More university dick moves...

[anthony87]

It's not just the Scottish that get it for cheap. I'm Irish and if I were to apply to Napier or something like that I wouldn't have to pay any college fees. At all.

Now I just gotta figure out what the fuck I wanna do with my life and I'm all set ^_^

 

[Random Argument Man]

The student council just put a recommandation of increasing the student's cost of admission so that "we" could help the province's debt (New-Brunswick, Canada).

Problem is that we start of with at least 50 000$ in debt with no jobs since the province can't make jobs. Therefore, there's a mass exile from the youth to the west of Canada for jobs. Their solutions were to bring immigrants in the country. Well, second problem is, the immigrants pay twice the cost of admission and a good portion of employees don't hire immigrant due to either direct or indirect racism.

Welcome to New-Brunswick Canada guys!

 

[madster11]

Australian here.

Use that money on a plane ticket, guys. Much cheaper in the long run, and then you don't live in a country that's dying from the inside.

 

[ztara]

We have to sign attendance sheets every single damn seminar - it's university, not secondary school where they take registers.

I 'think' this has something to do with foreign students. The universities (in the UK at least) have to make sure international students attend their lectures and have not simply signed upto a uni as to get a visa. (This does happen quite a lot and recently a college in London somewhere got caught giving uni places out for exactly this!) To make it fair lots of univesities therefore register everyone, everyone treated equally, none above it.

I'm a Masters student and it still happens to me. It's life and tbh not that bigger deal.

 

[Von Strimmer]

Australian here.

Use that money on a plane ticket, guys. Much cheaper in the long run, and then you don't live in a country that's dying from the inside.

Too right! You can come to a country that only has one industry to stand on

O/T Griffith uni in Queensland is a pretty good university, I can't really complain about it. Parking is expensive though.

 

[Woodsey]

This was at University of Exeter in the UK, a place which now actually has the balls to charge students £9000 a year for the same courses as before. They recently spent a few million quid building a giant glass roof to go over the library/on-campus shops, just because they thought it would look good on the prospectus. It took a few years to build as well, so the students who attended in the interim spent their entire university years learning in what amounted to a huge, ugly building site.

Universities seem to spend the majority of their resources in attracting new students. Whilst I see why this is important, obviously, I can't help but feel neglected now I'm in my third year.

£9000 is an extortionate amount of money, I'm so glad I came a couple of years before that was put in place. £27,000 is a crippling amount of debt to start your working life with.

Bit of a misleading idea of how it works. You don't start paying back until you're earning a certain wage, and even then it scales fairly comfortably. It's not like it's weighing on your shoulders as you desperately search for a job.

We have to sign attendance sheets every single damn seminar - it's university, not secondary school where they take registers. Not only that, but postgraduates such as myself and undergraduates have to sign separate registers if they are in the same class. Its almost like the admin dept. want to drown themselves in paperwork.

Seems a bit petty to complain about that when your mate got stabbed though! That's some heavy shit! Its ridiculous that he's not allowed an extension - I', pretty sure there should be processes in place where he can appeal that and at least get some marking concessions or something.

We have that, I presume it's so they can catch people who seem likely to fuck up by never going in and making the Uni look bad.

 

[IndomitableSam]

My twin sister and I applied for University at the same time.... the University near our house, as that's why our parents bought the house, so we could walk to all levels of schooling.

Anyway... my sister and I are twins, both our names start with S. My sister got her paperwork back from the University detailing her course signup dates and scholarship information. I got... nothing. We waited, then my high school contacted the University.

"Oh, we thought it was a duplicate application, so we tossed it. Also... it's too late to get a decent course sign-up date and we won't be giving you any scholarships because it's past the date to give them. We're not even sorry. Fuck you."

... So I lost the chance to sign up for the courses I wanted, and did not get any scholarships.

I mean, I could have fought it, but I was a kid and no one even told me I could fight it back then.

