The Most Selfish Generation in History and the Debt Trap

zappahey

StevieJ wrote: »

What did your parents do to you to make you hate them so?

Spent the next generation's money, which is what the debt represents.

olly300

Going4TheDream wrote: »

I dont think on average a £10k a year difference in salary for someone wiht a good degree is unrealistic over a 40 year working life ...........

What is a good degree?

You obviously don't know a wide variety of people otherwise you wouldn't come out with such a blanket statement.

STEM academics have "good" degrees. A lot of them earn less then plumbers in the UK.

dtsazza

olly300 wrote: »

Unfortunately if we want to complete with the rest of the industrialised world we can't just have every body going straight into work without any form of training.

As employers don't want to pay for their staff to be trained the only way that it can be done is via the state.

That's not what university is for. It's definitely not training. Having done a "proper" degree (Maths) at a reputable university, I can say that almost none of what I studied there is directly useful in anything other than further academic study.

It felt a lot more like a rubber-stamp; a piece of paper that certified I had the ability to perform complex transformations, and the potential to learn abstract concepts, even though the specific ones involved were almost arbitrary.

I really don't believe it's increased my ability to do useful employment at all (though being able to put it on my CV has sadly increased my employability). I remain unconvinced that a BA in Interpretive Dance would fare any better.

GCSEs are definitely relevant to an educated/useful workforce. A-levels - probably, if they're in sensible subjects. Degrees, I think typically not - or at the very least you could get a lot more bang for the buck (in terms of both money and time) if you strip out all of the academia.


If we really do need training, then who better to provide it than the employers themselves? Don't worry, if its required for them to stay competitive then they will definitely foot the bill. And doing it that way would ensure that the training would involve everything that was useful, and nothing that was not.

It'd be both much fairer and more efficient all round, once the education system had prepared children to a solid baseline through GCSEs and A-levels.

(All this ignoring the "teaching you about life" aspect of university, of course, and focusing simply on how much more efficient it makes you in paid employment.)

However none of the recent previous governments nor the current government understand that they need to encourage children into doing subjects which are viewed as harder.

And this is one of the reasons why I really like the tuition fee changes. It's all well and good to pretend the reason why you're going to uni for three years to do a mickey mouse degree is to improve your career prospects. It's a little different when ultimately you're on the line for £30k of its cost. If your degree is really going to be useful then it will repay itself over and over, but if you're just going to !!!! about then you're liable for the consequences too.

Ronaldo_Mconaldo

PaulW1965 wrote: »

Yes it is a tax - 9% over the £15k threashold. Which means that a young graduate faces a marginal tax rate of 20% income tax, 12% NI and 9% SL making 41%!!!! At £15k !!!!!!! And as for stopping - it lasts 30 years!!!!!!

Well these figures are just plain wrong now aren't they. On wages of £15k you would have a tax free alloawance of £7,470, which is almost half of your earnings so it's effectively 10% tax. NI allowance is about £5k so NI is more like 8%. Come on, just because you're hiding behind a computer screen doesn't make it alright to whip up figures and pretend that you know what you're talking about.

CLAPTON

Ronaldo_Mconaldo wrote: »

Well these figures are just plain wrong now aren't they. On wages of £15k you would have a tax free alloawance of £7,470, which is almost half of your earnings so it's effectively 10% tax. NI allowance is about £5k so NI is more like 8%. Come on, just because you're hiding behind a computer screen doesn't make it alright to whip up figures and pretend that you know what you're talking about.

the man said MARGINAL tax rate
and he was correct

StevieJ

olly300 wrote: »

What is a good degree?

You obviously don't know a wide variety of people otherwise you wouldn't come out with such a blanket statement.

STEM academics have "good" degrees. A lot of them earn less then plumbers in the UK.

Blanket statements seem the order of the day on this thread

dtsazza

kabayiri wrote: »

When you had degree/non-degree split of say 10:90 and now have maybe 50:50 then there must be a supply n demand effect though surely ?

True. But do you believe that in one generation children have miraculously become that much more intelligent?

The lowering of the bar to entry doesn't really achieve anything other than make arbitrary statistics look better (and keep people out of work longer). As I noted above, I believe that degrees are primarily a discriminator function, so their value is relative.

The intelligent and proactive 10% who would have gone in the past will doubtless lead a successful life and end up in very well-paid jobs. The people 49% through the scale who just squeeze into uni now are going to do about as well as the 50% figure before.

Correlation does not imply causation; obtaining a degree does not magically make you better at doing paid work (which is ultimately what determines your employability and salary).


I do hope that we see a drop in the university percentage now, not out of spite but because I really believe that at the lower end it's a waste of time for the students and institutions involved, and a waste of taxpayer's money on top. I just hope that the government is brave enough to allow university figures to fall without caving to Labour's inevitable accusations of "decreasing social mobility", as if a degree (any degree) was a passport to the gravy train.


More technical training courses (such as apprenticeships and things like GNVQs, if the latter are relevant) would be a much better way to go. Let's free society of its obsession with university.

StevieJ

zappahey wrote: »

Spent the next generation's money, which is what the debt represents.

What debt are we talking about, govt/private, I would have problem if it was govt debt due to the size of debt/gdp that the boomers inherited from that heroic generation post WW2 which was greater than it is now.

Going4TheDream

olly300 wrote: »

What is a good degree?

You obviously don't know a wide variety of people otherwise you wouldn't come out with such a blanket statement.

STEM academics have "good" degrees. A lot of them earn less then plumbers in the UK.

Maybe a bad choice of word but given the choice between media studies or golf course management and say Pure physics or Organic Chemistry, or pure Maths I know which ones I would class as good....

Thrugelmir

PaulW1965 wrote: »

Yes it is a tax - 9% over the £15k threashold. Which means that a young graduate faces a marginal tax rate of 20% income tax, 12% NI and 9% SL making 41%!!!! At £15k !!!!!!! And as for stopping - it lasts 30 years!!!!!!

In 1975/76 basic rate of income tax was 35% and employees nic 5.5%.

So 40.5% in total.

Worth checking your facts before jumping to conclusions.