Private option can’t be ruled out, Piatt says

Does Wendy Piatt not realise that there are girls turning to prostitution to fund their studies? Does she care?

Yep it would be a great idea to go private that way we can end all the bureaucracy we face from the government and staff can be given shares and big pay rises. Im all 4 it.

The Russell Group have assets on their balance sheets bought with public money. Does "going private" mean that the Treasury will get return on this investment or is it a gift?

@Anon -- You are correct about the students turning to prostitution. In one recent study, I believe one in four Kingston University students had engaged in such activity to fund their studies. Imagine what will happen if fees rise following privatization?

Ooh -- I can take "one in four" and work out that it means half of all female students at Kingston are prostitutes. Nice one Dr F!!

@Maths Wiz -- In case you need a specific reference for this, by all means read this article:- http://riveronline.co.uk/09/news/ku/rise-students-working-sex-trade

Social implications:
Men have no money left for fees after they pay for what used to be free.
It is doubtful that rich foreign students will contribute to "quality".
It is doubtful that good scientists will leave if "cuts" are made: cuts are supposed to throw away bad scientists.

To understand such situations, I would recommend to look yourself at the proposed changes and see what they reasonably should lead to. And then you conclude what are the actual desired results. Never be too impressed with the official explanations of the reasons and goals: these are routinely faked.

Dr Fredrics -- you either need some new specs or a replacement brain component to remedy a difficulty with reading comprehension. I had a look at your link -- the only one-in-four figure was: 'said they knew of other students who participated in the sex industry'. As I say to my students: think about it a bit first.

And the abstract for the journal article that the press article is about says:

"A relatively high proportion (16.5%) indicated that they would be willing to engage in sex work to pay for their education, with 11% indicating they would work as escorts. "

On a 315 student survey.

But, of course, this is about the continued concern that the cost of higher education is carried as a personal debt that might be immediately repayable, as if it were a credit card debt. Whereas it isn't - it's money you pay back over your working life.

How do you personally pay for your state primary and secondary education? You pay taxes.

What a horrible bunch of people.

@Maths Whiz -- Mea culpa. You're right, it was a hasty misread on my part. But the underlying notion is essentially correct -- the numbers of students involved in the sex industry is unacceptably high and on the increase in correlation with fee increases. For a somewhat better coverage of the issue, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/8568723.stm.

why is the sex industry so bad? i mean you make it sound like a last desparate resort, but i'm not sure a student getting a fiver for a hand-job is the same as crawling round the streets looking for fag ends

wendy is wrong. If the international offices and marketing departments in the russell group were a slick as some of the new unis there would be no trouble attracting top overseas postgrads- but the RG are still stuck in a colonial visit model rather than sophisticated International Marketing model. I have asked the Director of the International Office in my institution for competitor analysis and got a shrug and a 'well I know someone in Leeds who says that they are doing well' - shocking sickening waste of public money

where's the evidence? It sounds like self-interested doom-mongering to me

Does that mean that Russell Group Universities will no longer be eligible for EPSRC research grants and must get funding privately as well?

@john, Guildford

Essentially no-one knows what going private would involve. Universities have been accepting grant in aid since just before the First World War. A lot of legislation has been passed on the assumption that they will continue to do so.

Buckingham doesn't provide a very good precedent. Firstly, the subject areas in which it operates were devised on the assumption that it was beyond the pale. Secondly, it was politically very well connected in the 1980s and that resulted in it receiving a Royal Charter and separately that its students could receive maintenance grants (bearing in mind that in those days even the wealthiest UK students received a £400 a year grant).

I find all this hyperbole by Piatt and the Russell Group little more than a PR exercise so they can aggressively push for the tuition fee threshold to be removed.

I doubt many RG uni's could realistically cope with true privatisation and would face flat on their faces within a few years. After all they can barely administrate themselves as publically-funded institutions.

@John, Guildford. In a BBC interview several months back, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge (and former Provost of Yale) said approx. 50 per cent of funding to private US universities still comes from the US government. (Notably, she was against the privatisation). I imagine the UK government, like the US government, would still pour substantial money into research, but would be more picky about where it goes.

I've asked this before. Is there any university in the world which is entirely "private" (no public money of any sort for teaching or research)?

Are THE merely a mouthpiece for the Russell Group? Day after day they publish unquestioningly the latest utterance from Wendy Paitt and her plan to keep people like myself out of the best higher education establishments in the country.

Never any articles about Universities where there students are so poor they are in receipt of food parcels from local Chaplains, students committing suicide over the level of their debts or the pressures of juggling a degree and part time work

C’mon Ann Mroz, any chance of a few articles which which don't read like RG press releases?

