Olivia Morton writes for the University of Warwick’s The Boar on why this year’s Freshers have been given a poor deal at the expense of next year’s higher-paying students:

It would be easy to assume that with the introduction of higher tuition fees next academic year, we freshers of 2011-12 are the lucky ones. We got in there early, amidst the unprecedented increase in applications and mad scramble for places. Indeed, The Independent has estimated that 170,000 would-be students failed to get a university place. This is no wonder, when UCAS estimated that 9,000 more students were competing for the same number of places at universities that were being offered in 2010. I was part of this scramble myself. ‘Get to uni this year’, I said to myself. ‘Avoid the fees’- it seemed a no-brainer. As one of these ‘lucky’ freshers, gaining a university place at the lower fee level, I’d argue, however,that in some ways we’ve missed out...

Full article here.