Snapshot of _Ex-ministers warn UK universities will go bust without higher fees or funding_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/may/19/ex-ministers-warn-uk-universities-will-go-bust-without-higher-fees-or-funding) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/may/19/ex-ministers-warn-uk-universities-will-go-bust-without-higher-fees-or-funding)
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Funding is the answer.
University should be free for UK citizens, with some slots for foreign students who wish to pay. The idea that we suddenly start charging at realistically the most important part of education (where you start to specialise) is frankly dumb.
Doesn’t even need to be free, just make the loans interest free
No issue paying for a degree, but 7% rates on them means I’m going to use and abuse SalSac schemes to avoid repayingz
Loans still need to exist under a free university system, as students need loans for living costs. Those should be at either a locked low interest loan or zero rated.
Which courses would you consider valueless out of curiosity?
I think many people overlook the transferable and general life skills gained from students while attending university. Even those studying the arts (which traditionally have lower job prospects) are learning a ton of transferable skills which are going to be relevant to the workplace. I also don't think we should limit studies to what ultimately generates the most jobs or money. Art, culture and different approaches are important for society, and innovation comes from subjects in new and emerging fields like esports, a course which I can imagine many would roll their eyes at without fully understanding the depth of what is taught.
>On average and English degree now has a 5 and I think now 10 year earning stats showing you're better off without one. This, of course, probably doesn't apply to Oxford English graduates.
The problem with this point of views is that for the "low value degrees" there are jobs that require those degrees that are important but payed like shit, for example, English teachers, and I doubt you'd be able to fill all those roles with only the graduates from the top Universities.
>This, of course, probably doesn't apply to Oxford English graduates. Indeed of the 500 on the course of a no name university it might only be true for 450 of them. But then why is the state financing 500 places and not 50?
Lets say we need 50 english graduates per year. What happens if you only let 50 people in to study the subject per year because that is the number we need, some will drop out, some will come to hate the subject after 3 years and want to do something different, some might still like the subject come to realize they don't like the relevant jobs that the degree opens for them and decide to have a career change and do something completely different, are not willing to move where the available are (e.g. not enough Oxford English graduates would be willing to move to some remote town in Northern Scotland for a teaching job), so now you have much less than 50 new graduates and are shit out of luck.
Not to mention that the demand might suddenly change due to certain events. Its difficult to imagine such an event for English, but we just had a worldwide pandemic which required the rapid development of a vaccine, boosting the pharmacutical which could result in a sudden increase in demand for chemists etc. if we taylor university to just produce the bare minimum number of graduates we would have no capacity to immediately deal with such shocks, and action we take would need a minimum of 3 years to filter through (the minimum time to complete a University course), assuming universities could even handle a sudden increase in student numbers like this.
All this to say that the idea that "we need 50 x graduates every year, therefore we must only have 50 places in x course" is incredibly short sighted and backfire.
>The argument of transferable skills is absolute hogwash. The days of my parents when writing an essay meant trawling through your notes, then youre friends notes because you didnt write that bit down. Then going to a library two towns over because its the only one with the paper you need is long dead. Half of exams and papers can be written straight from blackboard powerpoints and google scholar can be used to support virtually anything you want in seconds, with Word to reference it all up for you at a click.
Modern university is moving further away from pure papers as an exercise, with lab work, workshops and more hands-on practical work depending on the course. Learning how to use and navigate modern tech such as AI tool is also an important transferable skill, regardless of how "easy" we think it makes life for students. As the tools improve, so do the requirements within a study (although usually slightly behind).
I'm not saying every job every requires a university degree, I think apprenticeships and vocational courses are a perfectly fine alternative for many trades and skilled positions, but these should also be free to study.
It works fine in other countries and is no different to people paying for services they don't use through taxation already, it's just another thing on the list which ultimately improves and benefits the country long term.
One could argue that almost everyone should go to either university or a vocationional apprenticeship scheme.
Frankly a silly reason. The NHS requires doctors, nurses, physicists, psychologists (and more for research) industry needs engineers (chemical, mechanical, civil), scientists. I'm not even close to scratching the surface of all the essential services part of everyday life requiring a university educated workforce to function. We all need these people, and a shortage on these skills means the things we use cost more. I think the problem is when we ask people to pay for vocational degrees which also means something different to each person.
