We have spent the last few months examining the EU’s contribution to the modernisation of higher education in Europe, and we have now published a report setting out our findings.
The European Commission is clear that: “the potential of European higher education institutions to fulfil their role in society and contribute to Europe’s prosperity remains under-exploited”. They recognise that most of the effort to realise this potential falls to Member States, but the EU can help, principally through mobility and research.
Mobility – i.e. helping students and researchers to move around the EU – is a very obvious example of possible EU action. Speaking about the EU’s student mobility scheme, Erasmus, one of our witnesses told us: “it gives young people the opportunity to move, to learn and to have different personal, social experiences as well as a different learning experience. The skills that they develop are skills for life and are absolutely the skills that we need to make our economies perform better as well. They are not just personal skills”.
We agreed. And UK engagement with Erasmus needs to improve. We urge the Government to overcome the UK’s lack of mobility culture by making language learning compulsory in primary and secondary school, ensuring the continuation of the Erasmus fee waiver scheme and supporting the development of the proposed Masters level student loan guarantee facility, all of which we believe could aid more disadvantaged students in particular.
Erasmus is supported by EU funds. Subject to reductions being made in other areas of the EU budget and overall restraint being achieved, we support the allocation of a bigger proportion of funds to research, innovation and education in the future. It seems to us that the targeting of resources in this way will result in long-term economic benefits for the EU.
An emerging influence of the EU on our higher education system is through the internal market. Only last week, the University of Maastricht was touring English schools in order to recruit new students for degree-length courses taught in English. While their significantly lower tuition fees will no doubt appeal to cash-strapped parents and students up and down the country, not only does it do less to improve students’ language skills but it also means that the UK can no longer guarantee that it will retain its competitive edge in attracting foreign students. Competition is certainly no bad thing though, and time will tell whether it will have a downward effect on tuition fees.
In conclusion, there’s no question that the EU can continue to play a significant role in helping Member States modernise their higher education systems. This is in addition to the ongoing role of the Bologna Process, involving voluntary cooperation between 47 European countries and higher education institutions as well as the Commission. However, the Commission must be pragmatic and concentrate on areas where it can truly add value, while not losing sight of Member States’ primary role in education policy. Our findings will be shared with the Government, European Commission and European Parliament, and I hope they will help to shape discussion over the next few months. You can find our report on the Committee webpage at www.parliament.uk/hleug.
The first place to start is the cost. In many EU countries higher education tuition is free. Or, almost. In Germany it is 500 Euros per semester, or, was. Much easier than here.
Next, language. If a person is going to study in a country that does not have English as its first option, then it is a must you become fluent ‘before’ you arrive for study.
Only idiots arrive in a country unable to speak the language, feeling they will be fluent by the end of the first semester. Don’t go there.
Otherwise, the British student will be well served in taking their university course in another European country. It broadens the horizons to such an extent you will be unable to be duped into believing those people on that continent are out to get you. Quite the reverse is true.
http://www.studyineurope.eu/
This is the best idea I’ve heard to date. Europe is a great and civilized place to be.
The first place to start is the cost. In many EU countries higher education tuition is free.
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If its free. No one needs to pay any taxes to support it. We don’t have to pay the teachers anything, its free, free free …
Somehow I think a bit more education is needed.
@LB:
Yes. Where do you intend to start? Europe would be good. And as the cost ‘to you’ would be free, as once we had in this country, and as it should be in any civilized country, you could manage that.
However, your fear of Europe says it all. Keep the people down and you will have slaves for life. Setting them free in Europe will be trouble. They may wise up.
That is exactly what befell slaves, had a law against educating them, didn’t they? Even in its simplest form. Just in case they developed ideas above their station and would then harbor thoughts of escaping the nihilistic trap they were in.
British people should start, in earnest, planning for their offspring to be educated in Europe.
The cost to me isn’t free. That the problem with education is that people have been told that its ‘free’ and aren’t bright enough to work out how they will end up paying through the nose for the ‘free lunch’.
You’re just advocating the same. Free load off some poor bugger in Europe. Is that particularly moral? Get the ‘free’ education, and have some poor shmuck pay for it when you return to the UK?
The UK is moving in the right direction.
1. The student should pay. They should take the risk, and not some plumber in Potters bar.
What’s missing are these things.
2. The student should get the benefit. ie. If they earn more, they should keep it.
Current the government is operating a heads we win, tails you lose approach to further education
3. The cost. There is a huge cross subsidy going on. It doesn’t cost much to lecture a couple of hundred students, or even run tutorials and exams. [Bar the heavies such as engineering etc]
4. Or we just import the graduates, getting them for free.
@LB:
If you look at the pie chart for government income, you will see that more than 70% of it comes from direct personal taxation, one way or the other. More if you take in what they term as ‘other.’ Very little in comparison comes from business in this chart.
