One of the poll questions explained the loans system, which sees graduates start repayments once they earn over £21,000, asking: “Regardless of whether or not you support the cost of university degrees being paid through tuition fees, do you think a university education is or is not worth £9,000 a year?”

Just 29 per cent of respondents said it was worth the money, 56 per cent said it was not, and 15 per cent were not sure.

Pretty loose wording here, particularly the headline.

The cost of the tuition (and all the associate magubbins provided by the university) will be £9,000 per year, or £27,000 in total.

The cost of a degree is far higher, since it includes a load of other stuff including accommodation, the opportunity cost of not working full time for 3 years, and so on.

The issue for universities is whether applications drop by 56% next year, which is what this poll suggests. I somehow doubt they will (by which I mean that people often seem to say one thing in surveys like this but act differently in practice).

On the 2-year degree thing... yeah, sounds pretty sensible to me. Why aren't we seeing more of this?

That has changed. The belief that university education has some intrinsic role apart from the economy is no longer held with any conviction by our ruling elite. ‘[Politicians] basically only care about universities in terms of their immediate economic impact’, Wolf says. ‘They still allude to the idea that universities are about more than that but I don’t think the current generation of politicians is doing more than paying lip service to the idea of universities as a place to develop thought and knowledge. Their hearts are in universities as engines of economic growth.’

Such a conception of the role of universities causes problems. Without the idea of a university as a place free from economic interests, a place in which one is at liberty to pursue thought and ideas, any defence of the importance of university education too often plays into the hands of those who would have people pay through the nose for it: after all, if you higher education supposedly helps to lines your pockets, then why should the public pay for it? It’s a lesson that applies not just to philistine politicians but perhaps more so to their social-mobility spouting critics. As Wolf wrote in Does Education Matter?, plenty of people advocate expenditure on university education ‘not because people enjoy education, not because of its contribution to culture and learning, but because it leads to growth’.

Wolf’s spoken lament hits home: ‘We think about universities purely in economic ways and I think that is a great pity.’

Sir Peter Scott, former vice-chancellor of Kingston University, said the Government’s overhaul of higher education was probably the “worse example of public policy making” he had ever seen.

Oh, dear. Horrible mis-use of quoting/grammar by the Telegraph in the opening sentence here. The original quote seems to have come from the sentence, "... it is difficult to recall a worse example of public policy making".

Hope that wasn't the result of an expensive university education :-)

The reason I stress the tax concept is because many parents wrestle with 'how will I pay for my child to go to university?' and then risk their own financial solvency and security to do so.

Let me be clinical for a moment: it could sound callous but you need to decide whether paying for it really is your responsibility.

The system is set up that the cost is met by the beneficiary of the education - your child. When this is referred to as a 'loan' many parents feel guilty and become desperate to avoid their child getting into this debt, even though they may not need to repay it.

Yet if we'd called this system a graduate tax, would you still feel compelled to prevent your child paying a higher tax rate? Of course there is a balance to be had but it's worth thinking this through to judge your own reaction.

A really useful set of facts from Money Saving Expert about the new student loans system in the UK. Worth a quick look if you, or your children, are planning on going to university in the UK from 2012 onward.

The comments about parental attitudes to 'paying for your child' are interesting, and make a lot of sense, unless you are unlucky(?) enough to have one or more children currently going thru university on the current (old) loan system and one or more who will come into the new system. In that situation the approach you may have taken with your older child(ren) may well be very different from the approach you are forced into taking with younger children. Personally, this makes me feel rather uncomfortable.

The Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons (CC) today announced a partnership to improve search results on the World Wide Web through the creation of a metadata framework specifically for learning resources. This work is being underwritten with grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This represents the first industry-specific initiative since the recent announcement of Schema.org by major search vendors Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Bing. Schema.org aims to create a universal framework for tagging web-based content to provide a faster and richer search experience. Google Shopping and Google Recipes are two prototypes of how metadata is used to improve search results and their presentation.

A potentially interesting announcement, which I take to mean that AEP and CC will look to develop a new schema for learning objects (one which can ultimately be hosted at schema.org).