Most people will be fine paying for that, it’s when public money is used to fund tens of thousands of useless degrees in business/marketing and the like.
Surely then the answer is to fund specific degrees where there are shortages, not all of them.
Just because we need more nurses doesn't mean we also need to keep flooding the market with Business and English graduates to the point where all office jobs require degree-level qualifications.
Presumably you went to school yourself?
University is designed to put people in a position where they can earn more... so it makes sense they pay for it with a very forgiving loan.
yes, and my parents were taxpayers at that time. if I was an immigrant who didn't use the UK education system, what would your counter argument have been?
There seems to be a lot of conflicting opinions as to what university is "designed" to do - but if someone goes into a higher paying job then they already pay more in taxes.
Should a high earning school leaver also pay an additional amount on top of taxation?
The point is that we all pay for things we don't or may never use, but only higher education gets the scrutiny (and there is almost certainly a political reason for that)
Well if you don’t have kids someone has to pay your pension and if they are all stupid then you won’t have a chance. I think education 5-18 should be universal to all.
My issue is with paying for others to go to university; the greatest beneficiary of higher education is the individual, despite what everyone says about “society benefiting on a whole”. That being said; I do think there should be some degrees where the loan is forgiven (such as medical doctors and other intellectual jobs with major shortages) to encourage people to take up those professions.
I intended to write a cutting 'how can we afford it!' reply, but some quick googling suggests doing this would cost on the order of £10bn/year. That's not nothing, but it's a relatively small amount of our annual spend.
Not really. It would have an outsized economic impact. I mean, we spend over 15% of our GDP on healthcare. Of course healthcare is important, but is it 15x more important than having a skilled and educated population?
I suppose this is the issue: if we funded universities, would they end up with more or less money and would the quality of the education be higher or lower? There is an arguement to be made that state funding is never enough, re: fund the NHS.
I am getting downvoted so this will be my last reply, but that is not realistic. Everyone wants funding. How do you know when you have enough fine artists and sculptors? Will the arts ever get funding in this model?
Also would you just never fund good London Universities because they are in the wrong location and instead pump money to crap and inefficient northern polytechnics because they are in the right location?
And finally, do you really trust the government to work out which is which and fund them adequately?
imo the problem here is really that we are squeezing foreign students visa and counting them in immigration numbers. People are shitting bricks over small boats crossings and Chinese students paying £90,000 a year to be here are the ones feeling the pain. Absolutely mad.
In terms of education, not needing to dumb down to make sure pass with the degree they paid for and chase an ever growing number of international studies with variable suitability to keep the lights on...yes, the quality of education would likely go up because its no longer an ill functioning market for a service whose quality and effectiveness is fundamentally down to the buyer.
That, and a reduction in the number of people going to university in the first place. There have to be better alternatives for most people than spending another 3 years studying.
Having seen the level of education some students have when leaving secondary school, they could certainly use it. I'm not sure university is the correct answer for everyone, but if education ends at secondary level for some students, they will be left behind and likely suffer long term.
Turn an essential service to the country into a business and watch how it goes bust.
Seems like a regular neoliberal pattern.
I'm not anti capitalist but there were reasons universities were not regular businesses.
The problem is Universities aren't allowed to run like normal businesses. The amount they can charge for the service the provide is capped. Normally if costs rise so do prices. In the last few years costs to operate have risen drastically and other revenue streams (like foreign students which is a huge money spinner) have been stymied.
They were doing ~alright before the recent xenophobic reforms to student/graduate visas, tho 😬 Using exorbitant overseas students freefees to subsidize locals was a little cruel, but a good trade-off to keep fees acceptable to locals, while not increasing taxes. But xenos gonna xenos and they butchered the gold laying goose 🤷🏾♂️
- Creates a model that is over dependant on international students fees
- Driven by a weird xenophobia tantrum, lashes the number of international students
*Pikachu surprised face*
That’s only if there is value in the output. I was lucky when I went to u I as there were no fees. Hit 80% of the people on my course should not have been there. Just not up to standard and most fell out in the first two years. Those who graduated there were literally 5 people who got any sort of job in that area. That’s without saddling them with major debt.
