Fees, debt and uncertain values 3

I fear that your correspondent, writing about the European Union free-for-all in relation to fees (Letters, September 15), has ignored (as do most decisionmakers) the fact that it is only full-time undergraduates who no longer have to pay their fees at the start of their programme. Part-time students will still have to find large sums of money to begin studying.

As a matter of interest, I wonder when the penny will drop among policymakers that pushing people simultaneously to a) take on large debts to study full time, b) start putting larger amounts in their pension savings from an early age and c) try to find increasingly impossible sums for housing once at work will force ever larger numbers of people towards part-time learning - if they are to enter higher education at all. The part-time sector has been in effect ignored for years by most universities and receives woefully little consideration or political priority.

Amanda Riley.
Whitstable