Are degrees in the UK value for money?

zagubov

Let me get this right.
We've almost the highest fees in the world and we want the rest of the UK to do the same?
We've got the shortest bachelors degrees in the world and we want them shortened even more?
Education's only incidentally about preparation for work. People on here seem to be confusing it with job training.

Cakeguts

GreatApe wrote: »

You do realize that by doing that you devalue the lower tiers of education?

If the average kid of 100 IQ goes to university then you are setting up a system where the employers feel/think that those with just A-levels are below average and those with just GCSEs below even them

So you have set up a system which roughly seems to translate as

80 IQ = only GCSE
90 IQ = only A-levels
100 IQ = lower End university
110 IQ = higher end university
120 IQ = Masters or PHD or one of the top 5-10 universities at BSci

Whereas in 1987 it may have been

80 IQ = few low grade O-levels
90 IQ = middle grade O-Levels
100 IQ = good grade O-Levels
110 IQ = A-Levels
120 IQ = university


So in your haste to make the world a better more fair place what you have done is make supermarkets go from hiring 110 IQ students with A-Levels as middle managers to hiring 110 IQ students with university degrees. You just added £60k debt and three or four years of lost time and earnings to the kids

You say the economy has changed the nature of work has changed more and more employers want/need degrees. No all you did was inflate the value of education so someone in 1987 with 5 O-Levels now has to go to university and spend another 5-6 years at school to get the same types of jobs in 2017

This is a disaster a huge waste of time resources capital debt and people.
You have literally chosen inflating the egos of kids and parents by pretending that this generation is massively smarter than their parents so deserve degrees in place of hiring 500,000 more NHS doctors and nurses.

That is exactly what has happened and it is so unfair on the lower IQs because in a way the high IQs will get where they need to be anyway. But it entirely exploits the lower IQs because they get drawn into the paying for the university staff and raising the league tables of their schools so that their teachers keep their jobs paying for everyone in wasted time and money without getting any benefit themselves.

In 1987 they would have gone to technical college at age 16 and got training for a job all for free. Now they leave school at 18 spend three years at university and leave at around age 21 with something called a degree which is worth less to them than the qualification from the technical college. It is the less to them that is important.

Arklight

zagubov wrote: »

Let me get this right.
We've almost the highest fees in the world and we want the rest of the UK to do the same?
We've got the shortest bachelors degrees in the world and we want them shortened even more?
Education's only incidentally about preparation for work. People on here seem to be confusing it with job training.

It's the nature of this forum. It is myopically obsessed with money and thinking inside the box. The idea that education might offer something of value other than an eventual income tax receipt is anathema to most of the posters.

Arklight

Cakeguts wrote: »

That is exactly what has happened and it is so unfair on the lower IQs because in a way the high IQs will get where they need to be anyway. But it entirely exploits the lower IQs because they get drawn into the paying for the university staff and raising the league tables of their schools so that their teachers keep their jobs paying for everyone in wasted time and money without getting any benefit themselves.

In 1987 they would have gone to technical college at age 16 and got training for a job all for free. Now they leave school at 18 spend three years at university and leave at around age 21 with something called a degree which is worth less to them than the qualification from the technical college. It is the less to them that is important.

Both of you are making sweeping assumptions about the correlation between IQ scores and educational attainment that there simply isn't any reliable data to support.


Again.

Arklight

Cakeguts wrote: »

Actually that makes it worse not better. You are saying that people who can only get into low ranked universities have to work hard to get degrees that are basically worth nothing. It would actually be much better for them to work hard at a job or some form of training and become something.

The point is that if you got to a top university and you work hard and you get a good degree then you will get more opportunities with that degree than if someone much less intelligent works hard for a degree from a university low in the league tables. This is extremely unfair on the people who can only get into the universities at the bottom of the league tables. They work equally hard, pay the same fees get a degree and then find out that there are no opportunities for them because their qualification doesn't count. What makes this worse is that often no one has told them that this will be the outcome.

The fair thing to do would be to not have the the universities in the middle to bottom of the league tables called universities and to instead turn them into technical colleges.

It is the comparison between levels of degrees that is so unfair. If only people who got As or A*s went to university and everyone else went on training courses or apprenticeships it would allow most people to get a qualification that gave them opportunities related to the qualification. They could become something and be proud of what they had achieved.

When I hear an adult say that they had decided that their degree was worth less than the envelope the certificate came in it makes me feel sad for them. They have been exploited. They only find this out after they have done the degree. No one tells them before they start. They are being used. They are being used to pay university workers. Why should unintelligent people be exploited in this way?

It really isn't fair for the universities to use people in this way. It is always the less able students for who this is the least fair.

If someone is going to spend time doing their best and working hard then they should get a reward for their hard work not a qualification that they feel is worth less than the envelope it came in.