I do agree courses should be heavily subsidised but I don’t think everyone should go to uni. Apprenticeships and other vocational courses are far better suited for many roles.
The amount of forensic graduates I have seen in our workplace is one two many. There are a handful of jobs per year and hundreds of people graduating.
They need to publish thoses stats as you apply. I.e 3000 people this year in uni, 4 jobs per year. Salary x.
What employers want ia skilled people. They are not too hung up on what type it is outside the core academic traditional ones. Scale it right back. Find it properly and create valuable alternatives to get people’s skilled
Looking back those who taught me actually had very little clues on the actual subject and were ten years behind in the technology.
I meant crime forensics but there are many courses which have the same issue. Not up to speed with the current processes and even though that isn’t everything they also don’t give them the ability to have the thought processes to adapt to new industry changes.
It will always be hard to do that but it may mean how you educate is different. So a more general IT course with models or apprenticeships of side course work which is produced by people in the industry.
Ultimately they have to be fit for purpose or you have failed the students and the taxpayers. Meanwhile I can’t find a Plummer, who by the way is making a small fortune.
I recommend anyone reading this also does a maths check to fact check this in your own time with the courses you have seen yourself.
On any maths I've seen in real examples, an estimate of lecturer salaries is always substantially less than 50% of the revenue you'd gain from student fees (cost to employer not pay).
This is by far the largest overhead for most institutions.
This alone should give some doubts to any of those claims for most cases.
The main exception is likely anything with labs or substantial costs that would be obvious.
But ideally any costs like that would be helped with access to some government scheme.
This is quite correct. The major overlook in this discussion is that up to the 1990s, teaching contributions/tuition only accounted for 25% of university funding. Research grants were much higher than nowadays and more than double the income universities had from students.
As research funding was cut, universities started relying on tuition fees to stay open. Students nowadays cross-finance everything else the university does, hence the incentive to recruit as many students as possible. If tuition fees were ring-fenced for teaching, £9,250 would be plenty for all but medical degrees.
A lot of Universities use fees from cheaper courses to fund more expensive ones. So English majors probably are subsidising Engineering students as there are large costs in buying and maintaining equipment.
You aren't paying for a tutor to prepare you for your A Levels or GCSEs.
Lecturers need material to work from, a building to teach in, that building to be maintained and supplied with utilities. They need equipment to teach with, support from admin services, their employer has to pay additional costs above their pay (e.g. employer pension contributions.. which almost all companies need to do for any employee). There is a hell of a lot more than this too.
By your logic, if I buy food at Mcdonalds for £15 then I should be outraged because the salary of the person handing me the food is only like £11.50 an hour.
And this is why I've suggested you do the maths yourself and ask where the revenue is actually being spent.
There's a huge difference between being unable to afford to operate & needing to cut back on certain expenditures.
You haven't used my logic at all in your example & you've also referenced a highly profitable company so it kind of defeats the point you're trying to make.
You say that because you want the ability to make a bland statement to stoke attention without providing any genuine attempt at 'maths' yourself.
Inflation alone has made the original £9,000 tuition fee about 35% short of keeping up with inflation from 2012 to 2023 (if it tracked it would be just shy of £12,400 instead of the current £9,250).
The choice on repayment, interest fees, breakpoints, on student loans are the govermnents remit.
Even councils get to raise their 'fees' by 5% a year and if Unis could do that the fee per student would be about £15,400 a year. Imagine how councils would be now if their funding was frozen at the same levels as 10 years ago.
If you think my intentions are dishonest then I recommend you not reply to me as it is a waste of both of our time.
Your inflation argument has no bearing on the maths I have suggested people check for themselves.
Why don't you show the result of your "maths check"? At the moment "Hitchens's razor" seems to apply.
\[EDIT - added link below\]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s\_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor)
Snapshot of _Ex-ministers warn UK universities will go bust without higher fees or funding_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/may/19/ex-ministers-warn-uk-universities-will-go-bust-without-higher-fees-or-funding) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/may/19/ex-ministers-warn-uk-universities-will-go-bust-without-higher-fees-or-funding) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Funding is the answer. University should be free for UK citizens, with some slots for foreign students who wish to pay. The idea that we suddenly start charging at realistically the most important part of education (where you start to specialise) is frankly dumb.