However, what you are blatantly unaware of, is government spending for those same tax payers in servicing their genuine needs, ie: education, NHS, Pensions, Welfare, and so on, is being dramatically cut. Whilst those on the top of the rung are in business etc., are becoming progessively richer.
It doesn’t matter how you want to gripe about cost to you, because that is a snow job you’ve bought into. And you have sucked onto it so hard you are losing sight of what claims taxation is for to the populous.
Why don’t you concentrate on how and why these consecutive governments spend so much money on bad management and idiot agencies. How much of the budget for schools, health and education actually goes on the service user, as oppposed to those duff organizations, et al, that run this billion pound milking cow.
How much is going into their own pockets for example. Whilst the poverty stricken can barely afford to eat. You have a big me me me problem. And as a result have got yourself into the propaganda smokescreen they drip out to us on a minute by minute basis.
Do you really believe the government bill to the EU will be stopped orlessened because they don’t want the ‘plumbers’ you mention, to pay for their kids education collectively. Only a lunatic would believe that.
And why instead of forcing us all to pay historically high taxes on necessities like peterol dont’ the put a 100% tax on fast food chains like McDonalds, KFC, Piza Huts and so on. Example: a burger at Mcdonals is detrimental to the health, especially childrens, and therefore if it was made so expensive, by taxation, akin to petrol, that would ease the burden on the NHS. But no, that may upset to many fatties at the top wouldn’t it?
Than we could return to a luxury tax. Anyone who can afford £3,500 for a plastic handbag, would just as easily be able to pay for it should it be £7,000. As it would boost their sense of privilege and be worth every penny to them for that high.
Then move on to art works, double the price by taxation, and the same outcome will result. Cars over £100,000 ditto. And so on diamonds, ridiculously priced shoes, in fact everything only the very wealthy can afford. That way our taxation poor would be filled nicely by the Phillip Green big spenders who hire and fire here at will to keep the muppets working for less. Then they still shout, we shouldn’t have a minimum wage it costs us too much to keep going.
And before you start about they will not use our people for work if you do that, well, in that case, they can’t sell here then can they? Who gives a ‘friars tuck’ about them and their squalid rag trade or sweat shops, if they cant sell here in Europe, then that will cut their income down to size won’t it? And the Chinese outlet would end right there as well.
Do you have no idea at all that even after a hard weeks graft people have little money to pay their rent, and so, you and the rest of the tax payers have to subsidize the fat cats by giving these families extra money just to bring them up to the poverty level flat line.
George Osborne, a multi millionaire, tells us he cannot afford a comfortable lifestyle on what he makes, so he worked out a taxation increase for his friends and self of around £10,000 whilst he helps the treasury to the pensioners measly income.
The groundswell of discontent by the British public is reaching a point of no return.
What is needed is a complete re-vamp of those in government to rid us of the old Labour group, the duplicitous LibDems, and the vicious Tories.
What we need in England is another party altogether, akin to the move of the SNP in Scotland. A whole new way of thinking with a man who will stand up for it, as Salmond is for Scotland.
Get rid of the US advisors, kick out the creeps that have been stuck in there for eternity and start afresh. A whole new government with a brand new party.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_8YfG5OaUo
And fast food. What is this doing to the children
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVR7tkajFpg&feature=related
We are being duped and you are in the mix.
When I was a lad of 18 and interested in the future of the EEC, as it was then, it was well night impossible to study at a French university as a foreign student, for a full degree. There were any number of foreign student courses for a matter of months, but if you wanted to study Maths or Economics at a French university, and you were not French it was not easy to arrange, and at that time nobody considered paying for university education to be at all normal. You could not take more than £150 out of the UK at that time, in 1964.
I have followed Erasmus with enthusiasm and admiration for all the huge academic fulfillment that it offers.
My late mother, (b1907) had ambitions for me as a Eurocrat, with the inspiration of Churchill at the back of it. The educational opportunities were not there.
Today an undergraduate of Law, for example, does not go to a French university, but to Harvard Law school, USA, to ensure his/her future as an eminent lawyer, along with future leaders from throughout the world.
But roll on Erasmus! The ideal is a fine one.
Take a good look into the overarching, but hidden in the eco-clownic clouds, big-issue:
not just arguably but demonstrably there is hardly any sustainworthy-lifeplace-and-lifestyle Education
because all schools and universities have increasingly become Workplace Training Centres, for essential-jobs & decent-careers (respectively), and for “More Luxuries and Extravaganzas For All Globally”.