It pretty much ruined my secondary education because I couldn't sign up for the courses I needed, and second year you don't get first shot at signing up for the intro courses, so they're full by the time you try and sign up... overall, I was fucked. Years later I went to another College and now work for the government, so a big 'fuck you' right back to the University. I also encourage people not to go to University and to take up a trade instead. Much better money, and you graduate faster.

 

[Voxgizer]

snip

That's pretty fucking terrible.

Agreed on taking up a trade instead. My brother's an electrician and makes more money than he knows what to do with.

I probably ought to look into it, myself.

 

[Ziame]

Well neither my uni nor me, but we have this "oaths" in Unis in Poland (not in mine, luckily).

So there's shit like "I give my word I will uphold the morals and stuff that are basic fundaments of democracy".

So one guy was like, wait wtf, I won't promise that. And he said that he won't make this oath, because he's a supporter of constitutional monarchy.

He got expelled in an instant. Yay for getting thrown out of uni for political views.

 

[capper42]

Bit of a misleading idea of how it works. You don't start paying back until you're earning a certain wage, and even then it scales fairly comfortably. It's not like it's weighing on your shoulders as you desperately search for a job.

I understand that the amount you pay back is proportional to how much you earn, and you don't pay anything until you're earning over a certain amount. It's still an additional expense however, and just because a debt takes a long time to pay off doesn't mean it's not a concern.

I perhaps worded it a little wrong, I made having the debt after finishing look like my main point, I really wanted to say that I don't think £27,000 is worth the amount of education you receive.

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

Nothing that bad, but we only got briefed about one of our courseworks three weeks after we were supposed to, because two of our lectures thought eachother were supposed to do it. Now that's communication!

 

[Roxas1359]

Yay a thread where I can vent the stupidity of one of my classes. Well I'm a freshamn in my first semester at San Diego State University and I'm majoring in Electrical Engineering so naturally I have to take a math class. Sadly I couldn't afford to take a placement test that would have put me in Math 150, calculus, and instead had to take Math 141, precalculus. They decided because of budget cuts to only offer the class online and the professor literally does not do a single damn thing. Instead he leaves it up to us to teach ourselves advanced math from a poorly written online textbook. Next he tells us that if we need help to go to tutoring but the all the tutors except one have no idea what in the hell they are doing.

Most of the class is failing the course, please note that this is a class of 500, and so we filed a grievance against the professor. Sadly it's too late for anything to be done about the class but we were hoping to change it for next semester. Sadly it's being offered the same exact way. I tried to confront the professor, which was actually the first time I had ever even seen him, and he said that the class is that way because they don't have the resources. Really? You don't have the resources yet you have 4 TAs being paid for tutoring hours as well as you getting paid? You know the class is bad when if you get in the 60% range you pass the class with a C. Never had to work so hard for a C in my life, hell I've never even gotten one before. I'm gonna retake the course just at a community college because I find that this is utter bull.

 

[sonofliber]

ok, so my university is free, it has a lot of great teachers, and it actually prepears you to the challenges of a working enviroment (basically they treat you like a number and they dont give a shit just like when you work,), also you get into the world with a lot of knoledge of how to manage yourself in it

 

[The White Hunter]

My university charged £3250 per year. During my last term I got 2 hours of tuition per week. One lecture, one tutorial.

I believe the excuse was that because third year is dissertation year, they wanted to focus on "independent study time". Well you know what? I could study independently and not have to pay £3250 for it. Yeah, basically tuition was just an undergraduate degree processing cost.

This was at University of Exeter in the UK, a place which now actually has the balls to charge students £9000 a year for the same courses as before. They recently spent a few million quid building a giant glass roof to go over the library/on-campus shops, just because they thought it would look good on the prospectus. It took a few years to build as well, so the students who attended in the interim spent their entire university years learning in what amounted to a huge, ugly building site.

