Letter: Unfortunate images of student life

Sir: It was unfortunate that you chose to illustrate an otherwise excellent article on the graduate tax ('Why students must learn to pay', 21 July) with a photograph of three Oxford students 'celebrating' (all in dinner jackets and drinking champagne). It was even more unfortunate that you chose to caption it: 'Oxford students celebrating: but parents and their offspring are having to pay more for the privileges of student life'. Many looking at that photograph would probably feel little sympathy for students bemoaning a lack of money, and may feel that it was quite acceptable to bring in a graduate tax to force students themselves to pay for the privilege of drinking champagne from the bottle.

Unfortunately, it is the case that most students - including many at both Oxford and Cambridge - do not enjoy such a privileged lifestyle, and the average student now finishes higher education with debts totalling nearly pounds 2,000.

Newspapers seem to have just two views of students. They are either boring Hooray Henrys, with a bottle of champagne in one hand and another bottle of champagne in the other, or they are dope-smoking militant Trotskyites who begin (or end) every sentence with 'yea', 'brother' or 'like, it's really bad, man', and who are always looking for a barricade to storm.

If these images were ever true (which I doubt), then they are no longer. Serious articles about student financial support deserve serious photographs which reflect student life today. Until we face up to the realities of being a student in the 1990s, we will progress no further in the debate on how we fund our higher education system.

Yours faithfully,

PHIL COWLEY

President

Brunel University Students' Union

Uxbridge, Middlesex

22 July