Verbal

But that was not the comparison that was being made by OE. You can't just try to criticise an argument and the examples used by simply changing the examples!! The film industry ISN'T big - the creative industries ARE; but film is by no means insignificant. And if you find it 'very sneaky' to 'big up the film industry', ask yourself whose judgement you'd trust - internet warriors like you and me or professional Oxford economists, who know a damned sight more about it than you and me. Or you, anyway.

Well I know this business pretty well. The point is, it's a talent-led industry. If we took the decision only to train exactly the number of people to graduate level we needed the whole thing would go into serious decline. You have no idea what people 'dream' when they go to university - that's just a little fantasy in your peevish little post, that you have some brilliant, omnipotent insight into people's ambitions. You don't. By what measure are there 'not many jobs in postproduction'. At the moment, the talent shortage is bad enough that many post people are imported from abroad in Soho. And what, exactly, is a closed shop? where does 95% come from - give me a source for that little dreamed-up figure. As I say, we're just talking about film here, not the much bigger TV and games industries. And the larger point is that the extremely tedious cliche about people studying 'useless' film and TV is not only stupid; it's potentially damaging to one of this country's great success stories in the creative industries.

Among a few on here, that is a spectacularly ugly and small-minded comment. Anyone injured for whatever reason deserves treatment immediately, and it is no business of ANYONE to tell hospital authorities who they should and shouldn't treat. "Made sense"? You should hang your head in shame.

I must admit that cheered me up. I will try to include your ending peroration in every conversation I have today.

Simple really. Sage is not a computer manufacturing company. I use their products for company accounts. Very good too - but it's software.

Unless you're at Oxbridge or UCL or Imperial, I find it hard to believe that NO departments in your university went into clearing. And it's really quite depressing hearing a university staff member trot out the old cliches about film. Training in skills used by Britain’s film industry is now virtually non-existent outside the university sector. So is film a useless subject to study, and is it pointless acquiring relevant skills at university? A new Oxford Economics report estimates that the core film industry in the UK – stripping out ancillary businesses such as tourism and merchandising – contributes £1.6 billion in GDP and £445 million towards the public purse. This means that the core UK film business is worth slightly more in GDP than, say, the British computer manufacturing industry. The UK film industry directly employs around 36,000 (up by 30% since 2000 and 7% since 2006), supporting a total of 100,000 direct and indirect jobs (up from 95,000 in 2007). Inward investment is estimated to account for around £3.6 billion of film’s contribution to GDP and £960 million in Exchequer revenues. Films depicting the UK are responsible for generating around a 10th of overseas tourist revenue, totalling around £1.9 billion a year. Showing UK films on TV helps local broadcasters generate about £245 million of revenues. Total multiplier activity contributes a further £1.6 billion a year to UK GDP and £425 million to UK tax revenues. Merchandising – merchandising associated with UK films supported about 6,600 jobs in 2009 and contributed about £237 million to UK GDP and £107 million to the Exchequer. Fifty eight per cent of the production workforce is university educated. London has a global market share of approximately 20% in VFX work. This is just film, remember - it leaves out the TV and games industries, which are VERY hungry for well-trained graduates. Source: http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/media/pdf/i/r/The_Economic_Impact_of_the_UK_Film_Industry_-_June_2010.pdf

Hello sweetie.

Oh yes, you can have an opinion watching telly. That's just as valid.

Unless you work in a VERY good university you are going to be in trouble, unfortunately. The idea behind this reform is a neo-liberal shrinking of higher education in this country - ie using the price mechanism to kill demand.

The only Tory island I've seen recently had a state-funded moat around it.

But he's outweighed by Tory fatbastards like Eric Pickles and Nicholas Soames (about whom his wife said sex was like being hit by a falling wardrobe with the key still in it.)

And warm beer in pubs with sawdust on the floor, and smog-filled streets in London, and coppers knocking beatniks on the heads, antimacassars on the floral settee, hand-cranking starters for car engines, the national anthem on telly at 10.30pm, brown leather football boots with nailed-in studs, a tiny privileged percentage of the elite allowed through the hallowed doors of academia...and most of all, the workers of this world knowing their damned place. Meanwhile, in the modern world.

The reason fees have increased by up to 300% is that the government decided to cut the teaching grant to universities by 80%. That figure FAR exceeds cuts made anywhere else in the public sector. The reduction is so large - eliminating teaching funds to arts and humanities subjects altogether - that this is not so much a cut as a fundamental change in philosophy regarding higher education. It is a transfer from public to private. If the government wanted to argue their case for this - fine. But they haven't. They've simply glossed over it with such ludicrous platitudes as that we 'all have to make sacrifices' - with not a word as to why large swathes of higher education are no longer funded at all. So here's an idea: since the bankers created this mess, why not a higher education tax on bankers - the funds can easily be raised to reinstate the teaching grant without any pips be squeaked.

Case closed.

It's depressing that you're falling in with the mob trousers. I don't have any problem at all with different points of view. What I do object to is the sullen, nasty, resentful way in which the condemnations of all students are expressed. It is brainless envy, and, ironically given the events of yesterday, yet another example of mob rule.

Adiran, I have the feeling you're wasting your time. This place, on this subject, is a sea of synaptically challenged, gimlet-eyed resentment, expressed with the kind of vengefulness that betrays a deep-seated and rather pathetic envy of students en masse.

That's IT? That's the choice??? Albania here we come.

Well at least on this thread we've managed to concentrate all the repressed rage and boiling envy in one place.

Parading your prejudices as facts doesn't make them any more true. What evidence do you have that 'academic institutions' offered courses of the lowest denomination? And it's not baby boomers who are making government policy - Clegg, Cameron et al are MUCH younger than that.

I disagree. Actually I think almost everything you say is demonstrably wrong - not least because you want, implicitly to turn back the clock to the 1950s when Britain had a large working class, denied access to further and higher education, and a relatively tiny, rigidified middle class. Britain - and the industrialised west - is very different today. White-collar jobs predominate - and, led by trends set in the sixties in the US, these require the kinds of skills that good university graduates have. These skills are not by any means limited to the sciences and engineering - the highest earners, by degree type, are ex-arts and humanities students, not least because working as an ad copywriter, say, does not require a degree in physics.

?? The 'dilution' of the HE system - converting the old polytechnics into universities - was carried out almost entirely by the Tories under John Major. And blaming an older generation is a tired, tiresome and false cliche. Study British social history of the late 60s and 70s and you'll see why.

This year is going to be particularly distressing. It's the last year it'll be possible to enter university under the old fees regime. Over 170,000 students failed to find a university place last year. Applications this year are WAY up. But a numbers cap is still firmly in place. So the number of students unable to find a place will inevitably soar. The difference this time is that reapplying next year will suddenly be financially ruinous.

This is exactly why Panorama, The Sunday Times. The Observer, Channel 4 News and others were right to report on FIFA's hopeless corruption: the sight of Sepp Blatter obnoxiously gloating over the English 'bad losers' would have been SO much worse had they all waited until after the (inevitable) result. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/england/8189550/World-Cup-2018-Fifa-president-Sepp-Blatter-says-England-are-bad-losers.html

Of course. Legal systems are infinitely manipulable by political forces. Ask Assange, sitting in a detention cell.

Are you thinking of a present for Carlos Tevez?