So that, both Lifeplace and Individual Education can only be adequated in ‘one’s-own-time’, from Self-Help Sources
(which in turn should be making the Unemployed better educated and much more sustain-worthy than the multiple-human-livings-per-person Workforce, shouldn’t it ? but somehow it just isn’t).
Face it, the Workplace although demanding only 25% of one’s time (40 hours per week)
pre-requires ONLY sufficiency of training for the job the Employer owns and dictates.
[“you can become the best lawyer or doctor in the world without any education whatsoever;
provided you do have all the best training and job-=placements”
(declared by a group of senior professors)]
Furthermore, the career-skill you think you have chosen, you have not chosen; it was pre-set and ‘dictated’ by your Employer.
Now; whether or not your work (and most probably your Workplace) is “sustainworthy” might well depend on whether you are employed for your ‘skill’ with a rainforest-felling chainsaw
or for your expertise in Arable-Farming.
One conclusion both validly and strongly from this formal and mortal argumentation is:
“Since the Employers own both the Workplace-workers and the capital Profits therefrom,
the Employers should be paying all the costs of the Training Places”
certainly of all Universities, FE Colleges and Schools.
Competing in a general-knowledge quiz, at building family sandcastles, or at a Chess board, may be classified at one end of the scale as “friendly” and as co-constructive.
Competing to find out which side can destroy the other side’s airforce first,
to see which machine-gunner can mow-down most of the other side’s unarmed ethnically-cleansable civilians in the least time,
setting-aside 90% of the national-citizenry’s input to a common-purse or ‘democratic pot egalitarian questionnaire’ run by the Government, by the Rainforest-Paper Media, or the BBC, and by them covertly utilising or selling-it-on in ‘private’ marketplaces,
or even as an opportunist quiz-contestant collecting the right component answers from ‘first-in’ others falling-short in such citizenship-education quizzes as Lord Norton’s weekly one in this Lords of the Blog e-site,
would be neither “friendly” nor co-constructive.
Your categorical assertion that
“Competition is no bad thing”
does not wash,
in fact it may only conflate and “corrupt” the mind,
and thereby make our Human Race’s Future non-sustainworthy
(by which term is included becoming socially, politically, and economically un-sustainable).
———–
So please be up-front ‘straight’ with the factualities, and do apply the three principles of good-communication and honest argumentation
Be clear (with your facts and use of language)
Be charitable (by honestly recognising every good intention in Others’ submissions)
Be self-corrigible (especially where shown to be misinformed or plain ‘wrong’.
———–
“And when you have done that, you have not done;
For there is More” (John Donne).
How many members of the House of Lords are on the EU’s payroll?
“How many members of the House of Lords are on the EU’s payroll?”
In Practice, none.
They are disqualified with leave of absence.
Kinnock’s certainly on a forfeitable EU pension if he dares criticise those in Brussels who made him rich.
Chris K,
Asked “How many ARE?” The answer is none.
I consider a forfeitable pension very much in the present tense.
That will be the multimillionaires, the Kinnocks who have managed to do that out of public funds.
Competing in a general-knowledge quiz, at building family sandcastles, or at a Chess board, may be classified at one end of the scale as “friendly” and as co-constructive.
Competing to find out which side can destroy the other side’s airforce first,
to see which machine-gunner can mow-down most of the other side’s unarmed ethni.
It is competitive on the wargames Videogames for which the Scaninavian mass murderer last summer, Breivik, was such an amateur enthusiast.
No doubt if he had joined the armed forces
of any other country than Norway, (who are pacifists of the highest order), or merely studied for an honours degree in “War Studies” at any of the formeost universities he would have got a distinction, first class honours, or medals for bravery.
There is likewise a US soldier who has been repatriated for precisely the same murderous crimes of unwary and innocent civilians, one subtle diference being that
Breivik is lifelong criminally insane, and the soldier in Afghanistan, was not an amateur, and had not decided to start his own army, nor a one man war against the rest of the world.
I hope that helps.
The repatriated soldier and the Norwegian were identical in that they were both maddened by their governments political games.
One will remain a prisoner of a hoslpital for his lifetime, the other used as a scapegoat.
Swinging GH’s and Maude’s ‘scrutiny-searchlight’ away from “war” and close to home right here on
the Lords of the Blog, wherein Hansard Citizenship educators, as well as the Posting-Peers themselves, can “competitively” suppress any submission from a citizen that might go against their own fat-financial and governancial-influence interests.
Any-one able to give us an insightful cross-section through this “Competition” (versus Cooperation) educational-gordian-knot ?