Resistance is Phutile

Tuition fees.

What a surprise, the formerly tumescent university application levels have gone down this year. Ministers dismiss it as a "blip", but the figures speak for themselves. As a student, I had to pay £1,100 annually in tuition fees, an amount which has trebled for today's aspiring learners. Contrary to the BBC report this morning, three years of shelling out three grand will not result in nine thousand pound debts. The reality is people will owe a substantially larger amount than this.

And for what?

Personally I am satisfied with the fruits of my labour. A university education helped cultivate my adult perspective and, I trust, will result in a higher earning potential than the industrial estates of my teen years offered me. Yet still I find it difficult to reassure others who left university in despair, seeing nothing but sales jobs, and low paid work open to school leavers, ahead of them. The truth is there is no guaranteed route to financial success. This is particularly true now when courses like physics are shunned in favour of media studies and film studies. Of those who did not go on to higher education, some will find wealth, some not. The same is true of those who got their 2:1.

It might sound absurd in this day and age, but I think the prerequisite for satisfaction at the end of a degree course is actually a hunger for knowledge, rather than a mapped out economic future. The question: how much are you willing to pay to appease that hunger?

posted by Phu @ 10:40 am