Fees

There's something I'm deeply ashamed of.... for as long as I can remember I've voted Lib Dem. Still, I can be confident that I will never again repeat this mistake.

Sentiments which I'm sure would be shared among the small throng of protesters gathering on campus as I walked home from my early morning lecture today.

As I passed by I recalled a conversation I had with some of my colleagues at the call-centre yesterday. We'd all felt short changed, even depressed, by the fact that our first degrees had led several years on to a low-wage call centre job. We're not isolated cases either. Research has suggested as much as one-third of the call-centre workforce are graduates

The answer we all concluded is either returning to university to do a more vocational degree giving entry to a profession, or like me to go down the postgraduate route, but higher fees closes this door as older students and post-graduates also have debt, family committments and opportunity costs from giving up what employment they do have.

Students are being asked to pay ever more for their education, yet at the same time the rewards for that education are becoming more uncertain and dare I say unevenly distributed...