Are degrees in the UK value for money?

economic

SingleSue wrote: »

I believe I have already put that in the post but it is safe to say he is one of those who is above the level where you start paying back your student loan.

As I have said previously, this was a very competitive graduate scheme (in part because of the renumeration and further training/qualifications they offer). He had to endure months of interviews, tests, exams, personality profiles etc before he was selected, at one point he thought it was never going to happen as there were graduates from much better universities than he had attended and from better backgrounds.

Despite the wait and the hoop jumping, he was never without a wage as he just continued with his summer job (which he had been doing since he was 16 and was minimum wage) until he started in his 'proper' job.

Maybe his determination to succeed made the difference, maybe it was his tenacity or his mature nature due to being a young carer but whatever it was, it has worked out for him and for that, yes he does believe that he has been extremely lucky.

this does not mean the degree was worth the money spent on it. be careful of survivorship bias.

SingleSue

It was worth it for him as it enabled him to move out of home and get his own place, has enabled him to start building savings, has enabled him to escape a minimum wage job and as he will be paying back his loan and paying more tax and national insurance than he would have been otherwise, worth it for others.

Ok, degrees are expensive nowadays (too expensive, especially at his uni where even the most basic of things were not provided and had to be funded by the students directly to be able to do their course) but there was no other choice. The difference between what he is earning and what he could have been earning had he not done his degree equates to more than the tuition fee loan each year.

N.B My initial post today regarding my son was in answer to the post that you made saying that none of those doing 'useless' degrees will be paying any of it back, not the value of it. I posted to refute that view but did balance that with acknowledging that he was one of the lucky ones.

Cakeguts

Arklight wrote: »

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?

Equally to balance all of this there will be people who have got this far without the degree.

I know someone who works as a freelance photographer in advertising who dropped out of university while on an unrelated course. Never did a course in photography. Dropping out of university (yes it was a dud) was the best thing they could have done.

You keep saying I don't know anything about these universities and courses but I have done part time courses at two universities in the last 15 years. One was a major dud. I went there on a part time course fill a place for the full time students to get more experience and because there was something in it for me. The major dud university had so many students drop out each year on most of the courses because the students didn't pass the exams (most of which were about the standard of a 1970s O level) that the university was forced to run a music course which was very expensive to run and a hospitality course so that they could keep off the bottom of the league tables in courses passed. The music students nearly all passed all of the exams and so the did the hospitality course students. Most of the other courses had really high drop out rates.

Hospitality is a technical college course. There is no reason why it has to be a university course.

The music course was a complete waste of time for music students because the standard of everthing about it was so low. You could get people passing modules on it who had never studied music at school but who had read up about it and played an instrument as a hobby and they knew more than the students.

The other university was an ex poly and the standards were higher but not as high as they used to be at that same place in the early 80s. That was the university where I found a 3rd year doing a harmony exercise that I did for A level. So that music course could be compared to a degree in maths where in the 3rd year they had just reached the level of an 1970s A level. What good is that? What level was the A level that they used to get into the place? This is recently not in the distant past.

Your example of 5 people means that the country only needs one media studies course run at a technical college somewhere. The country doesn't need all the dud universities to run the courses that lead the students to nothing.

Another thing you don't seem to have realised. If you go to a dud university and you have to work hard to get the degree you shouldn't be at university. The degrees at these universities are really really easy. The photography degrees are really really easy. They are time filling hobby courses made redundant now by digital cameras. These are not fine art degrees in photography they are literally courses where you learn how to take snapshots. The kind of photographs that many of my friends can do without having a degree in photography.

There is a university about a mile from where I live that UK students avoid having to go to because it is so bad. They run art and design courses. I expect there is a photography course as well. The students work is displayed on fence alongside the university campus. It is about the same standard as the work students were producing on a City and Guilds course for adults that I attended several years ago.

GreatApe

SingleSue wrote: »

It was worth it for him as it enabled him to move out of home and get his own place, has enabled him to start building savings, has enabled him to escape a minimum wage job and as he will be paying back his loan and paying more tax and national insurance than he would have been otherwise, worth it for others.

Ok, degrees are expensive nowadays (too expensive, especially at his uni where even the most basic of things were not provided and had to be funded by the students directly to be able to do their course) but there was no other choice. The difference between what he is earning and what he could have been earning had he not done his degree equates to more than the tuition fee loan each year.

N.B My initial post today regarding my son was in answer to the post that you made saying that none of those doing 'useless' degrees will be paying any of it back, not the value of it. I posted to refute that view but did balance that with acknowledging that he was one of the lucky ones.

Presumably that job position would have existed had your boy gone or not gone to university.

In which case your boy having attended university didn't create for the country higher paying more productive job positions

Taking things further would your boy have faired better or worse if instead of 45% going to university 90% went?