@Maths wiz. Please do not pay any attention to this guy Fredrics, a failked academic who set up the website in the name of the VC of KU and thereby twisting the tail of a tiger. He is in his native country America and if he had any sense he would get a job there. No need for him to come here. Half-a dozen of my colleagues have migrated to universities in America within the last 18 months. But then they are real academics.

@David Trotter. Research funding is a different issue , but then there are a number of universities which get private research funding through companies and organisations. I am not surprised that sitting in Wales you ask such questions as Wales is a socialist state.

@To Trotter: you haven't answered the question. I know perfectly well that many universities get private funding. What I asked was whether there were any that survived on exclusively private funding. Wales a socialist state? Jeez. You've obviously never been to one.

@David Trotter: "What I asked was whether there were any that survived on exclusively private funding"
Not a serious question and infact confuses the issue. Boeing is a private company, it gets govt contracts in a way there is part subsidy to R and D built into it. Similarly private universities in America. But if this question was to challenge to uncap fees and charging market rates, it sounds puritan.

Wales not a socialist state, may not be Cuba, but compared to Englkand , it is. All govt with nationalist elements , like PC and SNP are socialist in character.

I doubt there is a university anywhere that's wholly privately funded. The most prosperous US universities get about 40 percent of their income from endowment, and the rest seems to be split fifty-fifty between tuition and federal research funding - except that there are large numbers of research institutes such as the Princeton plasma physics lab that are directly funded by the federal government, which puts up the proportion quite dramatically. I'm sure Oxbridge would have gone private in the past decade - that is, agreed with the government to phase out their dependence on Hefce's 'T' funding, if they had ever got a straight answer to the question whether the government would continue to produce 'QR' and give them access to the research councils. But one minister suggested one thing and another another, and for every minister who thought they were wimpish for not cutting and running there was another who thought they were wicked to think of it.

Do the corporate sector listen to the advice of the academics ( who are not in the Business Schools).
Piatt does not look like an academic. Browne is not an academic; perhaps he got just a PPE, which means he cannot pass Masters Degree courses in either Economics, or Politics of Philosophy.
How these people can give advice to the universities, is the basic question.
Private sector gets its money by borrowing from the banks. The government can do the same, particularly when banks are practically nationalised.
Why is it impossible for the UK, a supposedly rich country, to have free education with adequate grants for each and every students, which was possible for the Soviet Union, a supposedly poor country?

@john, Guildford

One would hope that they would not be able to get EPSRC (and other research council) funding, though there my be a case for 'public-private' partnerships carrying out RCUK-funded work. However I can also see a scenario in which RCUK look to the private sector too with nothing really changing in these matters.

More seriously, if they do go down this route (and personally I don't believe they will) they shouldn't get RAE/REF funding. Moreover, in the absence of the RG universities the RAE/REF expenditure would be massively reduced and the associated bureaucracy could be virtually eliminated.

So if these universities do go "private", presumably they'll be paying back a dividend to the state on 100 years of public investment, yeah? I'll look forward to receiving my cheque.

Does this mean that Oxbridge will no longer be paid twice by the taxpayer to educate students?

Piatt sucks up to Cameron shock!

@Neil. No, it means that academics like you who underperform will get the cheque, the VR cheque.

Virtual Cheques! Cool!

Typical sucking up to money by a creepy careerist-by-politics-only self-promoter. These statements are not made in the interests of finding the truth (or indeed of revealing evidence) they are opinion-led self-interested rants designed to try to get the russell group more money. If the Russell Group are so successful, why do they need more money pumped in without any real effort so that people can chase the idea that they are eccelent - when in fact they are only 'better resourced'

I like the way the government is proposing that fees go up.. so that students have to borrow more.. so that banks get some good business.. and charge more for the money.. so that students leave with debt..and have paid more for each pound they spend than non-students, so that when they start to earn they have to pay back debts, which takes a chunk of their salary away so to live they have to borrow more money ..from the banks who make money from doing this and who make each pound more expensive for students than for other people, and they are later in their lives so they have to borrow more in order to buy a house, which means they need a larger income than a non-student which they spend on debt servicing..... isn't it curious what proportion of the city are conservatives? Of course if your income is so high that you can fund three - five years of study (plus rent plus fees) without impact, you are catapaulted ahead of your poor peers by two accelerating factors - safety net, no uni bills, and the high income dictated by a 'market' inflated by borrowed cash - nice how the multiplier works for the relatively rich isn't it? The way fees and personal finance are being set up is like a big quagmire being pumped full of water for the majority to wade through and/or get stuck in whilst being charged for their passage, whilst a few have some heads of the drowning to stand on. Its shameful that those people also make money from those who drowm - how can we have allowed the world to be set up like this?

I wonder if Piatt is a head-stepper or a wader? Bet she claims to be a wader when she's been on the shoulders of someone head-stepping....