London students refuse to pay rent and demand 40% cut | Education | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/education/20 ... and-40-cut

Good on them!

I do wonder how the University handles the student accommodation. If they own it outright then it's somewhat difficult to justify the increase in rent and also the rents, certainly at the upper end (about £1100 pcm by my calculations) - it's not like it's renting to the open market after all.
If, however, its some sort of sale and lease back type deal then the Uni may have less room to set lower rents as they'll be paying the fees to whoever they sold it off to (like a PFI deal).

Think I paid between £50 and £60 per week (Inc bills) between 97 and 2000.

Go to uni in London and then complain that it's expensive?

Talk about entitlement - how about you think about the cost BEFORE you set off?

[LIFTED]

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So the university an individual goes to should be determined by their ability to pay to live in the vicinity rather than their ability to do the course?

You'd think that UCL would want to interest the brightest student, not the wealthiest. Saying that my uni was full of overseas students at 12k a year ( in those days) plus accommodation


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Yes, well, welcome to the privatised higher education industry.

Partly, yes. If you can't afford to live there, how are you going to be able to study? You'll be jobbing every spare hour you have, just to scrape the rent together...

Our eldest daughter is studying and gets a student load of around 400€ a month, plus she has a 400€-Job (a non-taxable side job that earns a maximum of 400€ a month). With that, she can afford a flat here in town, but travels an hour on the train every day to Uni (students get a free rail and bus pass for the whole state), although she is hoping to switch to Osnabruck next semester, which would be 15 minutes by train. She also has a little motorbike, which she can afford to run and borrows our car, when she needs to do a larger shop.

There is no way that she would be able to afford to study in a big city on that type of loan, so the places she can study are severely limited...

That's kind of the point I was making though.

In my opinion University should be primarily about learning not worrying about whether you can afford to eat something other than value pasta from week to week.
In the case of UCL, at the top end of the rents that were quoted in the article you are looking at a bit over £1100 pcm. UCL's academic year is about 8 months long so that's getting on for £9k. The maximum London maintenance loan you can get is about £10.5k. Yes, it's enough to cover the cost of the rent but £1.5k isn't much left over to cover other costs. The students have to either have fairly extensive family support or, as you say, do enough work to cover their costs which has a reasonable potential to impact on their studies.
You end up pricing out or otherwise disadvantaging people from lower income backgrounds from going to universities that happen to be in expensive areas (which also happen to be some of the better ones in the country). To me that's wrong and ultimately detrimental to society as a whole.

What are you, some kind of communist???

What would give you that idea?

You're agreeing with me again.