Are degrees in the UK value for money?

GreatApe

economic wrote: »

i would have been much happier with that. thats 3 years starting work early which would have made a massive difference to me.

but for those who really want to do media studies, women studies and the like, why not just offer these course online, similar to open university? cut costs massively. in fact you could force this to happen by stopping all student funding for pointless degrees. the market will react.

its easy to say impossible to do

whereas employers should/could take the initiative and just advertise and make known they dont care if you have a degree or not just pass their 1-2 hour online tests come in for an interview and let them check you out if it both works out fine then you are hired. Pretty much the top jobs at the top companies do that. Sadly almost all of them ask for a degree too but would their intake really be much worse if they got rid of the degree requirement and just kept or improved their own online testing an interviewing?

The companies maybe save 1 hours of interview time by filtering with degrees while the country losses £100k to save the companies 1 hours interview time. The leaders of the largest companies need to wake up and make these changes

I would offer tax incentives for large companies that hire without any degree requirements dont ask at all for the degree they just test internally. Maybe a slightly lower business rates bill or a slightly lower employers national insurance rate. Can put some sort of lefty spin on it like we dont care about your education level we see value in everyone and give all an opportunity at the top jobs

teddysmum

People have different ways of learning, with some preferring to read up information for themselves, while others learn more quickly if given the information orally by a tutor.


I did an Open University degree and gobbled up the work, having read texts and done homework for the whole term within the first few weeks. I was very frustrated at my college of education because I was expected to listen to explanations and work with the class to complete a maths question, when I had already competed the lot in the first half hour of the lecture (The course overlapped what I did at A level.)


However,on summer school, I found that the two local people, with whom I'd travelled, were really struggling with reading up, preferring a presentation , so I ended up as informal tutor explaining the bookwork to them.


After our first year we parted as I went for maths speciality whereas they did a more general course .One finished his degree course but found it very draining (especially as most OU students work,too) and the other just gave up.

Arklight

GreatApe wrote: »

So your reason for sending kids to university is so they do not commit crime?

Do you have any evidence that the same temperament kids who go and do not go have different crime levels?

And even if it were the case can you prove that £80k in media studies reduces crime more than £80k spent on security/police measures?

Grasping at straws

It really doesn't cost £80k to put someone through a media studies course. If you're talking about marginal cost then try £9k - £12k.


Even if it were £80k I would have thought spending that on an individual so they don't have a marginally cheaper life being locked up would be worth it. But then that's because I'm one of these dreadful Lefties you keep hearing about who has this terrifying notion that people are more important than money.


Not a popular sentiment on here.

GreatApe

Arklight wrote: »

It really doesn't cost £80k to put someone through a media studies course. If you're talking about marginal cost then try £9k - £12k.

Even if it were £80k I would have thought spending that on an individual so they don't have a marginally cheaper life being locked up would be worth it. But then that's because I'm one of these dreadful Lefties you keep hearing about who has this terrifying notion that people are more important than money.

Not a popular sentiment on here.

The problem with you and most lefties is you see money as just a number and a number that should be hated. When I think of money I think of actual resources

So you think £80,000 why not its worthwhile to stop kids going to jail
I think, £80,000 that equals 2-3 years of human labor. Is it better to allocate 2-3 years of labor to putting kids through university or would we get more value from 2-3 years of labor spent instead on healthcare or housing or pensions etc or any other need/want the people need

economic

Arklight wrote: »

It really doesn't cost £80k to put someone through a media studies course. If you're talking about marginal cost then try £9k - £12k.


Even if it were £80k I would have thought spending that on an individual so they don't have a marginally cheaper life being locked up would be worth it. But then that's because I'm one of these dreadful Lefties you keep hearing about who has this terrifying notion that people are more important than money.


Not a popular sentiment on here.

if you had a life threatening illness and the only option of a treatment was at a cost of £1m to give you a full recovery, do you expect the state to pay for it all?

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

The problem with you and most lefties is you see money as just a number and a number that should be hated. When I think of money I think of actual resources

So you think £80,000 why not its worthwhile to stop kids going to jail
I think, £80,000 that equals 2-3 years of human labor. Is it better to allocate 2-3 years of labor to putting kids through university or would we get more value from 2-3 years of labor spent instead on healthcare or housing or pensions etc or any other need/want the people need

i think you need to dumb down the responses to him as otherwise he really won't get it.

Arklight

GreatApe wrote: »

The problem with you and most lefties is you see money as just a number and a number that should be hated. When I think of money I think of actual resources

So you think £80,000 why not its worthwhile to stop kids going to jail
I think, £80,000 that equals 2-3 years of human labor. Is it better to allocate 2-3 years of labor to putting kids through university or would we get more value from 2-3 years of labor spent instead on healthcare or housing or pensions etc or any other need/want the people need

That's funny because I would say the exact opposite. It's typically the Right that sees money as a number, apparently unaware that it actually only buys labour. As the working classes typically do most of the labour some of them found it unfair they got so little of the money.


I have some doubts that any money the Tories (I assume we're talking about them as Labour aren't going to spend less on Education, it's woefully underfunded now) cut from Education would go anywhere other than into tax breaks for the Tories.


If there were some concrete guarantee that money moved from some degree programmes would be moved to housing or health or anything else that would benefit the country I might reappraise my thoughts.


As it stands, the more graduates there are, the more Labour, Green and Lib Dem voters there are, and you'll get more of these things anyway.

GreatApe

economic wrote: »

i think you need to dumb down the responses to him as otherwise he really won't get it.

Sadly most people dont understand

Sometimes even I have to revert to trying to think of first principles
The way I imagine things is the UK is a army of 32 million workers.
We allocate a certain number to healthcare, a certain number to transport a certain number to agriculture etc etc etc

We can indeed spend more on healthcare, but fundamentally it means moving part of this workforce from something else to healthcare. The problem with the left is they seem to think we can just spend more without impacting anything else.

With regards to students of our 32 million army of workers about 600,000 of them are allocated to keeping the students feed/watered/housed/educated. If we shrink the number of students in half that frees up 300,000 people who could be put towards heathcare or building homes or well anything really. The question is not are these 600,000 of our workforce in higher education adding any value, sure, the question is would they be adding more value elsewhere and the answer is the marginal allocated worker to education would likely be better allocated elsewhere

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

Sadly most people dont understand

Sometimes even I have to revert to trying to think of first principles
The way I imagine things is the UK is a army of 32 million workers.
We allocate a certain number to healthcare, a certain number to transport a certain number to agriculture etc etc etc

We can indeed spend more on healthcare, but fundamentally it means moving part of this workforce from something else to healthcare. The problem with the left is they seem to think we can just spend more without impacting anything else.

With regards to students of our 32 million army of workers about 600,000 of them are allocated to keeping the students feed/watered/housed/educated. If we shrink the number of students in half that frees up 300,000 people who could be put towards heathcare or building homes or well anything really. The question is not are these 600,000 of our workforce in higher education adding any value, sure, the question is would they be adding more value elsewhere and the answer is the marginal allocated worker to education would likely be better allocated elsewhere

This is easy to understand. I just dont get why others dont understand this concept.

It's probably a lot to do with IQ. If you are able to think logically and think outside the box then i think you are able to get it.

economic

TO assume everything is "free" is very naive. This is what the left think. Everything has a cost and an opportunity cost. The left have no idea about opportunity cost.

A few weeks back i watched question time and Diane Abbott was on. She kept going on and on about how with low interest rates we should just borrow and spend. The left really have no clue how much they are destroying the economy.