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Comment by jamessb | Hacker News Reader

> faced with a tidal wave of new money, the academics that had been claiming they needed it to benefit students immediately went on "strike"

> the "strike" was ended by the simple expedient of allocating nearly all the new money to wage increases for lecturers

This makes it sound like the money from tuition fee rises went to the academics as pay. It didn't: they've now had real terms pay cuts for over a decade (here's one estimate [1]), as well as their pensions becoming worse.

The tripling of the price cap occurred in 2010; there was a strike in 2013 because university staff had had a real-terms pay cut of 13% in the 4 years from 2008-2013 [2].

It would also be more accurate to say that universities and vice-chancellors (rather than "academics") pushed for a raise in fees.

[1]: https://twitter.com/PWGTennant/status/1579061761013329921

[2]: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/6846/Strikes-remain-on-at-uni...

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"The tripling of the price cap occurred in 2010; there was a strike in 2013 because university staff had had a real-terms pay cut of 13% in the 4 years from 2008-2013 [2]."

You're right, I'm mis-remembering the ordering of events. The strike I'm talking about was in 2006 and pre-dated the tripling of the fee cap. They got a ~15% increase for everyone in the entire sector, including non-academic staff. Then they started to plead poverty and demanding a rise in the price cap, even as the great recession was ravaging the economy.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jun/06/lecturerspay.high...

I do seem to have recalled correctly that they claimed at the time very few universities would actually raise prices.

Your university source picks the time period for their "pay cut in real terms" starting immediately after they got a big pay rise phased in over two years. I learned at the time that the way unions calculate things like cost of living and "real terms" isn't always what you'd expect, though this was coming up on 20 years ago so I forgot the exact details of what they were doing. At least back then it wasn't just inflation. I do remember being pretty disgusted at their strike tactics and especially at the fact that universities continued to pay them, even as they refused to do their jobs.

> Then they started to plead poverty and demanding a rise in the price cap

It would be fair to say that academics demanded increases to their salaries (to limit how far they fell below inflation), but not that they demanded tuition fees be increased to achieve this.

See this policy briefing from the UCU on "Tuition fees in higher education" from May 2010 [1]: whilst bodies representing the universities supported increases in fees, the position of the UCU union (representing the academics, rather than the universities) was that tuition fees should be abolished and replaced by a Business Education Tax:

> University and College Union has consistently opposed the payment of tuition fees. Rather than charge students for their education, UCU would charge large employers who benefit from the plentiful supply of graduates through a new Business Education Tax (BET).

It's really not the case that lecturers wanted to stuff their pockets by price-gouging their students.

[1]: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/4626/Tuition-fees-in-higher-e...

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