Student fees drive students to sex work; alternatives to a brick and mortar institution.

When studying at LSE, I was lucky enough to be granted a bursary by the university and a full maintenance grant from the SLC, whilst tuition fees did not raise above £3,300 a year (loans available for tuition and living). Now, home students at LSE pay £8,500, (although the grants have gone up by 25% for my level). Students throughout the rest of the UK are forking up to £9,000 a year for tuition at an undergraduate level. And whilst loans are available, the thought alone of being in this kind of debt can be quite worrying. Apparently as much as 6% of students could be involved in sex work (although this based on an incredibly small sample of 200 students).

Then thinking about postgraduate work, where fees can rise up to as much as £30,000 a year, (LSE MSc Economics at £21,000, LSE MSc Finance at over £26,000, Imperial MSc in Risk Management and Financial Engineering at £28,000); although some Master's courses can often cost less than a single year at undergraduate  it is clear that higher education is not particularly accessible in the UK at the so-called 'elite'  institutions. 

Take a look at this regarding students in sex work: http://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/sex-for-tuition-fees-are-universities-just-refusing-to-face-up-to-the-facts-8667648.html

Education increasingly seems to be becoming more of a private investment rather than a public good. Luckily there are alternatives, with IIT-MIT-Harvard's online courses platform Edx https://www.edx.org/‎; and other open courses available online, although these don't come with the piece of paper/certificate that people value so much nor contact time. There are other courses providing this piece of paper, although not from particularly 'elite' universities, you can undertake the external programme at the University of London, the courses are tailored by various UoL universities such as the London School of Economics, SOAS and Goldsmiths, but again you don't get any contact time. No comment here on the practicality of the education/schooling, or force-fed syllabi.

I'll leave you with this as some food for thought: