'We Don't Need No Education' - Well, Not When You're Charging Us That Much!

With every university student, the thought of tuition fees is pushed out of mind whilst studying and replaced with partying and shopping.  The fees are covered by a student loan (if they are not lucky to have parents/relatives to cover the cost) and apart from excessive amounts of paperwork, there is no real concept of owing over £9,000 in fees, and possibly the same in Maintenance loans.

I myself am in that boat, having graduated from university a year ago, I have a rather large debt hanging over my head.  However, I haven't started paying it back yet, not earning enough and then taking on a Postgrad course, it's unlikely I'll tackle any of that debt for a while.  At the same time, I've pretty much resolved myself to the fact I may never pay off my loans!  Some of my friends attended university straight from school, when the fee was just over £1,000 per year.  It turns me a bit green to think if I'd gone to university straight away I'd owe much less and probably hold a pretty good job.  It's best not to think about it and to be glad to have met the people at university when I did!

Even so, the proposition of uncapping the cost of tuition up to more than double the current rates, and owing up to £7,000 a year in fees alone is rather astounding. I would end up waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat trying to juggle those amounts in my head.  Thankfully, I only have to have the money up front for Postgrad; well, I'm not sure it is much better (although I'm not quite living on bread and water just yet), but at least it's not going to be with me for another 25 years.

I suppose it's not necessarily a question about rising fees, but whether the education provided by the universities is worth their jump in costs.  Over the last 5-10 years, new universities have emerged, often from former colleges and poly-technics, but do these really give students the high quality of other established universities or do they fall below?  My friends have attended a diverse range of universities, and I have visited several.  It is true, they do differ in their approaches to students; some have a more laid back atmosphere, where others really push their students to succeed.  Unfortunately, some friends attended university where they were let down by lecturers, not providing the training and teaching that they should have had on that specific course.  After confrontations by the students, they were offered alternative lessons, but by this time they were about to leave the university.

This should ultimately cause an underlying worry for new students.  The problem is, those fresh faced 18 year olds won't have a clue what they're getting themselves into, or putting their parents through to fund their life of late nights and late mornings, occasionally showing up to lectures when they fancy.  It's only when they hit 30 they'll realise they owe a small fortune in excess of £25,000.