The cap lift salvation smacks of a new academic religion: believe in it and you shall be saved! Adding insult to injury, students are financially liable to pay for the education received. Moreover, one who cannot, for various reasons (apathy, lack of talent, struggle with the course’s content, etc.) satisfy the course’s requirements, won’t receive a degree. Simple as.
Anyone expelled after the first year and not transferred to the second will be financially spared, ineligible to continue in higher education but not subjected to a crippling debt accumulated over three years.
The extent of the consequence of that financial cost revealed itself only a couple of years later. Higher education for UK and EU students became three times more expensive, costing £9,250 per year, regardless of the university’s calibre. Marrying the price of fees with the option for both sets of students to take out a loan growing by 6% each year is a damning financial indictment. The days of the hedonistic student lifestyle are over, at least for now. Both students and parents have revised their approach and have become more introspective, electing better courses and apprenticeship opportunities which will serve them better post-graduation. Let’s not name and shame the ‘courses’ we don’t want our clients to indulge in, surely we’re aware of them by now.
At Scion Mastery, we support students with guidance in course utility and general academic-based decisions. Given the exorbitant fees, these decisions are essential.
For overseas students nothing has really changed. The tuition fees for them are significantly higher, ranging from £18,000 to £36,065 per academic year depending on the university. It is economically beneficial to take many foreign applicants during the first year, and from there on in the responsibility will lay solely on the student’s shoulders. A student who has wisely chosen a university, made the required effort and received a high-grade degree will easily build a career in the UK. Otherwise, all that remains is to go home.
An international student returning home with an honourless degree is not career suicide. Au contraire! Incidentally many countries are unaware that the U.K has differing degree classifications. A struggle in differentiating between the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, for example, is humorously not unheard of. The question of course is when will word of this academic segmentation reach foreign shores? Additionally, will well-off parents of their privileged progeny want to enlist their darlings for an expensive ‘adult kindergarten’ during which time their evenings will be trivially spent inhaling narcotics and achieving inebriation?
Those keen to maximise the unparalleled value and experience provided during their student years will always come out on top. Without fail. The level of education offered in the U.K yields the base and is an invaluable investment in your future and in yourself.
It is up to you to conclude whether or not the UK is closer to its goal of creating the country’s most intellectually accomplished and productive society.
Photo by Tetiana SHYSHKINA on Unsplash
