The British government has recently changed the rules on university funding. At present, students pay no more than £3,000 per year for their tuition, with the rest of the roughly-£7500 it costs to teach one student being paid for by the state.
From next year, students will pay up to £9000 per year and the state will hardly pay anything. This was sold to the nation as a way to cut the budget deficit after the Recent Financial Unpleasantness, although it won't achieve this for several years, if at all, because the government will loan students the money upfront and they'll then gradually pay it back after they graduate.
However, another supposed benefit of the changes is that they'll give universities an incentive to improve their teaching. Students, we're told, will demand high quality teaching, now that they are the ones paying for it, and institutions which fail to provide ...
