Students treated as adults for levy?

[*Carol*]

And, if Carol's 'location' is right, I'm sure her local club will be willing to help.

My new local club (and I would guess, yours?!) have been great so far, and the combination of city-based evening events and a car-share system mean I can get out to events relatively easily. In my opinion these kinds of schemes are key to getting MW21s involved.

[RS]

25 sounds a good cut-off point as offspring are on family membership till then.
On another point, PhD students are better off financially than many young graduates who are only earning the same as PhDs but paying tax and not receiving student 'benefits'.
Go with 25 and unders and bona fide students doing 'proper' degrees like PhDs.

[mharky]

Carol, I know how big your PhD grant is, you're doing alright for yourself!

[seabird]

My new local club (and I would guess, yours?!) have been great so far, and the combination of city-based evening events and a car-share system mean I can get out to events relatively easily. In my opinion these kinds of schemes are key to getting MW21s involved.

Aire, the club Carol refers to, have recently moved their car share scheme to a more prominent position on the website, and very slowly there is an uptake in its use.

It's not just students who can benefit from schemes such as this. We have young people M/W21s in employment - often not highly paid, who have no cars, who also benefit from such schemes. Clubs benefit from the increased involvement of younger people. There are no losers.

But for such schemes to work it is necessary for established orienteers to offer lifts, and for it not to be left entirely to those without transport to request them.

Going back a bit, Becks is right it was Aire that used to offer the same discounted rate for the unwaged and students. It rather ran into disuse due to no take up. There may well be a place for it again with the coming deluge of redundancies.

As a (part-time) pensioner, I do not see the need for a discounted rate for the pensioners amongst the orienteering community. Almost by definition, those who have stuck with the sport to retirement are fairly comfortably off. We are scarcely going to be trying to recruit new members from those surviving solely on state pensions.

[graeme]

Going back a bit, Becks is right it was Aire that used to offer the same discounted rate for the unwaged and students.

INT did as well. Trouble is that it was always open to abuse, and with online entry there's no way to check.

[AndyC]

Last time I looked (or ran registration) NATO also offered the student rate to the unwaged. I'll have to check with the club treasurer when I sleep with her next.

[King Penguin]

Last time I looked (or ran registration) NATO also offered the student rate to the unwaged. I'll have to check with the club treasurer when I sleep with her next.

What a chat-up line - do you offer a reduced rate for the unwaged !

[Paul Frost]

As a PhD student you generally get just over £1000 a month, that's just over £12000 a year to live on.

Which is higher than the minimum wage, on which a large number of working people are on. It's also a lot more than the state pension (not every pensioner has a private/public service pension).

I'm sure we could come up with a whole list of people that it would be 'fairer' to offer a reduced entry fee to (although that might not be fair to the rest, who would have to pay more to balance the books). But as someone mentioned, how do you check their status/entitlement when they enter online?

I don't have a particular view on this, but find it amusing that we are always trying to make it more complicated to administer our sport and at the same time want to pay less to those that administer it.

[Becks]

Paul - if you read my end note, you will see that I acknowledge that. There are mitigating factors: the living in big city centres because you have no car and public transport is stupendously expensive eats up a huge amount of your money. One crummy bedroom in a crummy Marchmont flat costs around £150 more a month than a whole small house to yourself in the villages surrounding Bradford.

I am not trying to say that Post Grad students are the only ones doing badly out of our, quite frankly, entirely screwed up society. What I am saying is that this particular, pretty small group contributes a very large amount to orienteering, and so to cut them out of cheap fees that really help them get through these tough years is shooting the sport in the foot. I am sure that charging Post Grads Junior fees is not losing clubs any substantial amount of money. But if those post grads are Scott Collier, Ian Webb, Jess Halliday, myself and Kirsten Strain (to entirely ignore the many other names that could also be on that list), then they're getting a large amount of people time and effort back in return for this tiny investment.

[awk]

and so to cut them out of cheap fees that really help them get through these tough years is shooting the sport in the foot.

Not unusual in our sport.
I can only agree with you wholeheartedly. I don't think it is any coincidence that the massive drop off in M/W21s - the bedrock of future development - is intimately linked with the drop off in university orienteering, which includes postgrads (not least because, amongst other things, they are often the only ones to be able to drive minibuses!).
Development support for schools and open clubs is fine (although we have yet to see any substantive longer term benefits from the former, in spite of it being on the agenda now for over a decade), but we ain't going to see any longer term improvement until we tackle the M/W20-29 age range, and the trend (at least at national level) has, unfortunately been the opposite, with support being removed rather than added.
Can anybody elucidate as to whatever happened to higher education development at British Orienteering?