The NUS is made up of careerists playing at being students

Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and wary of not lobbing their mortarboards too vigorously, students graduating in the coming weeks are set for a tough time – there’s a housing crisis, a difficult economic climate, and the average starting salary for graduates hovers perilously on the £20,000 mark. Comforting, then, that the National Union of Students has our back. Fighting valiantly against the so-called ‘marketisation’ of higher education, they offer dogmatic principles we can rely upon: namely, that university education must be free to receive; that all elected governments are secretly conniving against the people; and that all those on large salaries are somehow inherently evil. All very honourable and right-on, but these are metrics worth measuring the NUS by, too. Simon Blake might not be a name or personality that catches attention – he rarely appears in the newspapers, has never been elected by students, and isn’t a name that most undergraduates will ever have heard of. And yet he’s the CEO of the NUS, sitting comfortably on a tidy sum of £100,000 per annum. It’s