In terms of time at the college (assuming no failures and no business holding) if you do area its roughly 10-11 months split over 3 courses - Basic, Foundation and Advanced.
If you do aerodrome its 4 months if you are posted to a London airport (LL, KK, SS, GW, LC) and around 7 months for any other due to the added approach course.
In terms of pay and location, Area is more predictable. Its gonna be either Prestwick or Swanwick (maybe Manchester but that means Prestwick in a couple of years) which are Band 4/5 and the higher bands of pay.
Aerodrome has the possibility of 15 different postings all over the country, varying from Band 1 to Band 5. As a rough guide the level of traffic dictates the band the unit is in (I don't want to get into a debate about complexity of traffic here...
) So Heathrow is band 5 etc etc.
The actual courses themselves... I did aerodrome so I can only comment on that. Its a lot to learn, hard work and sometimes frustrating. But at the same time its a lot of fun and really enjoyable. Yes the exams are all multi-choice on aerodrome but you still have to know your stuff for oral boards and when you go out to a unit so don't count on that being the easier route. Granted ''verbatim'' on area does seem worse
Pass rates vary from course to course in both disciplines, but for aerodrome i would estimate around 60/70% get through. Again for area i'll let someone else comment but i think they're not as high as 60%...
Someone previously mentioned pressurised courses etc. Depends on what you mean by pressure - on aerodrome you get 'summatives' (assessed practicals' coming out of your ears - we had 25 on my course: in comparison area foundation have 6. You can take that both ways, continuous assessment... or one shot at the end kind of thinking.
Hope that answers a few questions, anything else just ask or pm
Cheers
Adrian