Whining fucking students

A load of students are whingeing about top-up fees again; whatever one's thoughts on these, it is good to see that the spokesperson for the NUS seems to epitomise the current crappiness of the education system.

NUS president Gemma Tumelty said: "We really believe that debt will be a huge deterrent on students entering education.

"This year there were 15,000 fewer students - that's a huge concern to us…"

Yup, because your fees will drop and you won't be able to afford so many perks, eh?

Ms Tumelty said that having to pay off student debt prevented graduates from investing in pensions and mortgages and contributing to society through spending.

"It takes years to recover from that financial burden, particularly for women, due to career breaks and pay inequality", she said.

No, no, no, love; not career breaks and pay inequality: it's pay inequality caused by career breaks, as Timmy has demonstrated a number of times.

Its figures also revealed that there is virtually no gender pay gap for people in their 20s. The difference widens to around 7% for people in their 30s, peaks at 18% for those in their 40s, before dropping to 16% for people aged 50 to 59 and 8% for those older than 60. This may reflect the fact that women tend to have children in their late 20s.

If people take a couple of years out of the workforce, if they do this two or three times over a working lifetime, would we expect their wages to be lower? Yes, I think we probably would, male or female. If people also decide that in the interests of their work life balance they'd like to step back from the rat race a bit, perhaps cut back on some of the more insane loyalty committments to employers, would we expect their wages to be lower 30 years later? Yes, I think we probably would, male or female.

So there you have at least a very large chunk of the answer to the gender pay gap: there isn't one pre usual child bearing ages, there is during and after.

So, Ms Tumelty, stick that in your cunt and set fire to it.

"What is always overlooked is that education is a benefit to society as well as the individual.

Well, it's not really overlooked, m'dear, but we do accept that the individual should benefit in terms of higher wages. So, society and the individual both benefit from the education: since this is the case, don't you think that both society and the individual should pay for that education?

But, even more stupidly, you utterly fail to see the fundamental problem with your argument; there have been a number of reports over the last couple of years showing that a degree does not command the substantially higher wages that it used to. This is because there are now about 50% of the population with degrees, rather than 20% or so. This means that a degree is worth less than it used to be—there has been, if you like, degree inflation—because there are more people with degrees (and, of course, the increase in numbers has led to less face-to-face time and therefore the quality of the education delivered has suffered too).

So, a decrease in student numbers would actually benefit your members by allowing them to command a higher wage through a lower supply of a desired product. How do you square that one, Gemma? And what's your degree in? (Please don't say PPE because that would just be embarrassing for you.)

"We're the institutions producing doctors, nurses, engineers, and that is a is a huge benefit to society and therefore society should pay."

OK, well, let's say that we will pay for doctors, nurses and engineers and all those other useful professions, and we don't pay for the English Literature, History and History of Art students, shall we? Or don't you think that's fair?

I do. I think that if we are going to foot the bill for you bastards to hang about spouting shit like this for the next three or four years, we should be able to choose which bits of it we pay for, don't you? I'm happy for my tax money to pay to train a doctor (even if he can't find a job at the end of it—nice one, Patsy) but I not happy to pay for someone to take fucking Media Studies, OK?

Fucking hell, you people are stupid.