I completely understand why parents on this thread are disappointed at the Covid response from universities and feel it’s not delivering value for money.
It’s worth saying re the fees though that this is not an ordinary loan in that the majority of students graduating now will never pay it off and it will be eventually be wiped. There is no upfront cost for tuition and repayment is linked to salary so it needs to be viewed as a graduate tax rather than justifying a demand that you must get a course ‘worth £9,250’.
The other thing is that the hike in tuition fees has not meant a huge increase in income for universities because public funding was withdrawn. Lecturers have not had huge pay rises. There will be people teaching your children who are being paid less than minimum wage on hourly paid lectureships that only pay a set amount for marking and preparation. Many universities have hugely increased staff to student ratios and it’s simply impossible for me to give the same level of attention to each student when I have 75 of them rather than 25. I of course have no control over the numbers recruited.
What I will say is that students today are less motivated to do self-directed learning. In seminars, a large proportion will not have done the reading and instead expect me to simply ‘teach’ them. I give an enormous amount of help with assessments, basically telling the students how to answer the question. When I was at university, there was none of this and we genuinely had to figure it out for ourselves.
There has been a move towards grade inflation in recent years. Students feel entitled to at least a 2.1 due to the fees, and the numbers who achieve this have gone through the roof, all while resources have been cut back and studies show that students are spending an average of just 14 hours a week on their studies, often because they have to work part-time. For context, I studied at a RG university in the mid 00s and spent about 35 hours of self-study and 5 hours of classroom-based learning every week. I worked full time in paid work during university holidays and lived very frugally. My students barely read beyond the textbook today, yet expect first class marks (and are more likely to get them than what I was). If you are accustomed to this teacher-led style of learning, then the current set-up during the pandemic will be extremely unsatisfactory.
FWIW, I disagree with many of my colleagues who claim that online learning is great and that the students are getting a fantastic education nonetheless. I think staff should be teaching face to face unless they are clinically vulnerable and I think online learning in the way it is delivered currently is an extremely substandard alternative. I would be angry too as a student and I am angry at healthy colleagues who are at low risk from Covid refusing to teach on campus and harming their students’ education as a result.
However, for the complaints about high fees, you must target the government who imposed them, not the lecturers. You will never get a course with teaching ‘worth 9,250’. Your money will go on staff, buildings, professional support, libraries, halls of residence, maintenance and all manner of things. Teaching will be a very small part of what you pay for. It’s always been this way but used to be paid for by the government so it was never noticeable.