Students Living the Life of Luxury?

Leafing through the Daily Mail during my lunch break, I stumbled across a rather interesting headline that read: Hard Up? Students are living a life of luxury, says Professor. Now, being a student myself this certainly got my attention.

Delving a bit deeper into the story and I was startled to find that it wasn't in fact a clever misleading headline but a genuine quote from an article published in the Times Higher Education magazine and The Professor in question was a man named Kelvin Sharpe.

Professor Sharpe certainly doesn't pull any punches and is quoted as saying students these days enjoy the spendthrift life enjoyed in Friends by regularly splashing out on £2 cappuccinos and eating at restaurants a lot. We can then go back to our student homes that are "equipped with large LCD TVs, Sky Boxes and several high end laptops.".

Reading on I wasn't too sure which, if any, University managed accommodation Professor Sharpe was actually talking about. I have friends at University all over the country and I couldn't name one that could even be jokingly described as a (quote) "posh pad with two bathrooms".

In this current economic climate, eating out has become far less of an expenditure as it used to be and choose the right day and you can get three courses for £10, I wouldn't eactly say lavish spending.

However, (and trying my best not to turn this into a bitter rant) the one final point that really surprised me was that at no point in this unnecessary swipe at students was there any consideration taken to the fact that maybe some of these 'big' spending students actually work an awful minimum wage job to afford there (quote) "Ipods and LCD TVs". I happen to know several people who work a bar job that often sees them home at 2am or later who then struggle to get up for a 9am start.

With the news that some students still haven't received there student loans and the rest of us still coming to the realisation that we have to work 20 hours a week because they barely cover rent, I guess we should be grateful that we have a middle class, Oxford Educated Professor to tell us we got it easy.