I also spent a year on exchange at University of Toronto. Not only were the tuition fees half the cost of those at Exeter due to the way the program worked, but I also got a glimpse at what you're actually supposed to get at uni. Toronto had the fourth biggest library in North America, and each college had its own individual library. The smallest library on campus was still bigger than Exeter's main library. I also got to do five modules per term (compared to two per term at Exeter), with way more variety in what you could choose to study, got sixteen hours tuition per week, and free access to the main leisure centre as well as the gym in the student accommodation where I was staying. They even had programs in place to help international students find work on campus, since you can only work for the university when you're on a student visa.

Rant over. Conclusion? Exeter sucks and Toronto is absolutely ballin'.

But back to the OP's story. Got stabbed? Walk it off, baby! This is a learning sphere, not a bleeding sphere.

UOC in Lancaster charged me 2980£ for the first year and I was there 8 hours MAX in any given week, full-time my arse. The time table also changed randomly and made working around it difficult and since it's full time I got maybe £2000 to live on for the year...

 

[Hero in a half shell]

-snip-

Our hours a week were usually around 9 in taught lessons, during the dissertation year that went down to about 4 hours of optional workshops that half the time the lecturers wouldn't turn up to. The rest we were supposed to learn ourselves through the reading lists. Bloody scam, although my course was a bit of a doss so I spent the best part of four years watching Top Gear on Dave. Now that I have to work 9-5 for a living I can honestly say those were the best years of my life, although it was a complete rip off to do it.

Also they consistently dicked us over with our lecture rooms, we were based in the same building as the Architects, and the architects got all the rooms while we were relegated to having to move all around campus to a different classroom in different buildings for every lecture because our designated rooms in the building were "being renovated". In my final year they final finished renovating them, and moved the architects straight into the shiny new area, while our two postgrad classes were thrown into the same old room in the still unchanged side of the building, that was way too small and we couldn't use it at the same time. Genius.

And then there was our final year trip to Barcelona, which is an awesome place to go, but we had to pay for everything: flights, food, etc. The university block-booked a hostel for us, but still made us pay the actual fees for it. The lecturers of course got to go all expenses paid to one of the swankiest hotels in the city (they weren't going to stay with us!) and got spending money for food and expenses, the university paid absolutely nothing to help us.

We had our own dedicated library for all the Science subjects, but halfway through the university built a brand-spanking new super duper library and consolidated everyone into it, so our old library was shut down, The same number of books on our subject were in the new library, but they only built 21 private group study rooms, to accommodate everyone in the university The pressure on the rooms for group work was so intense you had to book the rooms beforehand, and you had to do it about 48 hours in advance or you wouldn't get a room. That was a right shambles.

There's loads of other crap my uni pulled on me, but that'll do for now, I think those are the most vivid offenders.

 

[Doclector]

I too am at Exeter. And fully regret coming here. We do have slightly more hours than boots, but in no way do I feel we get our money's worth. That's without tacking on the cost of living here. The glass roof mentioned has since leaked (leading to flooding in the new building) and the revolving doors still don't work. There's too much spent on new students, fancy titles and new shiny things and not enough on buildings that could do with an update and on existing students. At least I'm not paying 9k for this joke of a degree.

Jesus. And to think, I would've been going there too if they had a media production course.

Plymouth ain't great, but they at least have a lot of good equipment for media. I hear some places are hideously under-equipped.

The problem with our lectures is that there's a lot of useless lectures. It ain't so bad when things are quiet. Nearer the end of term, with deadlines looming, some of the lecturer's response to low attendence start to sound a lot less reasonable.

 

[Subscriptism]

20ish of contact hours and 10 assignment work hours a week means that I can't put enough commitment into a job and keep my grades up. So I need a maintenance loan on top of the tuition which brings it to £12,500 a year. 4 year course. Yup, £40,000-50,000 is a lot of debt to start life with. Fuck the tory government and fuck Nick Clegg in his lying face. Education used to be free.