Only 10% of the jobs that exist in the country need higher level education.
When you push university attendance past that point you just get inflation. Already more than half of graduate are in non graduate jobs. And even the half that do have graduate jobs half of them are jobs that wouldn't have been considered degree necessary jobs a generation ago.

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

Presumably that job position would have existed had your boy gone or not gone to university.

In which case your boy having attended university didn't create for the country higher paying more productive job positions

Taking things further would your boy have faired better or worse if instead of 45% going to university 90% went?


Only 10% of the jobs that exist in the country need higher level education.
When you push university attendance past that point you just get inflation. Already more than half of graduate are in non graduate jobs. And even the half that do have graduate jobs half of them are jobs that wouldn't have been considered degree necessary jobs a generation ago.

In the future world of AI and big data, i wonder if you will need a degree to push buttons?

economic

I am learning Python programming. All self taught. Whilst i have a degree in maths which helps, it certainly isnt easy coming from a non computing background.

If i can self learn Python myself (to a pretty decent level within 4-5 months), people can self learn (by doing online course) in photography, media studies, women studies, David Beckham studies, and a whole host of other degrees.

Cakeguts

economic wrote: »

I am learning Python programming. All self taught. Whilst i have a degree in maths which helps, it certainly isnt easy coming from a non computing background.

If i can self learn Python myself (to a pretty decent level within 4-5 months), people can self learn (by doing online course) in photography, media studies, women studies, David Beckham studies, and a whole host of other degrees.

It would be interesting to find out how many of the people doing these silly degrees would suddenly find that they had lost interest in the subjects when they found out that they were not actually going to get to go to university to study them and would be doing them online. I suspect the popularity of studying these subjects would drop overnight.

It would be interesting to see what happened to school new student recruitment when the schools had to advertise that 99% of their A level students had gone on to study degrees online and 1% had actually gone to university? Especially if parents understood that the online degrees didn't lead to jobs.

economic

Cakeguts wrote: »

It would be interesting to find out how many of the people doing these silly degrees would suddenly find that they had lost interest in the subjects when they found out that they were not actually going to get to go to university to study them and would be doing them online. I suspect the popularity of studying these subjects would drop overnight.

It would be interesting to see what happened to school new student recruitment when the schools had to advertise that 99% of their A level students had gone on to study degrees online and 1% had actually gone to university? Especially if parents understood that the online degrees didn't lead to jobs.

Its a classic bubble that has been allowed to form and self feed onto itself.

Taxpayer funding for degrees
-> More useless degrees
-> More employers require a degree for filtering
-> more demand from students (also schools encouraging this too)
-> Politicians see more votes if they provide more funding for degrees
-> Taxpayer funding for degrees
-> AND THE CYCLE REPEATS

This must have been going on for decades from labour and conservatives hence the existing bubble as we see it today.

Windofchange

economic wrote: »

I am learning Python programming. All self taught. Whilst i have a degree in maths which helps, it certainly isnt easy coming from a non computing background.

If i can self learn Python myself (to a pretty decent level within 4-5 months), people can self learn (by doing online course) in photography, media studies, women studies, David Beckham studies, and a whole host of other degrees.

But hang on a minute, Python is 5th in the list of the top 12 most in demand programming languages:

https://www.techworld.com/picture-gallery/careers/uks-top-12-most-in-demand-programming-languages-3612638/

"Python is an easy-to learn language and provides a stepping stone into the world of programming." Bless its little cotton socks.

I reckon we should scrap all python courses as it is obviously a substandard mediocre programming language, and force everyone to learn proper coding such as Java or C+. What is the point in wasting time letting people study it when it is only middle of the table for earnings? Get rid of all python courses! Out with the rubbish!

GreatApe

Windofchange wrote: »

But hang on a minute, Python is 5th in the list of the top 12 most in demand programming languages:

https://www.techworld.com/picture-gallery/careers/uks-top-12-most-in-demand-programming-languages-3612638/

"Python is an easy-to learn language and provides a stepping stone into the world of programming." Bless its little cotton socks.

I reckon we should scrap all python courses as it is obviously a substandard mediocre programming language, and force everyone to learn proper coding such as Java or C+. What is the point in wasting time letting people study it when it is only middle of the table for earnings? Get rid of all python courses! Out with the rubbish!

If you were paying for him to study it you could be justified in making such an argument

For the kids that pay their own way, or their parents do, it doesn't bother me if they spend their university years learning to be circus acrobats I dont care at all. If they are spending £80k in public funds to learn lion taming then I would say that money is better spent on hiring 3 nurse years

Also even if it is #5 in demand that still is probably a few orders of magnitude more in demand than photography or media studies or even law students