Glad to see lots of broad sweeping fallacies in true OcUK fashion!
I'm studying medicine as a mature student. A lot of my fellow matures are doing medicine as a second degree as entry is competitive and a previous relevant degree can strengthen an application. Medicine is a very popular choice for a second degree for that reason, and it is obviously a prerequisite for a career in this field. Mature students are widely considered to be the strongest students in medicine as their maturity and wisdom are extremely beneficial in the role.
Under current SFE guidelines you can only obtain a fee loan for your first degree, therefore most of us (myself included) must pay for our fees without a loan. This is true even if you self-funded your first degree, or did it in the very old system with small grants and no fees. At the current rate of £3kpa it is just about possible to pay your own fees with savings when you take into account all the other things such as cost of living. When the fees go up to £9kpa next year it will be prohibitively expensive for a student that does no receive a fee loan given the duration of the course. Only people from extremely wealthy backgrounds would be able to cover these massive costs.
Looking for the outside in, and using dispassionate Daily Mail statistics you can jump to all sorts of conclusions. It's true that there are large proportion of students studying useless degrees in order to get the "university experience". Hiking up the fee costs so that people will be amassing over £15k of debt each year might reduce this a little, but you will lose a similar number of good students that were hoping to study useful qualifications simply because the cost is too high.
I'm studying medicine as a mature student. A lot of my fellow matures are doing medicine as a second degree as entry is competitive and a previous relevant degree can strengthen an application. Medicine is a very popular choice for a second degree for that reason, and it is obviously a prerequisite for a career in this field. Mature students are widely considered to be the strongest students in medicine as their maturity and wisdom are extremely beneficial in the role.
Under current SFE guidelines you can only obtain a fee loan for your first degree, therefore most of us (myself included) must pay for our fees without a loan. This is true even if you self-funded your first degree, or did it in the very old system with small grants and no fees. At the current rate of £3kpa it is just about possible to pay your own fees with savings when you take into account all the other things such as cost of living. When the fees go up to £9kpa next year it will be prohibitively expensive for a student that does no receive a fee loan given the duration of the course. Only people from extremely wealthy backgrounds would be able to cover these massive costs.
Looking for the outside in, and using dispassionate Daily Mail statistics you can jump to all sorts of conclusions. It's true that there are large proportion of students studying useless degrees in order to get the "university experience". Hiking up the fee costs so that people will be amassing over £15k of debt each year might reduce this a little, but you will lose a similar number of good students that were hoping to study useful qualifications simply because the cost is too high.