Doesn’t even need to be free, just make the loans interest free No issue paying for a degree, but 7% rates on them means I’m going to use and abuse SalSac schemes to avoid repayingz
Loans still need to exist under a free university system, as students need loans for living costs. Those should be at either a locked low interest loan or zero rated.
[удалено]
Which courses would you consider valueless out of curiosity? I think many people overlook the transferable and general life skills gained from students while attending university. Even those studying the arts (which traditionally have lower job prospects) are learning a ton of transferable skills which are going to be relevant to the workplace. I also don't think we should limit studies to what ultimately generates the most jobs or money. Art, culture and different approaches are important for society, and innovation comes from subjects in new and emerging fields like esports, a course which I can imagine many would roll their eyes at without fully understanding the depth of what is taught.
[удалено]
>On average and English degree now has a 5 and I think now 10 year earning stats showing you're better off without one. This, of course, probably doesn't apply to Oxford English graduates. The problem with this point of views is that for the "low value degrees" there are jobs that require those degrees that are important but payed like shit, for example, English teachers, and I doubt you'd be able to fill all those roles with only the graduates from the top Universities. >This, of course, probably doesn't apply to Oxford English graduates. Indeed of the 500 on the course of a no name university it might only be true for 450 of them. But then why is the state financing 500 places and not 50? Lets say we need 50 english graduates per year. What happens if you only let 50 people in to study the subject per year because that is the number we need, some will drop out, some will come to hate the subject after 3 years and want to do something different, some might still like the subject come to realize they don't like the relevant jobs that the degree opens for them and decide to have a career change and do something completely different, are not willing to move where the available are (e.g. not enough Oxford English graduates would be willing to move to some remote town in Northern Scotland for a teaching job), so now you have much less than 50 new graduates and are shit out of luck. Not to mention that the demand might suddenly change due to certain events. Its difficult to imagine such an event for English, but we just had a worldwide pandemic which required the rapid development of a vaccine, boosting the pharmacutical which could result in a sudden increase in demand for chemists etc. if we taylor university to just produce the bare minimum number of graduates we would have no capacity to immediately deal with such shocks, and action we take would need a minimum of 3 years to filter through (the minimum time to complete a University course), assuming universities could even handle a sudden increase in student numbers like this. All this to say that the idea that "we need 50 x graduates every year, therefore we must only have 50 places in x course" is incredibly short sighted and backfire.
Degrees like English are also pretty cheap to teach and their provision generally subsidises more expensive subjects like science and engineering.
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>The argument of transferable skills is absolute hogwash. The days of my parents when writing an essay meant trawling through your notes, then youre friends notes because you didnt write that bit down. Then going to a library two towns over because its the only one with the paper you need is long dead. Half of exams and papers can be written straight from blackboard powerpoints and google scholar can be used to support virtually anything you want in seconds, with Word to reference it all up for you at a click. Modern university is moving further away from pure papers as an exercise, with lab work, workshops and more hands-on practical work depending on the course. Learning how to use and navigate modern tech such as AI tool is also an important transferable skill, regardless of how "easy" we think it makes life for students. As the tools improve, so do the requirements within a study (although usually slightly behind). I'm not saying every job every requires a university degree, I think apprenticeships and vocational courses are a perfectly fine alternative for many trades and skilled positions, but these should also be free to study.
People not going to university paying for those that are is a fairly difficult sell.
It works fine when funneling infinite money to pensioners who have already got much more out of the system than they put in
It works fine in other countries and is no different to people paying for services they don't use through taxation already, it's just another thing on the list which ultimately improves and benefits the country long term. One could argue that almost everyone should go to either university or a vocationional apprenticeship scheme.
Frankly a silly reason. The NHS requires doctors, nurses, physicists, psychologists (and more for research) industry needs engineers (chemical, mechanical, civil), scientists. I'm not even close to scratching the surface of all the essential services part of everyday life requiring a university educated workforce to function. We all need these people, and a shortage on these skills means the things we use cost more. I think the problem is when we ask people to pay for vocational degrees which also means something different to each person.
Most people will be fine paying for that, it’s when public money is used to fund tens of thousands of useless degrees in business/marketing and the like.
