I can assure you that student accommodation is as crap as it's always been.In many cases, it the same accommodation that you lot stayed in, unchanged, not even the beds.
If you mean halls then there has been significant improvemtents. My hall of residence from my 1st year has been knocked down and replaced. Across a range of Uni's i've visited they've replaced a lot of halls with modern rooms with ensuite and internet.
No, I mean the shared-houses.
They're still crap and grotty, there's still 5 bedrooms squeezed into a 2up-2down terrace, the landlords are still money-grabbing, corner-cutting bastards.
They're still at the heart of the typical student experience.
Good article in The New Yorker on this subject: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/college-calculus?intcid=mod-most-popular
Kenneth Arrow, one of the giants of twentieth-century economics, came up with this account, and if you take it seriously you can’t assume that it’s always a good thing to persuade more people to go to college. If almost everybody has a college degree, getting one doesn’t differentiate you from the pack. To get the job you want, you might have to go to a fancy (and expensive) college, or get a higher degree. Education turns into an arms race, which primarily benefits the arms manufacturers—in this case, colleges and universities.It is well established that students who go to élite colleges tend to earn more than graduates of less selective institutions. But is this because Harvard and Princeton do a better job of teaching valuable skills than other places, or because employers believe that they get more talented students to begin with? An exercise carried out by Lauren Rivera, of the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern, strongly suggests that it’s the latter. Rivera interviewed more than a hundred recruiters from investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms, and she found that they recruited almost exclusively from the very top-ranked schools, and simply ignored most other applicants. The recruiters didn’t pay much attention to things like grades and majors. “It was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige,” Rivera concluded.
Don't knock the McDonalds Grad scheme. I know a few people who did it and are now regional managers earning a decent whack with decent bonuses (10k+) every year. By all accounts they are a very good company to work for, and one benefit is that if you decide you've had enough of where you live right now then it is relatively easy to relocate to just about anywhere in the world. And you don't have to put the clown suit on.
Don't knock the McDonalds Grad scheme. I know a few people who did it and are now regional managers earning a decent whack with decent bonuses (10k+) every year.
The real question is with a good grad scheme could you take decent people without a degree and turn them into the same regional managers?
In many fields you could.
Employees who join McDonald's as non-grads could well progress into mgt.