ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Bogus colleges in the United Kingdom

So, imagine you're going to school. Your parents want you to get a good education so you can grow up and get a good job someday. That's what schools are for - to help you learn things so you can use them later in life.

Now, imagine if you went to a school that wasn't really a school at all. It might look like a school, with classrooms and teachers, but none of the things you were learning would actually help you in the future. That would be pretty bad, right?

Well, that's kind of what bogus colleges in the United Kingdom are like. They look like real colleges, with buildings and teachers and classes and everything, but they're not really teaching anything useful. Some of them may even be doing bad things, like taking people's money and not giving them anything in return.

The thing is, there are rules about what a college has to do to be considered a real college. They have to meet certain standards and follow certain rules to make sure they're providing a good education. But these bogus colleges don't follow those rules, so they're not really colleges at all.

And that's not fair to the people who go to them, because they're not getting the education they need to succeed in life. So it's important for people to know which colleges are real and which ones aren't, so they can make good choices about where to go to school.