‘Locked down and locked in’: the pandemic plight of UK university students

The crisis has exposed deep cracks in the country’s market-driven higher education system. In the UK, one academic year costs £9,250, or roughly $13,000. While before the pandemic that would have given students access to university facilities and the on-campus 'experience', now in most places it is equal to strictly online classes, and a sense of abandonment that's driving students to push for affirmative action. In the Financial Times, Bethan Staton analyses. “If you’re a student, you’ve been sold the idea that you’d have this slightly modified experience. That was never possible. And now students have been locked down, locked in, paying high tuition fees, made to feel like biological weapons."