Verbal

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.

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.