Are degrees in the UK value for money?

kabayiri

I think we need to go back to a more fundamental examination of what the future skills mix tomorrow's prosperous UK society would need.

The below is of course IMO.

Increasingly, you just need 5% of the work force who are so-called 'black hats' and a then a large bunch of implementers.

It's the 5% who deliver the real value. A relatively small number of visionary people saw what Google could become; the invention of the iPod or smart phone was down to a small select few; ebay was a relatively simple idea, well implemented, and with truly global scale.

Anybody who has done computer chip design will soon realise it's quite a lot of drudgery after the initial design spec. You don't need a 3 year degree for drudgery.

I still believe genetic engineering; advanced materials management; so-called AI; robotics; these are the fields which will have massive wide scale commercial impact.

..you will have your own lists

westernpromise

jamesmorgan wrote: »

Within a year or two it is clear who are the high-flyers. There was very little correlation between the type of university and who these high flyers were. The skills required to be successful in business are much broader than those developed within a typical university degree.

On balance, though, the better the university the better you do. Russell Group graduates make £200k more over their working life than non-Russell Group graduates, and Oxbridge graduates make another £200k above that. Not all graduates go into business, unless you count law or medicine (for example) as business.

In individual cases, however, what you say can absolutely be true. Where you went to university and what you studied were largely beyond your control when you were 15 and making the choices that led you there.

• You may have been unlucky and been taught by Oxbridge rejects who became class warriors and told kids that Oxbridge was not for the likes of them.
• Your school might have had a headteacher who thought that mediocrity was a perfectly adequate standard of attainment.
• Your teachers may have ignored the top (who'd pass no matter what) and bottom (who'd fail no matter what) of the class, and focused on getting the middle from grade D to grade C.
• You may have been advised to do completely the wrong A Levels. Cambridge, for example, specifies that stupid subjects don't count; so if you did French, German and General Studies, you'd be insta-rejected as having only two A Levels.

So where and what you studied may not be an accurate indicator of potential. This of course is why we interview people.

westernpromise

Cakeguts wrote: »

When I did my A levels (also 200 years ago) there was a particular aspect of the A level music course that you had to be able to do. About 5 years ago I was doing a part time course at an ex Poly level university department and there was a student who had been assigned the same thing as I did for my A level. I was a bit surprised but even more so when I found out that they were in the 3rd year of a 4 year degree course.

This is ubiquitous. A few years ago I found the scholarship exam papers I sat for entrance to a reasonably well known greater London independent school. The Latin paper was a translation from Plutarch and also tested ablative absolutes and the use of the gerund and gerundive. The French paper tested the use of the conditional mood and the past historci and expected you to know vocabulary such as cr!puscule and robinet. The maths paper included trigonometry and quadratic equations. And so on. We were 13 and we did trigonometry when we were 12. My Maths AO Level aged 15 included calculus . This is now A Level syllabus material.

My daughter is 14 and has not even heard of any of these. In many ways the education she is getting is better - there is a lot more travel and use of local resources like the London museums - but she will take A Levels a year older than I was and the content will be less. I would say that empirically, and yes my sample size is small, the A-grade A-Level student of 200 years ago is in many subjects about where a second-year Russell Group university undergraduate is now.

jamesmorgan

westernpromise wrote: »

On balance, though, the better the university the better you do. Russell Group graduates make £200k more over their working life than non-Russell Group graduates, and Oxbridge graduates make another £200k above that. Not all graduates go into business, unless you count law or medicine (for example) as business.

In individual cases, however, what you say can absolutely be true. Where you went to university and what you studied were largely beyond your control when you were 15 and making the choices that led you there.

• You may have been unlucky and been taught by Oxbridge rejects who became class warriors and told kids that Oxbridge was not for the likes of them.
• Your school might have had a headteacher who thought that mediocrity was a perfectly adequate standard of attainment.
• Your teachers may have ignored the top (who'd pass no matter what) and bottom (who'd fail no matter what) of the class, and focused on getting the middle from grade D to grade C.
• You may have been advised to do completely the wrong A Levels. Cambridge, for example, specifies that stupid subjects don't count; so if you did French, German and General Studies, you'd be insta-rejected as having only two A Levels.

So where and what you studied may not be an accurate indicator of potential. This of course is why we interview people.

One of the advantages of a university education is that it encourages you to dig under the surface and analyse cause and effect and not jump to conclusions. When adjusted for A-level performance, the so called Russell group premium is shown to be statistically insignificant (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/russell-group-earnings-boost-statistically-insignificant/2006680.article#).

