[Tezcatlipoca]

Originally Posted by Arthurgray50@blu

When you think some of these students will go on to be Doctors and Lawyers, but they will bein debt for the rest of there lives, due to to the increase in fee's.

The government has gone back on there word, and this happened with the poll tax, another Tory tax that brought the worst riots l ghave ever seen in London in my lieftime.

The students rallied to protest against fees that they will have to pay - what happened was a riot in London, which was totally wrong.

Well, I think the Doctors & Lawyers will be able to afford it

Plus, of course, as mentioned earlier, the salary threshold for loan repayment is being increased (above the pathetic level Labour set it at), so although the fees will be higher than at the moment, graduates will also have to be earning a fair bit more than they have to earn now before they start re-paying the loans.

The Government never gave its word not to increase fees. It also was not responsible for commissioning the Browne Report into higher education funding, which actually recommended unlimited fees - the previous Government commissioned it.

If Labour had won the GE in May, the Browne report would still have come back saying "We think fees should be unlimited", and the Labour Government would still have had the same tough decisions to make that the Tory/LibDem Coalition Government has had to make: Where do we get the money from...

---------- Post added at 01:37 ---------- Previous post was at 00:57 ----------

Originally Posted by nomadking

High student fees/loans are not that much of a problem in the US(and elsewhere).
Link

Did you not read the rest of that link?

Originally Posted by BBC

It's a price tag of more than $200,000 - about £132,000 - for a four-year undergraduate course at one of the leading universities in the United States.

It means that as well as student loans there are also parent loans - with huge sums of money borrowed by people who might have been planning for their retirement.

And it's the middle-income families who are facing the toughest squeeze.

(snip)

The rich can afford the cost (about a third of students get no support at all) - and the poorest will get the maximum support from scholarships and state aid.

But for the majority in the middle, who might already have been saving for college, it means a major stretch on cash and borrowing.

In terms of the toughest pressure point, where the support fades away and the big bills arrive, she says it is for families with a combined income of around $130,000 (£86,000).

Changing jobs market

What makes it even tougher for families is the feeling of being caught in a double whammy.

(snip)

And at the other end of the scale, community colleges offer a route into higher education for those with less cash or those working and wanting to improve their qualifications.

(snip)

Among the biggest providers of publicly-funded higher education across the United States is the network of state universities.

Boston has one of five campuses of the University of Massachusetts. It's an airy, modern building on the waterfront, a few subway stops away from the city centre.

Students from Massachusetts receive a discount here, paying about $12,000 (£7,820) per year in tuition and fees - half of what out-of-state students are charged and much less than other local universities such as MIT or Harvard.

Unfair advantage

Students here are keenly aware of both the cost of their courses - and their relative worth in the academic pecking order.

Psychology student, Kristen Smith, says she expects to be in her forties before she pays off her university debts, which are already at $80,000 (£53,000) and rising.

And she says unambiguously that students are choosing universities based on cost.

It's a big sacrifice for herself and her family, she says, but worth the investment. Not going "was never an option".

But despite the scale of the cost to all students, she fears students from the more expensive universities will have an unfair advantage in the jobs market. (snip)

etc.