Students? What Students?

By: Steff Keightley
Date: 24/05/2001

YESTERDAY Grimsby Town announced the allocation of Student Season Tickets (SST), one of the first in the country, but with a very major, and extremely disturbing, omission. The club's statement reads: "you must be a student in full-time education, be aged 16-18".

The statement goes on to add that you must have "parents still in receipt of family allowance for the aforementioned student".

In other words, if you are studying as a 'Student' at University, which you have to have finished your 'A' Level(s) to get in to. This means that by that time the majority of people are 18, they are too old in the eyes of Grimsby Town, to be eligible for a SST.

Yes some people do get grants from their Local Education Authority (LEA), but not all, most now get 'Student Loans' which are for the purchase of books and other such materials, not for spending on a Season Ticket.

During a phone call to the club, I was told by a receptionist that, "University Students get a Grant", implying that we can spend this on the Season Ticket, and we have a healthy income so we can.

WRONG! Students DO NOT have an income like that. Some students have to live in squalor, unless they have well-to-do parents who are willing to help out, or they manage to get a job working in a bar or working nightmare shifts in a sandwich factory, or warehouse! Which in some towns and cities are few and far between.

Being a Student is not as easy as some people seem to think it is, there is a lot of reading and hard work, also there is a lot of hard playing, but wouldn't you if you had been working and revising for 4 years?

People have the view that students are drunken layabouts, admittedly some are, but the majority of students have to juggle a job, or jobs, with studying hard for something that will set them up in the future with good incomes.

If GTFC read this, then take head from the last paragraph, ".that will set them up in the future with good incomes". So wouldn't it be a better Idea to open it out to the hundreds of real 'Students' at Universities? Not just those who have gone to college straight from school because they are not sure on which road through life they wish to travel. The students, who, in your eye's are too OLD, are also some of the full price paying future season ticket holders which you could be capturing now.

These people, in 1, 2 or 3 years time will have a high income, which GTFC could have tapped into, simple economics I believe it's called!

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