Verbal

Actually, what a lot of rich parents do - the capitalists among you, no doubt - is take the student loans at their ridiculously cheap rates, pocket them themselves and pay the 'up front fees' Hey presto, amazingly cheap money. This will be a growing problem now that the terms have been made increasingly favourable by the changes enforced by the Libs. Meanwhile, fewer poorer students will go to university as a result of these increases. Social mobility - which was going backwards anyway - will now be heading for the buffers.

How long is a piece of string? People I know who pay up front are all from double-income families - for example a consultant pathologist married to a senior civil servant. I'd guess their disposable income at £100,000 odd. You could generalise and say it's all the people who can afford to pay private school fees - it wouldn't be strictly true but near enough maybe.

As aintforever quite rightly says, the debts are real. Living and other costs can easily double the debt, and are by no means fully covered by student loans at the moment. These are quite serious debts, contrary to the trousers wing of the Tory Party.

Well of course. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head. But it can easily come down to a class thing. Children of working class parents will more likely than their middle class competitors be under some pressure not to go into debt.

Some pay upfront fees - the sons and daughters of people rich enough to keep their children out of debt, or those who can afford it and don't want to go into debt. Those who decide not to go for financial reasons do so not because of upfront fees, which don't exist under the present loan arrangements, but because of fear of debt.

They don't now, under the present system.

Ah another fan. I'm collecting starry eyed acolytes at a rate of knots. I think Delldays is organising the fan club. Please do PM him, not me. I don't answer plebeian requests, I'm afraid.

Sorry, trousers, if this is true, you need to go back and correct your earlier posts. The firms listed are looking for people who'd have gone to university but have been put off by higher university fees. Surely there won't be any - because as you and others have tried to argue, the increases are all in our minds, the government is being over backwards to help, they're not really fees at all, etc etc ad nauseum.

We are not elitist or condescending; we just feel sorry for you. But there is hope in your case.

There are some mental exercises you can do to improve your IQ. As you do so, you will find your politics moving inexorably to the left. I promise.

No, not theory - he said it was scientifically proven. Now what, I wonder, is the reason for your not grasping this simple point?

Would you make a habit of dragging disabled people out of their wheelchairs, whatever the provocation?

Assange now out of jail, happily. Carry on leaking...

Not until they call it The Secret Billionaire.

Yes, sadly I am very rich.

I know you love me really. Would you like a kiss?

Cause and effect. The failure to follow agreed routes is to avoid kettling and the police violence that inevitably seems to come with it. Unfortunately, a violent cabal has attached itself to an otherwise peaceful protest to try and popularise their hopeless ultra-left causes. I genuinely feel sorry for the students. They don't deserve these punishing increases and they don't deserve the exploitation of their cause by violent idiots, whether in uniform or not.

Don't worry too much BTF. There's a violent mob mentality here, and you're not one of his gang. Nauseating.

And in some, applauded. Australia for example

I don't have the will to live through a detailed response to such contradictory nonsense. Discounting for value-added degrees - however the hell that is done - will in all likelihood result in reductions for the very courses you loathe. The abject neo-liberal philistinism of doing 'what's good for UK PLC' will have all the wondrously unintended consequences you'd expect in your worst nightmares if politicos started making such diktats. In any case, some people value higher education as a thing in itself. If you DON'T make impossible measurements about value to UK PLC, you're likely to do as the Americans, for example, do - and reap the broader benefits of a college-educated workforce, whatever disciplines they follow. Or tiger economies like South Korea, where 80% of the 21 year olds hold university degrees. Any idea that you can simply set up degrees to encourage certain economic outcomes is absurd and doomed to fail. Gates and Jobs didn't do degrees in 'Microsoft Studies' or 'Apple Studies'. The most exciting thing about the next big thing is that nobody can know what it is. Except you, evidently.

There's often a very fine line between a capitalist and a criminal. It takes enormous amounts of state power to reign in the kind of rampant greed that would otherwise destroy capitalism from within. Ergo, if all Tories are capitalists, some capitalists are criminally greedy, then most Tories are greedy AND criminal. QED.

Quite so. We should really be scrapping those courses in which the outcome is that graduates earn the lowest wages. That will mean axing most science and engineering degrees.

I don't even know where to begin with this tosh. Have you read the report? There is also a skills shortage in many areas of film, TV and games - in fact, games industry is busily heading offshore, partly to because of this. The economic consequences are not exactly great - unless you see a Britain as one giant f**king Tesco. As to what bearing this has on undergraduate courses, it's (of course) much more nuanced than you, especially, could ever imagine - not least because, like English, Economics, Engineering, Chemistry, etc, etc, etc, we do not produce graduates to fit precisely into fixed positions but to add to the intellectual gene pool of the country. Some of the brightest minds in the City have science degrees, not business or finance degrees, for example. Politicians, loathe them or love them, have acquired Humanities and Arts degrees. As have copywriters in another industry at which the UK excels - advertising. Sometimes, of course, it works out as you would presumably want 100% of the time; the young AP photographer who took the infamous picture of Camilla being goosed in the royal caboose has a degree in documentary photography.

Which is precisely what the OE report does, among many other things.

Then my original comment stands. I find your attitude thuggish.