My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

I had the same thought, but what practically is the distinction? The only thing I can come up with is scope, but even then, there are plenty of tutors that teach a fairly wide range of a topic like a teacher would. I have seen plenty of Calculus II tutors but never a integration by parts tutor.

I thought teachers were supposed to be experts in their field of study that have a desire to pass that knowledge on to those that are interested. Not everyone will have the capacity for learning those things. As an example, I love art but despite years of trying both books and classes, I just cannot bring the images in my mind into the physical world. I'm a responsible enough adult to accept that this is my shortcoming and not the fault of my teachers. I simply don't have the hand-eye coordination necessary to produce the things that I can imagine.

>[edit] The attitude of teachers astounds me

The overly-privileged, entitled attitude of the younger generation astounds me. You have to work for what you get. The world does not owe you a living. You have to understand that you are not a special little flower that is more important that everyone else. That said, neither are you just another cog in the machine unless you choose to be so. It is perfectly possible to be an individual without being a disrespectful, self-important boor. Why is it okay for you to inconvenience your professor, who likely has a life outside of work, but it is unthinkable for them to schedule anything that inconveniences you. What makes you more important than the other 500 students they are teaching this semester?

Actually, the functionality of medical care does depend on the actions of the patient to do what the medical system instructs them to do. When a person doesn't follow doctor's orders, there is a high possibility that the person in need of medical care doesn't actually get the results they expect.

> All you are offered is the chance to learn, and no guarantees of graduating if you turn out to be incompetent at it.

While I agree with your sentiment and the principle of what you're suggesting, most universities aren't packaging it like this. When you see the ads and you read their propaganda... er, I mean their pretty glossy brochures, they are selling it as exactly that: "Come to XU, get a degree in Y, our graduates have a 100% career placement success." "Get a degree in X, the best value in the country, no other University offers our graduation statistics." They might as well be a play by play from the consumer manipulation handbook. So I can't blame students for playing it both ways. I don't think students are stupid at all, I'm sure many of them know that they're not actually buying the degree, but they're all too well versed in how the media is being used to manipulate things to their own ends, and the student playing dumb to that manipulation and using it to their own ends is a classic example of using the University's own tactics against them.

What we are really seeing here is market forces that make the current university structure -- with its emphasis on research over quality of teaching -- a terrible product, just like a lottery ticket is a terrible product. Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets.

At the moment, the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college is propping up these institutions. But that's going to go away someday.

And in the Information Age, I have plenty of "access to an infrastructure" outside of the university walls. There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own. (And most of the time I did learn that way, better than from lectures.) But I wouldn't have been able to put "MIT graduate" on my resume and I wouldn't have gotten the connections out of it. So that's why I went.