Tuition Fees: are they really that bad?

£43,000 is a lot of cash. If anyone won that on a national lottery scratch card they’d be pretty pleased, right?

But what if that amount of money was taken from you before you even had a chance of getting a real job or accumulating any method of paying it back? What if you had to start your working life with this burden?

What if you had to choose all that stuff on the front of Trainspotting with a debt of nearly £50,000 already weighing you down?

Well I’ll tell you. In three or four years, and my friends and the vast majority of freshers up and down the country today will tell you. It’s happening to us.

I guess there are positives – we get to complain as much as we like. When a certain Analysing Film & Television lecture about sound was conducted entirely in mute due to ‘technical problems’ we were outraged, Facebook was full of it.

For some reason the laundrette’s current closure is causing similar, if not more widespread horror. We shouldn’t feel like we could get more out of university, or that the university should do more for us, but we do.

We are paying so much more to get a degree at a time when a larger proportion of people than ever before are getting degrees. I don’t think there is any reason why we shouldn’t be able to demand more.

Maybe it’s unreasonable for us to expect that the day to day glitches of university life should be ironed out for us, but that’s irrelevant because they aren’t.

A short flat-mate based survey on the matter was greeted with a shrug of the shoulders, it’s as if the figures are too large to even matter. My most eloquent Norfolk Terrace companion blithely suggested that ‘it’ll all fuck itself up in the end’.

Thirty years from now, when we haven’t paid it back, the debt will be returned to the government and they’ll be ‘all mad’ again, apparently. My flat really is extraordinary.

However they believed everything would be okay in the end. We will just pay it back. We had our riots and what have you, and now, little pictures of docility itself, we’ll just take whatever.

It doesn’t seem to play too heavily on our minds. I mean we don’t even see the money; it never comes near our bank accounts. It’s just a number, for now.

Happily ever after? I guess we’re just freshers who have more pressing concerns; we’re busy trying to deal with life, for the first time for most of us. Who knew looking after oneself was such a time consuming task.

Debt will come, but will it be so bad? How can we know? No one appears too worried, everyone thinks it’ll be alright in the end. And I can’t help but agree.