Then you would be on here moaning about people going to technical colleges when they should be doing some mythical apprenticeships, and how their lives are blighted by having a degree from a technical college even though the higher end courses there are more robust than the soft subjects at civic universities.. Which is why polytechnics were rebranded.


Anyway, I think this debate has more than played itself now. In answer to the OP, if degrees aren't value for money it's down to the individual student experience, the quality of the teaching, and the facilities, which differs in different places.


If it's about leading to a high paying job, well, you take your chances like with everything else.

westernpromise

I like the idea that Arklight has some airmiles that the state could simply take off him, in the cause of fairness.

Even if they were never used, social justice has been served by taking them away from him. Previously he had airmiles and others didn't; now nobody has airmiles, which is completely 100% fair.

I like this plan. I wonder if he has anything else that the state deserves more than he does and should therefore confiscate? Kleptocracy works so well in Africa.

Cakeguts

Arklight wrote: »

Then you would be on here moaning about people going to technical colleges when they should be doing some mythical apprenticeships, and how their lives are blighted by having a degree from a technical college even though the higher end courses there are more robust than the soft subjects at civic universities.. Which is why polytechnics were rebranded.


Anyway, I think this debate has more than played itself now. In answer to the OP, if degrees aren't value for money it's down to the individual student experience, the quality of the teaching, and the facilities, which differs in different places.


If it's about leading to a high paying job, well, you take your chances like with everything else.

The point about technical colleges was that they were local, free and the education started at 16 and the terms were the same as school terms. What we have now are institutions that offer the same level of education as a technical college but are not free, are not local and run courses for only part of the year.

A technical college course didn't have the long summer holidays of a university course so to get to the level of what is now called a degree would only take two years. So at 18 you had what is now called a degree but in a vocational subject and you could start work at 18 not 3 years later with a non vocational subject.

The people who are seriously losing out are the ones who can't get 3 As or A*s at A level. Their degrees don't offer them as many opportunities as the people who get into the top universities.

What is needed are courses and apprenticeships that offer more opportunities for the people who can't get into top universities not what we have at the moment that just exploits them for their money to pay for the courses that are of no use to them.

Linda_D_2

No of course degrees in the UK aren't value for money but at least the majority of fees are never paid back due to the chances of a well paid job being very small.

How it could be anything different when there's a huge lack of skilled jobs in this country? We live in mininum wage job Britain.

zagubov

GreatApe wrote: »

but it did not dispearse the kids out it concentrated them

If the kids just got a job age 16 they probably just stayed local so their demand for goods and services stayed local

now the kids are going to universities in large numbers, everywhere which does not have a university suffered a population drain to the areas which did have universities.

The population of inner London has gone up more than outter London over the last 20 years partly because of the student boom. Kids like me from north London went to live in Zone 1. Kids from far and wide came to live in Zone 1.

Yes that's true. Many even came from abroad as everywhere's heard of London. However, all my friend's kids are off around the country to Exeter, Manchester and elsewhere. Years ago they would have had a few big English cities to go to. Now there are many more places.

For London, neighbouring towns like Chelmsford, High Wycombe, Bedford, all have unis. Most counties have them now (I'm not claiming they all do, but the vast majority must have).

Locals may not go to them but people from the big cities may go there. The desire to leave town to go to uni elsewhere is a very positive aspect of the uni experience. I expect a lot of the students want to reinvent themselves and experience somewhere new and fresh to them.

We're all stuck in the past with our old-fashioned ideas that kids are born to large families out in the countryside who then move into the big city to escape the constraints of country life. Let's get real. This is a massively urbanised country. Most kids are being born in small families in big cities and towns. Spreading the HE experience around as many places like that as possible is the way forward.

economic

zagubov wrote: »

Yes that's true. Many even came from abroad as everywhere's heard of London. However, all my friend's kids are off around the country to Exeter, Manchester and elsewhere. Years ago they would have had a few big English cities to go to. Now there are many more places.

For London, neighbouring towns like Chelmsford, High Wycombe, Bedford, all have unis. Most counties have them now (I'm not claiming they all do, but the vast majority must have).

Locals may not go to them but people from the big cities may go there. The desire to leave town to go to uni elsewhere is a very positive aspect of the uni experience. I expect a lot of the students want to reinvent themselves and experience somewhere new and fresh to them.

We're all stuck in the past with our old-fashioned ideas that kids are born to large families out in the countryside who then move into the big city to escape the constraints of country life. Let's get real. This is a massively urbanised country. Most kids are being born in small families in big cities and towns. Spreading the HE experience around as many places like that as possible is the way forward.

So from you are saying universities are like holiday camps for 3 years where students get to experience the local area? And get into 50k worth of debt for? Do you not see anything wrong with that?