Listen & Learn English | How Much Does University Cost in the UK? Ep 796
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You can do more without spending more. Learn how to save at Cox.com slash internet. Cox internet is connected to the premises via coaxial cable. Cox mobile runs on the network with unbeatable 5G reliability as measured by UCLA LLC in the US to age 2023. Results may vary, not an endorsement of the restrictions apply. Hi there and welcome to this latest podcast from Adept English. Education is one of my big interests.

and I'm a great believer in lifelong education. I don't mean we should all be taking training courses all the time, but rather that we should continue to educate ourselves into our old age. One of the reasons why I like doing the Adept English podcast is the research I do for it. It ends up educating me too. So I'm learning as you're learning. So an article this week caught my attention. It asked

Has Britain finally fallen out of love with university? And there were other articles in the news in the UK this week with headlines like this one from the BBC. Cardiff University plans to cut 400 jobs and axe courses. To axe in this context, A-X-E means to cut, to stop, to close down.

And Cardiff University is not the only one in the UK to be making cuts like this. So what's going on? Given that you are learning English, I assume that you're interested in lifelong education as well. So this podcast today is of general interest.

But you'll get some great vocabulary about education, university education in particular, and life in the UK in general. Right at the end, I'll talk a little bit about my experience of university. So, have we fallen out of love with university? ♪

Hello, I'm Hillary and you're listening to Adept English. We will help you to speak English fluently. All you have to do is listen. So start listening now and find out how it works.

Before I do any of that, just a thought. If you would like even more input on education, then there's a huge section on our course, New Activate Your Listening, which discusses education. In there are various conversations, including one with my son about GCSEs and school in the UK, and another with my daughter about her university experience.

So if you'd really like to learn all the words, all the vocabulary and phrases for education, New Activate Your Listening is where to go. Find it on our website, adeptenglish.com. Has Britain finally fallen out of love with university? This was the article by Helen Coffey in The Independent, published January 25th this year. It's interesting that the question is even being asked.

Not long ago, we would just have assumed that anyone 18 or 19 years old who enjoyed studying should just go to university. It would be the best option for them, wouldn't it? Maybe that decision is less clear-cut than it used to be. A lot has changed.

has happened in the last 30 years of higher education. One of the biggest changes has been in the number of students. British Prime Minister Tony Blair back in 2012 had the goal that 50% of people would go to university. Literally half the population would be university educated.

That was a much higher percentage of people going to university than when I did it. And that goal of Tony Blair's was achieved for the first time in 2019, when over 50% of the population, it was estimated, were university educated. Other changes in the UK meant that tuition fees came in. The word tuition, T-U-I-T-I-O,

N just means teaching. Tuition fees are the cost of your teaching at university. Initially, this was £3,000 a year and this rose to £9,000 a year in 2012. Students from other countries wanting to study at UK universities, usually they're called overseas students,

generally have to pay more than this. And the amount depends on the course and the university. Another change, of course, we have student loans. That's L-O-A-N. That means when you borrow money and you pay it back later. This was a big change. And for most students now, by the end of university, their student loan is probably

probably well over £50,000. That's a lot of money to owe, even if you pay it off slowly. That debt, D-E-B-T, is made up of usually three years worth of £9,000 of tuition fees, plus your living expenses on top. Even so, the number of people going to university continued to rise, even after tuition fees and student loans.

That is until 2022. Now the number is falling. Why?

Why? A study was done recently by King's College London. That's one of the big London universities. And they looked at whether doing a degree is still worthwhile. And this is what inspired the article I saw in The Independent. Obviously, if you want to do one of the professions, that means becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist, an accountant, an architect. It's

something like that, you have to go to university and it won't be the only training that you receive. But actually, many other professions demand it as well. You need a degree to work as a nurse and for many other vocational subjects. Vocational, V-O-C-A-T-I-O-N-A-L, means to do with the world of work.

So a vocational degree prepares you for a particular job. It's important then to think about what your degree subject is going to be. And if you do choose a traditional subject like history, French, geography or like me, something like Latin, you really need to think hard about

about what you're going to do with it, especially given that £51,000 worth of debt you're going to have at the end of your course. So the study and the article looked at the value of a degree in terms of what you earn. The estimate here is that degrees are worth on average £280,000 for men and

across their lifetime and £190,000 for women across their lifetime. That sounds like a big difference, doesn't it?

