"If you keep them busy with basic needs, they will forget about the freedoms that they have lost."
Make things difficult enough and all anyone as any energy for is meeting the most basic needs. Having a place to live, feeding a family, etc. Dire times.
I'm not shocked, I went the apprenticeship route and I was able to get enough money together to buy a home last year after getting a job in my sector.
Meanwhile my partner went to uni and is doing manual labour work while renting out a room, they got their degree but they can't find any work in their sector.
If I went to uni, I would probably would not have been in any state to be saving any kind of money
Our generation has a problem where you're told pretty much through the entirety of secondary school that "you need to do well here or you won't get in to uni", the underlying message being that you're a failure if you don't go to uni.
The result being that every man and his dog now has a degree the value of which is watered down hugely and 30,000 historians, artists, philosophers, , , each year, are left wondering why they can't land a job role in their chosen line of study.
Good for me, as no one wanting to learn a trade has definitely helped with my value in the job market, bad for people that were missold a dream by a generation of boomers who "worked hard and achieved whatever they wanted".
Anyone can go, but there are fees. If you can’t afford the fees or the living costs you can get a means tested student loan. They copied the US model and the costs are slowly getting in that direction.
I graduated in the early 90’s when grants were still a thing, but they froze them so they didn’t rise with inflation any longer and you could get ‘top up loans’ to bridge the gap to cost of living. I think I borrowed something like £750. But it was the beginning of the end of free higher education here.
Back in my day, universities used to pay me a grant to attend.
How the times have changed.
It's what,at least £9k per year plus an expectation that if your parents are "richer" than the norm, they contribute to maintenance costs to keep you going.