United Kingdom: education on credit

The UK is undergoing austerity measures unprecedented since the Thatcher years. Among them is a rise in university fees, which can cost up to €10,000 per year. Students and academics are calling it an unfair policy which favours the rich. FRANCE 24 went to meet the young people affected by an economic crisis that is not of their making.

REPORTERS

In England, recent weeks have seen students out on the streets voicing their anger at the rising price of higher education. David Cameron's coalition government is aiming to save 92 billion euros in the coming years and says a hike in tuition fees is an unavoidable part of the cuts.

For university-goers, the cost of some courses is set to treble in 2012, reaching up to 10,000 euros a year. Students will have to take out bigger loans and graduates entering an increasingly competitive job market will start their working life with huge debts. Critics of the government's policy say it’s those from poorer backgrounds who'll suffer the most.

France 24's Clovis Casali and Rabah Zanoun went to meet some of them.

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It's almost the same as in

by Anonyme - 17/06/2011 - 09:44

It's almost the same as in the US. In the US, the choice came up in the 1980s. It was very simple: Do we want the best research universities in the world, which will require extremely high tuition, or do we want less advanced research that focuses on educating the general population pursuing bachelors degrees? Almost universally, US states chose prestigious PhD research funded by the general population pursuing bachelor's degrees. Look at the Financial Times list of best universities. US universities dominate the top 50. Why does University of Maryland (a smaller US state) have some of the best research programs in the world?

Middle class Americans must now pay far more for university than their parents' generation with tuition increasing by about 10 percent per year. In the 1970s, students could pay for their education themselves with part-time and summer work. Now, the university fees have ballooned so high that what students can realistically contribute is a drop in the bucket. The older generation often fails to see that a drastic change has occurred and simply insists that today's university students are not willing to work hard enough to pay their own way. The massive influx of students from around the world (especially China, where the one-child policy has lead to millions of parents willing to do anything possible to help their children) willing to pay whatever price necessary to study in the US guaranteed that university seats would still be full regardless of tuition fees. Most take out massive student loans to afford tuition, which take years to pay back.

Don't make the same mistakes we did.