"Fredxx" wrote in message
...
On 03/07/2013 22:00, Adrian wrote:
On Wed, 03 Jul 2013 20:52:15 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:

Of course, the costs haven't changed - it's just that the
student pays rather than the taxpayer

The students are *supposed* to pay, but the overwhelming
expectation is that the student's parents pay. I've never seen
newspaper articles on "how to pay your university fees", but
piles and piles of "how to pay your child's university fees".

The fact remains is that {students,parents} now pay all of it
rather than about a third, and the government pays nothing rather
than two thirds.

Umm, no.

Courses are still heavily subsidised for UK students.


No they're not!!

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/n...6-000-run.html

I have also read that the contact time between university and students
is alarmingly few hours and so real tuition fees per hour are
astronomical.

UK Universities do not represent good value for money for students!

I would go along with that. My daughter received just a few hours per week
of 'tuition', and even that was pretty variable. She also had to pay for all
materials used as part of the course, and also for the use of some
university facilities and exhibition space within the university. Most of
her 'lecturers' were actually part time people who worked doing their own
thing, outside of the university system. We felt that the entire thing was a
cynical ripoff, and that her course could have been completed in little more
than a year, if the tuition levels were what they were 30 years ago. The
whole university thing has, IMHO, become a travesty, which is now about a
teenage right of passage rather than real-world advanced education in the
case of most of the 'new' universities. Many of the courses offered are in
nonsense subjects that are never going to be the slightest use to the
student - except to say at the end of it that they've "got a degree", and
the fact that they drag these courses out to three years, is criminal
gravy-training ...

Arfa