"Any of the left wingers here..."
Come on Don!!
While education has moved on from Richard Attenborough's 'The Guinea Pig' days, higher education is still very much a privilege in Britain; even if the need for an extra wage packet for some families wasn't still a major factor, crippling fees and the need for student loans have made sure of that, as well as a whole load of other factors.
http://militantstudent.org/britain/239-government-provokes-fury-ucas-changes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/sep/29/british-universities-fail-poor-students
I very nearly posted to the 'my favourite teacher' thread, our science teacher Mr Cobban of Speke Secondary Modern, (a typical factory-fodder factory) who told me a year before I left school, "the only thing you need to know when you leave here is how to tot up your wages at the end of the week" - with that statement he made me determined that it wasn't all I needed to know.
Higher education is still very much the domain of the privileged in practice, if no longer in theory.
Jim Carroll