Well its just spin taken to the extreme then isn’t it?
We know the state “Investment” in loans to students is done on terms which effectively mean a large majority of them will never be fully repaid, and the government probably has to borrow at a higher average rate than it charges to students, plus they have to pay the SLC to miss-administer the whole thing, so they can only ever make a loss with the whole enterprise anyway (with our taxes filling the gap) so effectively the state is writing off a good chunk of the up-front cost of funding University education for all via loans, but the mechanism by which they do this serves to mask this fact quite effectively by making it appear we’re billing the arse off of those lazy student scummers…

The “I’m not paying for you to go to University with My Taxes” crowd miss the whole point, one way or another you are bound to have a proportion of your taxes used to pay for university students…

What you are investing in of course is the end product; (Hopefully) better qualified doctors, solicitors, Engineers, businessmen, etc, etc which all of society should benefit from – its an investment that the state makes on our behalf in our future workforce.
Of course like any investment there is risk always associated; a proportion of that investment will always fail to yield the hoped for results, however by the same token, some of that investment will return productive, useful, well qualified and motivated individuals who might for instance save your life in A&E, Defend you in court, educate your children or start a business generating employment for you… And all of who will pay taxes on their higher average lifetime earnings…

but only 5% of your / our parents generation had access to university.

now it’s closer to 50%, the cost has gone up.

There I agree with you, too many people go to University to save them from making any big decisions for another 3 years, if a course has no value in terms of a place in the workforce for the students it turfs out at the end then it should not be funded by the state…

do you think everyone should pay – even those who haven’t been to uni?

Basically Yes, the benefits for society and our economy extend well beyond the individual undertaking a degree, and are perhaps not so tangable to some, but seeing as we are seeking to become a “Knowledge based” economy its probably in the nations general interests that we actually invest in our future workforces knowledge…

it’s made millions of people pissed of yet (according to awhiles calcs) won’t claw back as much money. Surely a lose/lose?

It was a PR disaster as far as I can tell. That is unless they were being very clever and wanting to make university appear to be too expensive, thus putting off people who would go to university for the sake of it, whilst others (with some inteligence) would see through the hysteria and realise it was a still a good deal or possibly even a better deal. Those people wil become higher earners, and statisticaly higher earners vote tory, so they’ve given a load of future tory voters a big chunk of cash whilst att he same time saving money by having lower numbers of university places to fund, AND those that do go are payign it on the never never, so in 30 years time it’ll be interesting to see how the acounting was done i.e. did the government borrow money for the student loans or did it pay the university up front as normal then keep the student loan repayments for itself.