Yabby,

The price being asked to do a course at a university would be far in excess of costs.

The costs would be much lower than doing a subject at a high school or a primary school, remembering that primary schools and high schoole have a much lower student: teacher ratio, and require that the students are actually at the school, and also remembering that the textbooks and software are bought by the student, not by the university.

So the costs of running most courses at universities would be minimal.

Yet, they want to increase their fees by as much as 50%.

Why?

The answer normally given (or excuse normally given) is that universities are for research.

What research, and how effective has it been?

I would think totally ineffective when almost everything inside a university is imported.

Its like someone teaching cooking, but they never eat their own cooking, and always get their own food at a take away food shop.

The public is paying through the nose for very poor quality education, and paying for research that is mostly ineffective and will never be of any use to the public.

I have my reservations about unis Vanna but me thinks your top mine.

Vanna has sort of hit the nail on the head from a functional point of view - are unis worth the money? The unis I went to operated like mini cities (Melbourne) with numerous buildings and labs to service and rent. They also had high admin salary costs.

I'm not so sure that Vanna is on track with Oz's poor research performance. True, not every piece of research makes money. But research is also about the quest for knowledge. It can also answer why questions as well as how questions.

Having said that, in my experience communications and media at unis have been producing some woeful, highly subjective 'research' which is trendy rather than valid, replicable or useful.

Unis are very expensive to run. Some campuses such as Charles Darwin consistently under enrol and are almost totally supported by NT and Fed Gov. But we need them. But do we need 38 of them? Me thinks not.

Cheryl,
I think you have hit the nail dead center by mentioning "high admin salary costs".

Some time ago there was (& possibly still is ) a teacher shortage in the US. Upon closer investigation, it was found that numerous schools and universities had more people employed in administration than there were teachers standing in front of a class.

The teachers themselves tended to drift towards administration where they could get more pay, and they tended to create jobs for themselves in administration.

So the education system employed many people, but most were not actually teaching.

I tend to think this would be the same for many of the schools and universities in this country, and students and the taxpayer are being asked to pay numerous people in universities and schools to not actually teach.

In effect, they are being asked to pay out more of their money so that various people can live the academic lifestyle, while not actually teaching anything.

The "pursuit of knowledge" is rather meaningless unless someone does something with that knowledge. The fact that universty courses nearly always use imported textbooks means that the money spent on reaserch in universities in the past has been money thrown down the drain, because it has not resulted in enough knowledge being gained to even make a textbook.