That's compared with people who don't have a degree and that's having taken away tax and student loan costs. But if you look at what the average graduate earns when they come out of university compared to a non-graduate, it's only £5,000 more. So it takes quite a while for that advantage to work through. And there is, of course, again, that £51,000 debt. Both the study and the article talk about longer term benefits.

including the fact that graduates remain in the workforce for longer. They spend more of their lives working and they enjoy earnings increases, increases in what they earn, well into middle age, which is not the case so much for non-graduates. So I think you have to see the benefits as lifelong rather than short term. It's

said that education broadens the mind. And I think the experience of going to university, especially when you're young, 18 or 19, it means leaving your hometown, going somewhere completely different and getting to know an entirely different set of people. It's also an experience of independence.

All of this probably changes you and gives you greater aspiration than you had before. Subtle benefits, but they probably still hold true for many. More recently, it's been overseas students in the UK that have maintained the numbers. But this has started to fall as well. There are greater costs.

for overseas students. But there are now also changes to the visa system from 2024. A visa, V-I-S-A, is the document that allows you to remain in a country. Previously, overseas students who didn't

graduated in the UK who got a degree were able to bring family members to the UK to live with them. This is now much more difficult since the rules changed. Now it's only students with a PhD, a much higher level of qualification than a degree, who are permitted to bring family members to the UK. Overseas students can still stay in the UK for up to two years after they've qualified.

But as I say, the rules are much stricter, which is putting overseas students off, quite understandably. The reduction in the number of students is affecting some universities more than others. The Russell Group of universities, which is rather like the Ivy League universities in the US, these are the top universities, the most prestigious ones, these ones are OK.

But other universities are really seeing a drop in student numbers and training programmes called apprenticeships. That's A-P-P-R-E-N-T-I-S.

E-I-C-E-S-H-I-P, apprenticeships are becoming more popular. This is where a company employs you and pays for your training. Understandably, this is more appealing. You can earn a salary while doing your degree rather than running up a big debt. And arguably, you're perhaps more prepared for work at the end of it. You're just not getting the full university experience away from home.

That's the main drawback. But what else is affecting university entry? It's also the cost of living. Life in general in the UK is much more expensive, so students have less money. More students are having to work at the same time as doing their degree. The latest numbers show

57% of students in the UK have a job as well. Life is more difficult then. And the traditional picture of a university student, which was certainly the case when I went to university, of students who drink quite a lot of alcohol, perhaps don't work that hard,

lie in bed a lot, miss lectures. Increasingly, that's a thing of the past. Gen Z students just don't live in the same way. They're too anxious about their job prospects and they're mindful about the amount of money they're having to borrow to study. And they

probably got to hold down a job while studying at the same time. It's a different life at university these days. University is not the rite of passage that it once was. My experience of university, well, it was all paid for when I went. Your tuition fees were paid by the UK government.

And they also gave you a grant, G-R-A-N-T, money to live on, free of charge. And you were more free to choose your degree subjects.

When you graduated, employers would take you on without really caring too much what type of degree you had. It was just seen as a general qualification and the employer would give you the training that you needed for the specific job. So I emerged with a Latin degree from Nottingham University.

And pretty quickly, I was working in an IT department, learning to do computer coding, learning to program. There is a link between computer code and Latin, but the point was I hadn't really thought about what I wanted to do with my degree. There are few students these days who have that luxury.

Now, you have to think really carefully about what you do your degree in because it determines whether or not you find employment afterwards. So what do you think of all this? Did you go to university or would you like to? Are you planning to go to university? Maybe you're planning to go a second time, perhaps to do a master's degree. Does cost influence your decision? And would you like to study in the UK?

We'd be really interested to hear from you. What do you think as well? Do you think people need to be pragmatic about their degree subject? Or do you think it's a shame that perhaps fewer people study subjects like history or languages because they need to think about the job afterwards? Let us know. We're always interested to hear. Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.

Thank you so much for listening. Please help me tell others about this podcast by reviewing or rating it. And please share it on social media. You can find more listening lessons and a free English course at adeptenglish.com.