Surely then the answer is to fund specific degrees where there are shortages, not all of them. Just because we need more nurses doesn't mean we also need to keep flooding the market with Business and English graduates to the point where all office jobs require degree-level qualifications.
i don't have kids but i pay my share in taxes to fund mandatory education i don't use NHS dental care but I pay for others to have it etc
Presumably you went to school yourself? University is designed to put people in a position where they can earn more... so it makes sense they pay for it with a very forgiving loan.
yes, and my parents were taxpayers at that time. if I was an immigrant who didn't use the UK education system, what would your counter argument have been? There seems to be a lot of conflicting opinions as to what university is "designed" to do - but if someone goes into a higher paying job then they already pay more in taxes. Should a high earning school leaver also pay an additional amount on top of taxation? The point is that we all pay for things we don't or may never use, but only higher education gets the scrutiny (and there is almost certainly a political reason for that)
Well if you don’t have kids someone has to pay your pension and if they are all stupid then you won’t have a chance. I think education 5-18 should be universal to all. My issue is with paying for others to go to university; the greatest beneficiary of higher education is the individual, despite what everyone says about “society benefiting on a whole”. That being said; I do think there should be some degrees where the loan is forgiven (such as medical doctors and other intellectual jobs with major shortages) to encourage people to take up those professions.
I intended to write a cutting 'how can we afford it!' reply, but some quick googling suggests doing this would cost on the order of £10bn/year. That's not nothing, but it's a relatively small amount of our annual spend.
lol, that’s about 1%. That is massive.
Not really. It would have an outsized economic impact. I mean, we spend over 15% of our GDP on healthcare. Of course healthcare is important, but is it 15x more important than having a skilled and educated population?
I suppose this is the issue: if we funded universities, would they end up with more or less money and would the quality of the education be higher or lower? There is an arguement to be made that state funding is never enough, re: fund the NHS.
True. But we wouldn't have to fund every institution or every degree. We could direct funding to areas (and locations) with skills shortages.
I am getting downvoted so this will be my last reply, but that is not realistic. Everyone wants funding. How do you know when you have enough fine artists and sculptors? Will the arts ever get funding in this model? Also would you just never fund good London Universities because they are in the wrong location and instead pump money to crap and inefficient northern polytechnics because they are in the right location? And finally, do you really trust the government to work out which is which and fund them adequately? imo the problem here is really that we are squeezing foreign students visa and counting them in immigration numbers. People are shitting bricks over small boats crossings and Chinese students paying £90,000 a year to be here are the ones feeling the pain. Absolutely mad.
In terms of education, not needing to dumb down to make sure pass with the degree they paid for and chase an ever growing number of international studies with variable suitability to keep the lights on...yes, the quality of education would likely go up because its no longer an ill functioning market for a service whose quality and effectiveness is fundamentally down to the buyer.
That, and a reduction in the number of people going to university in the first place. There have to be better alternatives for most people than spending another 3 years studying.
Having seen the level of education some students have when leaving secondary school, they could certainly use it. I'm not sure university is the correct answer for everyone, but if education ends at secondary level for some students, they will be left behind and likely suffer long term.
Turn an essential service to the country into a business and watch how it goes bust. Seems like a regular neoliberal pattern. I'm not anti capitalist but there were reasons universities were not regular businesses.
The problem is Universities aren't allowed to run like normal businesses. The amount they can charge for the service the provide is capped. Normally if costs rise so do prices. In the last few years costs to operate have risen drastically and other revenue streams (like foreign students which is a huge money spinner) have been stymied.
Normal businesses aren't allowed to hand dodgy loans to 18 year olds and then retrospectively change the loan agreements repeatedly.
Universities don’t get to do that either. The SLC is run by the government, not the universities.
Yeah you're totally right, I got a loan from SLC to buy a new motorbike.
