The workload was light enough when I was an undergraduate, long before tuition fees. Almost 40 years on, kids are paying through the nose – and for what?
There’s a young woman I know in west London who, having bagged excellent A-levels, chose to study in France. While all her friends, similarly qualified, went off to various redbrick British universities, she picked a fashion school in Paris. To my shame, I must admit I thought it all sounded a bit, you know, Mickey Mouse. How wrong I was.
I also happen to know a few of this woman’s friends, who, naturally, were keen to go and pay her a visit. Never mind Reading, Newcastle, Bristol, Nottingham, wherever. Paris! With a friend studying fashion! What a ball. But word started to reach me of the disappointments of these jaunts. The problem? “Well,” one of them told me, “she has to leave for college at nine and doesn’t get back until six. She’s there all day. And she has to go in or she gets into trouble. We hardly saw her.”
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
