Britain: University Students face worsening conditions, rising debt

But even this is set to rise as the government has encouraged the marketisation of higher education, with universities increasingly being treated as businesses.

Asked whether universities should be allowed to charge whatever tuition fees they please just before he left office, Blair replied that the university system was a global marketplacei.e., that the universities would always be able to find people somewhere in the world able and willing to pay the going rate.

Just months later, his successor Brown announced plans to remove £100 million of funding from 170,000 mostly part-time students studying for a second degree. The same month saw a private-sector firm granted the power to award degrees for the first time. BPP College of Professional studies, an offshoot of the education firm BPP, will offer truncated two-year post-graduate degrees in law and business-related subjects from the next academic year. The degrees will cost about £10,000 a year.

The principal of BPP said, We dont have the baggage of traditional research, so were focused on customer service (emphasis added).