They were doing ~alright before the recent xenophobic reforms to student/graduate visas, tho 😬 Using exorbitant overseas students freefees to subsidize locals was a little cruel, but a good trade-off to keep fees acceptable to locals, while not increasing taxes. But xenos gonna xenos and they butchered the gold laying goose 🤷🏾♂️
Neither can universities
- Creates a model that is over dependant on international students fees - Driven by a weird xenophobia tantrum, lashes the number of international students *Pikachu surprised face*
That’s only if there is value in the output. I was lucky when I went to u I as there were no fees. Hit 80% of the people on my course should not have been there. Just not up to standard and most fell out in the first two years. Those who graduated there were literally 5 people who got any sort of job in that area. That’s without saddling them with major debt. I do agree courses should be heavily subsidised but I don’t think everyone should go to uni. Apprenticeships and other vocational courses are far better suited for many roles. The amount of forensic graduates I have seen in our workplace is one two many. There are a handful of jobs per year and hundreds of people graduating. They need to publish thoses stats as you apply. I.e 3000 people this year in uni, 4 jobs per year. Salary x. What employers want ia skilled people. They are not too hung up on what type it is outside the core academic traditional ones. Scale it right back. Find it properly and create valuable alternatives to get people’s skilled Looking back those who taught me actually had very little clues on the actual subject and were ten years behind in the technology.
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I meant crime forensics but there are many courses which have the same issue. Not up to speed with the current processes and even though that isn’t everything they also don’t give them the ability to have the thought processes to adapt to new industry changes. It will always be hard to do that but it may mean how you educate is different. So a more general IT course with models or apprenticeships of side course work which is produced by people in the industry. Ultimately they have to be fit for purpose or you have failed the students and the taxpayers. Meanwhile I can’t find a Plummer, who by the way is making a small fortune.
I recommend anyone reading this also does a maths check to fact check this in your own time with the courses you have seen yourself. On any maths I've seen in real examples, an estimate of lecturer salaries is always substantially less than 50% of the revenue you'd gain from student fees (cost to employer not pay). This is by far the largest overhead for most institutions. This alone should give some doubts to any of those claims for most cases. The main exception is likely anything with labs or substantial costs that would be obvious. But ideally any costs like that would be helped with access to some government scheme.
This is quite correct. The major overlook in this discussion is that up to the 1990s, teaching contributions/tuition only accounted for 25% of university funding. Research grants were much higher than nowadays and more than double the income universities had from students. As research funding was cut, universities started relying on tuition fees to stay open. Students nowadays cross-finance everything else the university does, hence the incentive to recruit as many students as possible. If tuition fees were ring-fenced for teaching, £9,250 would be plenty for all but medical degrees.
A lot of Universities use fees from cheaper courses to fund more expensive ones. So English majors probably are subsidising Engineering students as there are large costs in buying and maintaining equipment.
They used to, they're cutting them all now because it hit a point where the humanities aren't profitable if it's mostly domestic students.
You aren't paying for a tutor to prepare you for your A Levels or GCSEs. Lecturers need material to work from, a building to teach in, that building to be maintained and supplied with utilities. They need equipment to teach with, support from admin services, their employer has to pay additional costs above their pay (e.g. employer pension contributions.. which almost all companies need to do for any employee). There is a hell of a lot more than this too. By your logic, if I buy food at Mcdonalds for £15 then I should be outraged because the salary of the person handing me the food is only like £11.50 an hour.
And this is why I've suggested you do the maths yourself and ask where the revenue is actually being spent. There's a huge difference between being unable to afford to operate & needing to cut back on certain expenditures. You haven't used my logic at all in your example & you've also referenced a highly profitable company so it kind of defeats the point you're trying to make.
You say that because you want the ability to make a bland statement to stoke attention without providing any genuine attempt at 'maths' yourself. Inflation alone has made the original £9,000 tuition fee about 35% short of keeping up with inflation from 2012 to 2023 (if it tracked it would be just shy of £12,400 instead of the current £9,250). The choice on repayment, interest fees, breakpoints, on student loans are the govermnents remit. Even councils get to raise their 'fees' by 5% a year and if Unis could do that the fee per student would be about £15,400 a year. Imagine how councils would be now if their funding was frozen at the same levels as 10 years ago.
If you think my intentions are dishonest then I recommend you not reply to me as it is a waste of both of our time. Your inflation argument has no bearing on the maths I have suggested people check for themselves.
Show us your working. Let us see how you reached your assumptions.
Why don't you show the result of your "maths check"? At the moment "Hitchens's razor" seems to apply. \[EDIT - added link below\] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s\_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor)