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Was your time at uni worth £53K? A brutally honest audit

MARTYN Lewis has criticised the student loan system which leaves graduates with unpayable debts of £53,000. Was your time at uni worth such a hefty sum?

Gigs

The live music scene is touted as a reason to go to decent universities, but memories of seeing Fred Again at Leicester SU do not justify a lifetime of debt. And the union’s political leanings mean it’s usually indie acts who say the right things about Palestine who get booked, so actually it’s Sleaford Mods, Bob Vylan, Idles, Sleaford Mods again.

Sex

Universities can’t put ‘You’ll get laid, guaranteed’ on the prospectus for legal reasons. But, surrounded as you are by hot young singles with no gender imbalance unless you study engineering, it’s likely. Whether that’s worth £53k at nine per cent is another matter. That buys a great many Tinder dates or if you’re into honesty, escorts.

Alcohol savings

Cheap booze has always been a perk of university, but even with pints at an optimistic £2 you’d need to drink an impractical 35 every day to recoup your debt. The rapid weight gain would limit your social life to Warhammer Soc and blue chip employers are traditionally unwilling to recruit graduate trainees in the final stages of liver failure.

Increased earnings

The average graduate salary is £42k, £10k higher than non-graduates, so it’s pretty much guaranteed you’ll benefit financially in the long term. Sadly, it also means a lifetime of being told aggressively ‘you should have learned a trade’ by twats who don’t go around furiously telling plumbers they really f**ked up by not knowing the key themes of Middlemarch.

Fashion

University is a chance to explore your authentic self and your personal style, and the results are usually criminal. White-boy dreads, goth make-up for 9am lectures, dungarees. If you fell for the peer pressure that makes those cool, you shouldn’t be paying loans but receiving compensation for spending your prime years looking such a dick.

Acquiring knowledge

Supposedly the point. But who really cares about the factions in the Spanish Civil War? It’s over. Likewise if you’re working with isotopes of Mendelevium, you won’t be expected to refer to your lecture notes. Nobody’s ever pulled by summarising the arguments of Kant, so you must conclude this is one area where university definitely isn’t worth it.

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Seven artists who played the weirdo long game to benefit from the Gen Z online freak storm

AFTER lying dormant for decades, Aphex Twin is the darling of the odd kids again. These acts knew their music would one day be loved by mutant youth:  

Type O Negative

The only era that shouldn’t have been big on lustful vampires is the 19th century, who loved it. Lead singer Peter Steele added metal and knob gags to the formula, but today’s teens don’t get the latter and use his deep bass vocals to frame themselves as sexy goths. Having not met any 90s goths, who weren’t sexy and spent whole parties upstairs crimping their hair.

Aphex Twin

Shy, retiring techno artist who plastered his name and logo everywhere and is consequently remembered when Loop Guru is teaching music theory at a private sixth-form in Sussex, Richard D James has seen his tracks take off as soundtrack to short-form videos. If he watches them he might finally use that tank he bought in the 90s.

Insane Clown Posse

This Faygo-infused circus act might be the only band on the planet to have assembled a worse community of creeps than TikTok already is. But they’ve been together 37 years and the internet loves nothing more than a bad joke that’s gone on for far too long, so there are now fathers who spent their youths ridiculing Juggalos who have them as children.

The Ting Tings

Social media’s neon trash heap is basically the 00s on a phone screen, so it’s unsurpising the catchy migraine of That’s Not My Name found a new hellish home there. Will Smith, desperate to be rehabilitated, picked up on the trend to combine two risen ghouls from our recent past we honestly thought we’d be allowed to forget.

Three 6 Mafia

The horrorcore rap act were outcasts compared to their contemporaries of misogynistic gangster pimps with ongoing criminal records, but impressed wanky tastemakers enough to rediscover niche audiences that appreciate smashing together dumb shit like green demon skulls and shaking ass. Better than a Jay-Z and Linkin Park mash-up, in fairness.

Kate Bush

Revived by Stranger Things and now the soundtrack of WitchTok where children make potions in their back gardens, using neither eye of newt nor toe of frog but some herbs they bought on Etsy. Does she care? Or is she on some Hertfordshire estate somewhere doing exactly the same but not livestreaming it?

Limp Bizkit

Fred Durst, always as much infuriatingly successful marketing bro as overgrown child, has smartly ruined a second generation with his faux-transgressive bullshit. Still, at least they’re only listening to it in minute-long chunks and freedom from it is but a swipe away. The children of the nu-metal revolution had no such freedom.

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