The 'less good' news comes in the form of "The initial scope will at a minimum cover the Common Core State Standards for K-12" which seems to me to be very US-centric and potentially quite complex (I say this without having looked at it in any significant detail). It also appears to still be in draft?

Whatever... I'm not totally convinced that it forms a good basis for a simple, core, schema for learning objects? On that basis, I suspect there is probably room for alternative experiments around what schema.org can do for OER though, ultimately, it's not schema.org that matters but whether Google is interested in improving discovery of learning objects thru its search engine.

Paul Lowe is one of a handful of people pioneering the use of webinars in education in the UK. As a course director at the London College of Communication, he placed webinars right at the heart of his online MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, and has seen them spread around the rest of the college.

"We realised that webinars were the perfect solution for people who wanted to study photography at a higher level but stay where they were living and working, and for whom the traditional to-and-fro emails of a typical distance-learning course lacked the immediacy they wanted."

Lectures, seminars and tutorials for the students on the course now all occur online in real time, while the students stay at homes or their office.

"It takes students and guest tutors a few minutes to get their heads round the idea before they are hooked," Lowe says. "Their shared interest in photography very quickly helps them develop a real sense that that they are part of a group exploring issues together, and the power of the collective experience of overcoming technical hitches just reinforces the bonds between them."

There may be worries as to how employers see such virtual courses; however, Paul Lowe believes that webinars also have a future at undergraduate level. "What's the point in getting everyone into campus for just one tutorial, when they can stay at home and attend online?"

It looks as though students will soon have another reason not to get out of bed.

Not a great deal to note here other than it is probably indicative of the long lead time on technology impact (assuming one equates webinars with video conferencing, at least at some level).

That sounded pretty clear, but what has Cambridge actually proposed? Its current access target under the current fees policy is to reach 60% to 63% of state school students-not, we should note, poorer or disadvantaged state school students, just any state school students including those from selective schools. What has it proposed in the new access agreement? It has proposed that the target should be not 60% to 63% of state school students, but 61% to 63% of state school students. As the Financial Times put it:

"Cambridge basically reckons it can triple student fees and placate the Government by adjusting the bottom of its target range for state school pupils by one percentage point."

Does anybody in this House believe that Cambridge will not be allowed to charge £9,000?

You've got to laugh...

The poll also found that students who went to state schools were much more likely to be put off attending university by high fees (59 per cent) than those who were privately educated (39 per cent).

Other groups found to be at particularly high risk of being dissuaded on grounds of cost included female students (56 per cent said they would not have gone to university if fees were £9,000 a year), those with three B grades or less at A level (63 per cent), those studying languages (57 per cent) or arts and humanities subjects (54 per cent), and those from the north of England (58 per cent in the North West, 51 per cent in the North East).

I'm not convinced by the headline claims because I think that the cultural momentum around "going to uni" will continue for some time to come, almost irrespective of price. (I'm not saying that respondents were lying as such... but my feeling is that people tend to respond to hypothetical questions rather differently than they might act in practice). That said, I do think that the relative figures for different groups are worrying.

Stupid title... but one that at least hints at where this infographic is coming from.

Ends with, "Social media is now a vital part of life, and academia needs to learn how to effectively take advantage". Err... "take advantage"... why?

Replace "social media" with "going for a drink in the pub" throughout and most of it still makes sense. So what?!

Our map shows an average cost of £8820.10 a year for students aiming for university and just six planning to charge less than £8,000: Southampton Solent, £7,800; St Mary's University College, Twickenham, £8,000; Anglia Ruskin University, £8,000; University Campus Suffolk, £7,500 - £8,000; Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, £7,500; and the University of Derby, £6,995 - £7,995.

This fits in with information gathered by the Times Higher Education Supplement, which has published a guide of fees for the academic year 2012-2013. Out of 57 universities, only 14 say they are planning to charge below the maximum.

The maximum fees figure does not take into account any scholarships or waivers for poorer students, and instead represents the headline fee level. It is also only a prospective figure from universities, as OFFA has the final say.

A spokesman from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills told Channel 4 News: "No university can know for certain yet what it will charge from autumn 2012. Each university will need to show how they meet tough new conditions in an approved access agreement from the Director for Fair Access, if it wants to charge more than £6,000.

Interactive map of proposed UK university tuition fees.