But do you think international students will be afforded that privilege?
Virgin Trains, Natnl Express East Anglia, Odeon and Cineworld don't accept Solo. I can live without the others but I'm depending on Virgin to take me around the country on the cheap.
Okay, so perhaps international students can't get all of those privileges, but your previous post implied that students in general were issued with basic accounts, which is not the case.
However, for booking train tickets, both
www.thetrainline.com and
www.virgintrains.co.uk accept Visa Electron, so if you aren't able to get an account with a different debit card, you could try to open an account which gives you a Visa Electron card instead of Solo. Or if they offer the cheaper fares there, you can always book train tickets in advance at a train station and pay in cash.
It's really not the end of the world if you have to open a basic account though. As people have said above, they haven't had many problems or hassles with them.
Will you be keeping a bank account open in the US? If so, you can probably still use your US cards in the UK if you need to (I spent 10 months in the US on study abroad, but didn't bother to open a bank account - my student loan was paid into my UK account and I just used my UK credit card and then had my parents pay it off from my UK account each month).
