1) Contact time isn’t what defines your degree as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. 2) Neither is the subject you study. 3) Neither is the institution in which you study. 4) Student loans are not sufficient for either the institution or the individual. 5) Education should only be for those who ‘deserve’ it (replace deserve with whichever word you like, they’re all there in the comments). 6) This is a crisis that is not only affecting the young and the middle-classes. 7) European degrees, or having the army pay for your degree, are not solutions. 8) We cannot institute the policy of ‘paying’ people for attainment in their degree by giving people with 1st class degrees a discount.