In other words brighter students tend to earn more whichever uni they attend The university they go to doesn't seem to have any effect (in fact non-RG pre-1992 universities seem to do 2% better than RG). Having had a number of family members go to both non-RG and RG (including Oxbridge) I'm not overly surprised. A university's reputation and the quality of the education they provide are two very different things.

Jackieboy

westernpromise wrote: »

This is ubiquitous. A few years ago I found the scholarship exam papers I sat for entrance to a reasonably well known greater London independent school. The Latin paper was a translation from Plutarch and also tested ablative absolutes and the use of the gerund and gerundive. The French paper tested the use of the conditional mood and the past historci and expected you to know vocabulary such as cr!puscule and robinet. The maths paper included trigonometry and quadratic equations. And so on. We were 13 and we did trigonometry when we were 12. My Maths AO Level aged 15 included calculus . This is now A Level syllabus material.

My daughter is 14 and has not even heard of any of these. In many ways the education she is getting is better - there is a lot more travel and use of local resources like the London museums - but she will take A Levels a year older than I was and the content will be less. I would say that empirically, and yes my sample size is small, the A-grade A-Level student of 200 years ago is in many subjects about where a second-year Russell Group university undergraduate is now.

I don't think you actually mean that.

If you say 50 years ago, I'd agree and have argued this many times, based partly on my degree level study in the 70s and 90s. In the French degree I did in the 90s, at the end of the second year we were on approximately the same level as when I did A level in 1970.

westernpromise

Well, except that "the so-called Russell Group premium" originates from the Russell Group's research, so it is not exactly "jumping to conclusions", while the research you've cited originates from two individuals at non-Russell Group universities (Lancaster and Kent) and was commissioned by the state around the time it introduced tuition fees and needed evidence that they were always worth paying.

So their conclusions are not wholly unexpected, in the same way that if they had been asked whether Lancaster and Kent were second-rate universities, we also know what they would have said (constructively that's what they were asked).

The point is that going to a Russell Group university is the best available proxy indicator for the type of skills that tend to mark out those equipped to be successful. As I noted before, there may be reasons why not everyone so equipped attended a Russell Group university and it may be worth spending the time to identify those if you can.

westernpromise

Jackieboy wrote: »

I don't think you actually mean that.

If you say 50 years ago, I'd agree and have argued this many times, based partly on my degree level study in the 70s and 90s. In the French degree I did in the 90s, at the end of the second year we were on approximately the same level as when I did A level in 1970.

I said 200 years because that's what everyone else has been using :-)

But I can recall in the 1970s practising on 1950s O-Level papers and being aghast.

As a colleague of mine once put it, we started out in the 1950s giving candidates the question and the book of log and sine tables. Then we gave them calculators, then we gave them the answers and told them to pick one, and soon we'll give them the actual answer and tell them to agree with it.

Jackieboy

westernpromise wrote: »

I said 200 years because that's what everyone else has been using :-)

But I can recall in the 1970s practising on 1950s O-Level papers and being aghast.

As a colleague of mine once put it, we started out in the 1950s giving candidates the question and the book of log and sine tables. Then we gave them calculators, then we gave them the answers and told them to pick one, and soon we'll give them the actual answer and tell them to agree with it.

I queried it because, obviously, there was no such thing as A levels 200 years ago - there weren't even entrance exams for Oxford it was simply down to being the "right sort" of chap.

Jackieboy

jamesmorgan wrote: »

One of the advantages of a university education is that it encourages you to dig under the surface and analyse cause and effect and not jump to conclusions. When adjusted for A-level performance, the so called Russell group premium is shown to be statistically insignificant (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/russell-group-earnings-boost-statistically-insignificant/2006680.article#).

In other words brighter students tend to earn more whichever uni they attend The university they go to doesn't seem to have any effect (in fact non-RG pre-1992 universities seem to do 2% better than RG). Having had a number of family members go to both non-RG and RG (including Oxbridge) I'm not overly surprised. A university's reputation and the quality of the education they provide are two very different things.

And, of course, the whole point of the Russell Group is that it's about research which can be a good thing but in some subjects isn't the be all and end all of HE - it was certtainly never intended to be synonymous with university excellence.

Out,_Vile_Jelly

I would advise a teenager today to only go to university if it's a STEM subject at a decent university, or if it's to study something vocational that they're passionate about ie midwifery or veterinary nursing.

I know an enthusiastic but not overly bright teenager who wants to do Politics at Portsmouth. I think this will be mostly a massive waste of money.