates in the UK last year.
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Is it really only 10 people hired who didn't have a degree? Blimey!

They have a decent apprenticeship scheme designed for school leavers with A levels, pretty sure they take on more than 10 people for that a year, plus know of fair few other people who have gone there and not had degrees.
 
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I'm so glad that living in Scotland I got my degree for free. Although it's complete bull that English students don't get treated the same as European students.
 
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