On 03/07/2013 11:30, Tim Watts wrote:
On Wednesday 03 July 2013 10:42 Dave Liquorice wrote in uk.d-i-y:

On Wed, 03 Jul 2013 09:35:53 +0100, Tim Watts wrote:

If I were 16 now, I would be giving serious second thoughts to going to
university with the extorninate costs involved.

er, I'm sure you realise that you don't go to University at 16, you
go to "Sixth Form" to get A levels to go to University at 18...

Well, yeah... But 16 is a good time to start thinking about it - it may
affect the choice of A-Levels taken ;-o

The costs, well the student loan is cheap money and you don't start
paying it back until you are on a reasonable income and even then
it's at a pretty low rate and it gets written off after 25/30 years
or so.

This is true - but what about the means tested maintenance/cost of living
side - that looks horrendous? It seems that a lot of working parents would
have to support their kids through uni for housing and food. Or am I wrong?

Absolutely correct. Our lad's at Manchester and his rent is a little
bit more than his loan provides, and not for anything palatial. This is
actually considerably cheaper than university accommodation, which is
invariably run as a business now rather than a service. He could, of
course, get a job but with 100,000 students within 5 miles, they're not
exactly easy to come by, although he has picked up a few little
short-term earners. So guess who has to pay?

Is it worth it? Only time will tell but these days even a good degree
in something worthwhile is no guarantee of even a shot at a decent job,
in the way it was once, more a baseline qualification.

While the high cost of HE might be expected to motivate students, it
seems largely to have the opposite effect. They now consider that all
this money has bought them a degree, so they shouldn't have to do any
work for it.

Probably the worst aspect of current higher education though was the
conversion of polytechnics, where some very good courses were once run,
into 'new' universities, whereupon they dropped a lot of their best
offers in favour of soft options. I'm sure nobody intended that, but
it's a predicatable consequence of making it a market, given the fickle
consumer base.