they increased the fees from 3000 to 9000, I remember the government claiming that they only expected the best to increase fees, of course they all did
It priced me out of obtaining a degree, I was about to sign up for an OU degree when that happened, almost immediately the OU increased their prices, making it impossible for me to study and work, it seems if I want a degree the only way to do it now is to be a benefits claimant or earn below the threshold for payments to begin, it was affordable before abnd would have been a net benefit to my employer and my career but now, on a purely financial level, it's just not feasible.
I would dearly love to get a degree but I will have to wait until I retire and then study as a silver student. Which benefits nobody as the money I'll spend will be purely an ego trip.
I have a friend studying at Coventry, it's £7000 a year. He came round for some help as he is doing an electrical/mechanical HNC, he showed me a mock exam he was attempting, it was all that lovely mesh/node analysis stuff, just what I had done but unlike me it was in very simple DC not AC with complex numbers. His ability to even write out the equations was poor and he lacks the math skills i had learned in my "analytical methods for engineers". the questions were very easy and the hardest one in the mock was unsurprisingly also in the actual test that had a 40% pass rate. He got 57%, when he left my house I felt he was still quite confused...
I have family who went to uni, one (alright, on my ex partner's side) dropped out after two years and Student loans are still chasing me as, unknown to me, I was somehow named on her loan (yes, it's fraud, that's another story entirely), the 'degree' she was doing was 'tourism' which would seem to be an utter BS qualification and totally useless other than as a way for a university to rinse 27,000 out of students.
The value of a university education has been diluted so far by such BS courses as to make most degrees less than a doctorate pretty much worthless and yet, by some amazing coincidence, all degrees cost pretty much the same per year, regardless of how good or bad the course.
A cynical person might begin to suspect it's just a way of keeping university staff in cushy jobs.