Are degrees in the UK value for money?

economic

If anything needs to change its the education system and tax system. Higher tax payers pay too much tax IMO. Watch the economy boom if there was a flat income tax rate say 20% for everyone. This can be partly paid for by the scrapping of tuition funding and privatization. The rest will be more then paid off by the increase in productivity and innovation.

GreatApe

One of the main reasons why the free markets work better is because in free markets you have many more small businesses and self employed. These tend to be much more productive than the large businesses and state

The reason the soviets did so poorly was because they were all employees of the state.
It is interesting to read actual stories from actual Russians who post about what it was like in the soviet union. Things like the state employing people to run restaurants and they workers there would just lock the door and often just not open for business at all. Why not they get paid the same if they serve 5 customer or 500 customers. Also workplace theft and 'gifts' aka bribery take the place of barter. You work at a paper mill then you steel lots of paper and hope to be able to trade that paper for other goods or favours you may need

Compare that to the UK or any free market system. A mom and pop self employed couple who run a small cafe they work as hard as they can to get more customers and keep current customers. Competition keeps prices affordable and productivity high so we have lots of restaurants in the uk and many of them do lots of business

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

One of the main reasons why the free markets work better is because in free markets you have many more small businesses and self employed. These tend to be much more productive than the large businesses and state

The reason the soviets did so poorly was because they were all employees of the state.
It is interesting to read actual stories from actual Russians who post about what it was like in the soviet union. Things like the state employing people to run restaurants and they workers there would just lock the door and often just not open for business at all. Why not they get paid the same if they serve 5 customer or 500 customers. Also workplace theft and 'gifts' aka bribery take the place of barter. You work at a paper mill then you steel lots of paper and hope to be able to trade that paper for other goods or favours you may need

Compare that to the UK or any free market system. A mom and pop self employed couple who run a small cafe they work as hard as they can to get more customers and keep current customers. Competition keeps prices affordable and productivity high so we have lots of restaurants in the uk and many of them do lots of business

This is why government and typically the left have never worked in the private sector. They will never understand or be able to do well in it. They are the classic B grade students who were not the brightest and jealous of the A students so they end up working in the public sectors like government.

Arklight

I had thought we were having a grown up discussion, but it seems to have been taken over by fantasists and skivers who, judging other people by their own standards, assume everyone else is a fantasist and a skiver.

Andy_L

economic wrote: »

we have laws in place to give employees the right to take a certain number of sick days a year

what law is this & how many days does it give me the right to take off?

westernpromise

economic wrote: »

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.

In their terms they're right. Everything is free because you make other people pay for it.

Leftism is being generous with other people's money. They expect to gain personally from higher taxes, not lose, because they'll be higher taxes on other people. They demonise the people they rob because obviously if you hate someone, anything you do to them is legitimate.

Borrowing is especially evil. This hands the bill for leftism to people not yet born.

Arklight

westernpromise wrote: »

In their terms they're right. Everything is free because you make other people pay for it.

Leftism is being generous with other people's money. They expect to gain personally from higher taxes, not lose, because they'll be higher taxes on other people. They demonise the people they rob because obviously if you hate someone, anything you do to them is legitimate.

Borrowing is especially evil. This hands the bill for leftism to people not yet born.

From the people gloating about skiving off work and taking sickies when they aren't sick, or sitting around on smuggled laptops watching !!!!!! when they should be working - for months on end.


Economic, as well as not having a shift key, doesn't even work because he can't be bothered.

GreatApe

Arklight wrote: »

From the people gloating about skiving off work and taking sickies when they aren't sick, or sitting around on smuggled laptops watching !!!!!! when they should be working - for months on end.

Economic, as well as not having a shift key, doesn't even work because he can't be bothered.

Thumbs up for making me laugh :rotfl:

And no I have never watched !!!!!! while at work.
I had my own net for you tube and my own laptop which was much faster than the old work laptop for coding

Cakeguts

economic wrote: »

Open university offers a wide variety of courses via distance learning. Why not have more services like this?

http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/atoz

The institutions needed to offer courses in media studies, fashion, photography etc are already available. These courses are so incredibly easy that they could be done as evening classes. They have to be easy otherwise the students who pick them would never pass the courses.

If you added these courses to the local evening class courses available students could pay the evening class fees and do them part time at the local college. They would fit in very well with courses in jewelry, art and design etc at the local college as an adult evening class. You could do quite a lot of courses like this. The benefit of this would be that students could work in the day and do the degrees in the evening. That would mean that they could pay for their courses as they do them so no debt to the student and no debt to the taxpayer. It would be good for everyone because the students wouldn't have any debt, they would have got work experience and when they had finished their useless degrees they wouldn't have to worry about getting job because they would already have one. This would also mean that some of the dud universities could be closed saving taxpayers a lot of money. We could probably get rid of about 75 straight away universities doing this.

One of the things about doing a useless degree is that it doesn't matter how long it takes to complete because you aren't going to be able to use it for anything. So 6 years at evening class once a week wouldn't make any difference to the end result. Plus a first class useless degree in no more useful than a 2:2.

Arklight

Cakeguts wrote: »

The institutions needed to offer courses in media studies, fashion, photography etc are already available. These courses are so incredibly easy that they could be done as evening classes. They have to be easy otherwise the students who pick them would never pass the courses.

If you added these courses to the local evening class courses available students could pay the evening class fees and do them part time at the local college. They would fit in very well with courses in jewelry, art and design etc at the local college as an adult evening class. You could do quite a lot of courses like this. The benefit of this would be that students could work in the day and do the degrees in the evening. That would mean that they could pay for their courses as they do them so no debt to the student and no debt to the taxpayer. It would be good for everyone because the students wouldn't have any debt, they would have got work experience and when they had finished their useless degrees they wouldn't have to worry about getting job because they would already have one. This would also mean that some of the dud universities could be closed saving taxpayers a lot of money. We could probably get rid of about 75 straight away universities doing this.

One of the things about doing a useless degree is that it doesn't matter how long it takes to complete because you aren't going to be able to use it for anything. So 6 years at evening class once a week wouldn't make any difference to the end result. Plus a first class useless degree in no more useful than a 2:2.

Of the people I know who did Media Studies at a "dud" university as you would probably call it:

• One is a manager in an editing studio and runs a team of 4 people
• One has just made his own film and is promoting it
• One is a successful photographer and has now started directing ads you will see on television
• One is a director who has just stepped down from being the Chief exec of a production company to work for the BBC, his Facebook is quite interesting because he gets a lot of selfies with people that you probably only see when you're trawling the Daily Mail sidebar
• One spent some time working for the NME and is now a talent scout

They all worked bloody hard in their degrees and bloody hard when they graduated, often doing long, barely paid internships.


Maybe if you tried doing the same rather than complaining ceaselessly on the internet about people you know nothing about doing degrees you don't understand, you wouldn't be quite as mentally constipated as you appear to be?