It is a shame glimmerbat left. The abruptness surprised me and they might have went through something difficult. I hope they are doing okay and it is nothing serious.

Back to the topic, I don't get this complaints about printing costs. We are PhD "students" and not staff. It is not unreasonable to pay some extra costs for our degree and I think we all undoubtedly had to buy stuff for our undergraduate courses. Yeah printing is expensive but there are a multitude of printing options. You can get online printing for as little as 5p per page or £15 for 300 pages then pay for binding. A little bit of effort by walking further than the university printers can save a lot of money.

PS: Vice-chancellors are overpaid but the university governance system is fundamentally flawed, so nothing will ever change. It doesn't matter if you are at a Russell Group uni or not, the board of governors are not directly accountable to students or staff. We are only a metric to them and PhD well being is not an important metric in the grand scheme of things.

What is a Russell group Uni?

I don't regularly check these forums but see you attacked me kinda baselessly in another thread on the back of this.

I should probably have explained more why it was disappointing. It's nothing to do with PhD students wanting/deserving better treatment (which they often do), or your language, it was that the tone of your OP smacked of elitism along the lines of 'we don't have those problems here because we're Russell Group', and that the poster was lesser than you (or stupid) for voicing their opinion.

It's further to your discredit that you then went on to slam one of my unrelated posts apparently baselessly/emotively (attacking on this basis will fail and you'll ultimately screw yourself over if you do it professionally); but if you do have a basis I'd be happy to have an academic discussion with you on the forums.

I'm an educator/researcher so my only possible gain here is trying to explain to you, presumptively as a prospective future researcher, why telling someone they should 'work through their issues lol!' isn't constructive, and nor is elitism.

I am really surprised by the attack to the idea of PhD students want some support for their thesis printing. You might agree with OP or think it is reasonable that students bear some costs. But this strange attack I do not understand. Either support posters, or say your counter opinion politely, or just ignore the post. I can only understand in very rare cases where someone posts complete nonsense a strong opinion against them. But in this case, it is really something normal that happens in many universities and the OP has not invented the idea of universities taking the printing costs.