It’s all about money, not education

THE huge spike in Covid this autumn is correlated 100% to the return of students to rental accommodation.

Most subjects are online and with social distancing has devalued Freshers’ Week to a farce.

These institutions are a long way from the model of learning and providing a life start.

Fees and income are the drivers, not social development and a better society in too many cases.

This model is shown in Cornwall where our EU funded campus was annexed by Exeter, who far from developing a socially inclusive embryo Cornish University have instead developed a campus the Sutton Trust rank amongst the worst for social inclusion.

This is in Cornwall, the UK’s most deprived region.

Last year, many universities had staff strikes which deprived students of lectures but with no reduction in fees.

This year Covid led to the A-level shambles, with A-levels devalued, and this same cohort of students is now being confined in PFI Halls of Residence with mounting debts and little education.

This is a national scandal and may be magnified by Covid but like so many other failings Covid only lifted the stone on a rotten underbelly of student treatment from Tremough in Cornwall to the North of Scotland.

The poncy scheme of debt funded facilities and little real concern for quality, and a dependence on often Chinese foreign student income, is broken.

As students belt out Paloma

Faith’s latest release, while holed up in isolation with people they don’t even know, can we all join in and say ‘We can do better than this?’

Timothy James Chy an Botallack, Penzance