Why do we pay so much in university tuition fees when we're expected to do the majority of studying/finding out information ourselves?

Did you know that schools cost even more? If you went to a fee-paying school, you'd certainly know that it does. You don't notice because if you didn't go to one of those, it will all have been paid out of taxes so you went for free. So you're actually getting a discount for having fewer classes provided. Schools are the most expensive service provided by local councils.

I happen to know that Lili is American. So she has her own perspective. I see from previous questions that you are presumably British. It's different here - when I went to university 30 years ago, that was free as well. Then we got politicians wanting to expand the number of university places and that made it unaffordable to keep it free, so fees were introduced. Still, it's subsidised to a maximum of £9,000 a year, and you've got a free loan so you don't have to pay it until you can afford to. Americans don't get any of that. Actually look at the full cost fee charged to foreign students and it's more like £15,000, or more if it's something scientific so there are laboratories to pay for. I can't help thinking the policy was a mistake because now we have more university graduates than ever before, but the number of graduate-level jobs hasn't gone up so it won't necessarily help you later on. I've had university graduates working in our office as office assistants just to be earning until they can get what they really want. But that's another story.

It actually is a reasonable fee compared with what the university costs to run. You can read its accounts to find that out.

University tuition was ever thus... DIY with lots of help available if you want it and lectures to point the way. The skill of finding things out for yourself is an important one. Things sink in far better when you've learned it yourself instead of just someone telling you. Unfortunately that's a change in schools as well... they will spoon-feed you to get high grades and make the school look good in the league tables. So university can come as a shock.

I don't know what it's like now but I was expected to do bits of project work from a young age. Oddly enough I was talking about this yesterday to Mum - my sister's partner's daughter is finding university oh so difficult! It's certainly a shock to her. And that reminded me that when I was 10, and the class was doing Tudor history, our teacher Mrs Murphy gave us all a little topic to research and write up. Yes, when we were 10! I got Sir Thomas More to read up about. We'd all been shown how to use the school library by then, how to find things in it using the Dewey Decimal Classification because that's how books are put in order on the shelves, how to borrow books, and to ask the librarian if you want help. (I can still picture Mrs Brett in my mind now, a fairly old lady with her glasses on a chain round her neck! She must have been in her 50s - well, that's old when you're 10.) No Internet then so it had to be books. Even out of school, Mum would take us to the public library every 3 weeks (because that's how long you could borrow books for) to get something new to read (and get herself some fiction from the adult library while we were there in the kids' one). Certainly by the time I got to university, I knew all this and the idea of going to the library to find things out was nothing new. Now there's a big university cost - the kind of books you need for that level of study aren't cheap so the library needs a decent budget.

Really look at the real world facts and you're getting a good deal!

How will you know how successful you have been at learning without the guidance and feedback of expert faculty? And what about their lectures? The classes they teach?

Then there are the facilities -- the libraries, the labs, the equipment -- to which you are given access. You also enjoy many other, non-academic amenities which cost quite a lot to fund and maintain.

A college or university education is about faculty teaching you AND about your doing the homework, the reading. You need both to learn effectively, not just one.

the point of higher education is to teach you to find things out for yourself, and develop initiative and independent thought. If you are always spoon-fed the information, how will you cope in the big bad world ? How would the researchers of the future ever start researching ?