Why?

I, and most of my generation, went to university and had all of our fees paid. On top of that, we were given a grant - money every term to live on. And a book grant. If you lived like a trappist monk you could actually survive on it. I couldn't so had various part-time jobs to provide me with beer tokens.

But - uni or poly was much, much harder to get into back then. You had to have real, decent grades to stand a chance. We also had none of this stupid continuous assessment bollocks. We had an end of year exam that was fucking ferocious. You either passed or failed. Failure meant retaking the year or leaving.

Getting into a degree was harder, passing it was harder still. But at least it was free.

And it produced graduates who had degrees that employers valued.

These days? A degree isn't worth the paper it was written on. They hand them out like coupons. Because, most of today's students don't work for their degrees, they pay for them.

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Fri 2 Mar 2012, 10:01, 2 replies)

really?
Including those science degrees? Has being a doctor got easier? Has humanities at Oxford got easier?

Doubtful.
(skgorsky, Fri 2 Mar 2012, 10:49, closed)

Devaluation
Medicine is still the memory feat for borderline Asperger's type with poor social skills that ever it was. Humanities at Oxford is probably still a tough business of two tutorials, a few lectures and a lot of rehearsals, madrigal sessions and clubbing that ever it was.

Alas, though, the concept of a degree in general is suffering from such degrees as Dance with Waste Management and Dance with Equine Studies (thank you, "University" of Northampton for those two).

Nobody wins. The kids conned into worthless degrees waste three years and shitload of cash. The kids taking real degrees find their efforts devalued by the rubbish.

The Law of Unintended Conequences has kicked in big time with the new fees and loan structures. The idea was to make students take financial responsibility for their studies, but since only graduates who get well paid jobs will pay back a penny, the doctor, engineers, lawyers, teachers and other professionals have to subsidise the Dance and Equine Studies brigade, who will be lucky if they achieve minimum wage.
(ubergeekian, Fri 2 Mar 2012, 11:55, closed)

I worked rather hard for mine.
With tutorial questions and the like, it was nearly fifty hours a week. It's done me fairly well, though andnow I get to work on making materials that are aimed at seriously slowing climate change.
( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Fri 2 Mar 2012, 11:01, closed)