I don't think that reducing net immigration is, itself, either a good or a bad. It all comes down to how it's achieved. For an example that will take more than one term to implement - reducing the need for immigrant workers in health and social care by funding additional training places for young people to move into the field.
Theirs plenty of areas you can cut from without touching health and social care related visas
Yes. One area is student visas. We can cut this, which means universities will have less income. Do we want to let the universities suffer, or maintain their funding? That is the choice that I want to be deliberately made, not just swallowed up in the government's destructive electioneering.
I'm a bit puzzled by this. I'd very much like to see a substantial fall in the size of the university sector in the UK. The relentless push to get ever more students of indifferent calibre, to be supervised by mediocre academics who do increasingly awful quality research on the side has not benefited society a single jot. Whole swathes of cities have now been turned from relatively balanced communities into glorified halls of residence, for students who participate less and less in the society they are camping out in. They aren't even that profitable. A radical fall in the number of foreign students would be welcome, and would ideally be accompanied by a drop in the number of domestic students who are being conned into so much debt to support this tottering edifice.
Depends what you see as more valuable.
Let a government campaign on those issues. I see headlines about the indifferent calibre, but not the rest. Domestic students are being underserved, but that doesn’t make it a con worthy of anti education changes.
University income. Every time.
Agreed. In my humble view there are far too many universities. It’s now seen as a rite of passage that when teenagers leave school they will go to university. Many take courses which they have no interest in but take them anyway because they simply wanted to go to university. When I left school back in the 1960’s only 2 or 3 carried on to university. Nowadays it’s probably more like 2 or 3 who don’t. I feel many universities are a business and not a seat of learning.
Slightly questionable whether even the research in a lot of technical areas is a cost-effective way of discovering and developing new technology, and while I applaud the aim of everybody gettting richer and being able to pay more taxes, it's senseless to claim that in an argument about foreign students, the vast majority of whom are expected to leave the country at the end of their courses. Even in the case of UK students, we're just educating too many people to a higher level than they want or need. They don't give you extra pay for having a degree when you empty the bins. All you've done at the level of higher education we now have is cost people more money by worsening the housing market, and wasted epic amounts of government and students' money.
Actually, I was being facetious with my working T's and C's.
Ok
Actually almost all new technology starts as pure research. University researchers are constantly discovering things that have no practical application, which are then turned into useable products in industry. Probably the most pertinent example is HTTP and HTML (well, SGMLs generally), which were of no more than theoretical interest at CERN until they were put together into the World-Wide Web.
It's not (necessarily) the students themselves I was referring to, but rather everyone who benefits from new technologies, and improved ways of working. We are all significantly richer thanks to the Internet, which began life as the NSFNet linking major academic institutes (along with ARPANet, JANet, etc.) which again largely existed to support research.
Theyd have to bid for land from the surrounding communities , still driving up prices
Admittedly this is going back over half a century, the vast majority of first years lived on campus at my uni (I didn't and it made a hell of a difference in how I settled in - in a negative way). The university benefiited, students stayed on campus, students spent on campus. People on the same course, even if not in the same building, may be close by. I notice that there is now a Student Accommodation Code (for university managed housing). Assuming it has teeth, that must be a good thing all round; for the university, it may lead to one less reason for a student to drop out, The trouble with some of the external providers is that they will just want to fill the rooms - taking some students from institution A, or B , or C, not caring whether the students have anything in common or not.
HTTP/HTML are basically a couple of weekends of work done in spare time by somebody who was actually researching something completely different, and they date back 20 years to when we had a rather smaller and more effective higher education sector. Nothing about it justifies the modern day expenditure on employing people to fill useless journals with largely unread papers which primarily document the author's absolute inability to understand basic statistics.
Did you ever stop to think they might be working from home, have kids they needed to look after or even got all thier work done. Of I'm waiting for developers to do something and I've got everything else complete. I finish for the day. Just leave teams on and go do something else. No point sitting at a desk with I dobt need to.
Sorry for being naive, but how does your daily routine relate to Rishi Sunak (which is what this thread is about)
