When I was 14 my mum told my chemistry teacher she thought it was a waste of time girls going to university because they'd only just get married. I remember being so angry with her.
No one should be held back from realising their potential by fears that they will not be able to afford to go to university or that they will graduate with unmanageable levels of debt.
I believe that access to a university education should be based on the ability to learn, not what people can afford. I think there is no more nauseating a sight than politicians pulling up the ladder of opportunity behind them.
I could, I think, quite easily have gone to Oxford. I got four good A levels, but my father's income was such that I wouldn't have got a grant, and he wouldn't let me go to university, and that was the end of it.
I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
There is lots of evidence that it is this fear of going into debt that most puts people from poorer backgrounds off going to university.
Sometimes life limits your choices - rising tuition costs may put university out of reach, or like me, personal circumstances might simply make it difficult to complete your education.
We have a government that boasts about free education. Those of us who have scratched below the surface know it is costing us by denying opportunities for others to attend college or university.
Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.
Colleges and universities divide families by income, providing access to the best schools for those with accumulated wealth. Low- or moderate-income families are relegated to the less prestigious schools where the resources for advancement are fewer than those provided at better financed schools.
Most of India is rural; there is a huge population in India not being tapped for their excellence. They have no access to great universities.
Maintenance grants, a proud Labour achievement which made it easier for children from lower and middle income families to go to university, have been abolished in one fell swoop. To be replaced with loans.
We need a movement that says in a highly competitive global economy all of our kids who have the ability, the qualifications and the desire, will be able to get a college education regardless of income because we will make public colleges and universities tuition free.
Cutting NASA education funds would most severely affect students from low- to middle-income families and students from non-Ivy League-level schools.
The SAT allows less-privileged students access to universities that previously were the bastions of the wealthy.
Access to high-quality education is way too limited. The United States has the world's most admirable higher education system, and yet it is very restrictive. It's so hard to get into. I never got into it as a student.
I went to university with no money. I can't understand a society that wouldn't give a poor person the same opportunity as a rich person.
In Latin America, no country is prouder of its legally obligatory admission-free school system than Argentina. Yet only one Argentinian of five thousand born into the lower half of the population gets as far as the university.
I didn't really want to be a teacher, but there was nothing else I could be. Most of those who went to the university became teachers. It was just the racial restriction on Africans.
I see the difficulty of kids in going to university, the difficulty of kids in schools getting arts education, so that the arts and drama and the creative arts are extracurricular. They aren't: they are at the centre, and they are the equipment we so desperately need in the world.
I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to the universities go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene ... They are scum.
I came from this very traditional background and I benefited hugely from feminism. I felt privileged going to university and doing a PhD. Most people of my background don't get to do that.
Students who have spent their childhood here in Florida deserve to qualify for the same in-state tuition rate at universities their peers and classmates do.
Our admissions system should be a vehicle for justice, but it is failing working-class students, especially those who are the first in their family to go to university.
What is obviously unfair is that the half of the population that doesn't go to university that's often on lower incomes pays more taxes in order to send other people to university, without them, you know, contributing.
