Are degrees in the UK value for money?

GreatApe

Take an example of a boy deciding to go to university or not

Going to university for a 4 year course
£9,250 tuition x 4 = £37,000
£8,430 (£11,002 inside London) Maintenance Loan x 4 = £33,720 (£44,008 inside London)
Loan costs +3% above inflation for 4 years adding ~£5,440 to the cost outside London
So £76,160 outside London and £87,240 inside London

Deciding against university instead deciding to work for 4 years

60th percentile median full time earnings for 18-21 year olds = £17,577 x 3 years
50th percentile median full time earnings for 22-29 year olds = £24,342 x 1 year
£77,073 in lost gross earnings over the 4 years
£65,536 in lost post tax earnings over the 4 years

If you look at just tuition + interest on tuition + post tax earnings = £37,000 + £2,857 + £65,536 = £105,393

Also important considerations

If you are able to live at home and save £5,000 per year on rent that is another £20,000 in your pocket and you are more likely to be able to stay at home if you get a job rather than move across the country to go to a university

You have 4 years work experience and a lot of savings that will earn you a return. Eg you could buy an average 3 bed terrace for £120k with a 50% deposit and rent one of the rooms out which will cover the mortgage and bills. Your pal with the degree needs to live in a HMO or shared house and has £76k+ debt. At age 22 you have zero housing costs while the grad has £500 pm housing costs. While he has to save up to one day buy a house while paying you £500 pm rent for your spare room house prices are also going up by inflation of 2.5% a year so you are another £2,400 better off than him for each year he has to save up his deposit.

GreatApe

GunJack wrote: »

The maths I get, it's the logic that's flawed....
Current rates These rates are for the National Living Wage and the National Minimum Wage. The rates change every April.

Year 25 and over 21 to 24 18 to 20 Under 18 Apprentice
April 2017 £7.50 £7.05 £5.60 £4.05 £3.50
So, roughly,
16-18 = £8k p.a.
18-20 = £10.5k p.a.
21 = £14k pa.

So your typical 16-y-o school-leaver will earn around £53k gross in 5 yrs.. not only does this blow your's and ape#s arguments out of the water, it also blows his "an 18-y-o worker can save £8k or whatever it was a year" argument about buying a house...

Like I said, you aren't living in the real world...

Most people get paid more than min wages, here is the actual data for 2017

GreatApe

GreatApe wrote: »

Most people get paid more than min wages, here is the actual data for 2017

Looking at that it is reasonable to say someone who could marginally get into university but decides not to could earn the 60th percentile at ages 18-21 and then fall to the 50th percentile (median) at age 22

If you do that you get 4 year lost gross earnings of £77,100 or net earnings post tax of £65,500

Actually it would probably make sense that they would earn the 70th percentile for ages 18-21 and the 60th percentile for age 22 but I dont want to confuse windy & co with why just now

Cakeguts

The point is that the population has not got cleverer. It is still going to be a few at the top who are very intelligent and more at the bottom who are less able. So all that has happened is that the middle have now got qualifications called degrees. Because people have not become more intelligent for people in the middle to have qualifications called degrees those qualifications have had to be made easier or no one would pass them. The top degrees from the top universities are going to being done by the same level of intelligence as they always were.

What has happened is the middle and bottom have been scammed into thinking that what used to be called something else but is now called a degree will get them a better future. Of course this is total rubbish because there is only a small percentage of jobs that need someone to have a degree and those jobs go to the people from the top universities as they always have.

So if you are going to get a B for your A levels you are going to go to a university where your qualification will be called a degree however your university is likely to be a technical college that is now called a university and your degree will be the same level of education that it was when the place was a technical college but in a subject that doesn't lead to a job. You will not get the same level of job as you would have done had you gone to a technical college and you will start work 3 years later. So you have loss of earnings of 3 years and they wouldn't be minimum wage because your technical college qualification is likely to have been a vocational one meaning that you will be starting a job that you already have a qualification in. So by having a university that used to be a technical college you are causing students to pay for their education and lose 3 years of wages. What this means is that the middle to bottom students can't ever get jobs that reflect the length of time they have studied for because 21 is too late to start entry level jobs. The decent ones are mopped up by people who start work at 18. No one is going to want to train a 21 year old when they can get an 18 year old.

In terms of a job there is no difference in intelligence level between an 18 year old with A levels and a university graduate so unless the university graduate has studied a degree that helps them to get a job they will have just wasted 3 years. So if there is no difference in intelligence between an 18 year old with A levels that have BBB grades and downwards and a graduate that started from BBB entry grades what is the point of the degree? The degree is only worth doing if you can learn a lot in a short time and that needs people with high A level grades. As or A*s there are people with 5 A*s at A level. People who get BBB at A level have already demonstrated that they can't learn a lot in a short time or they would have got better A level results.

Degrees didn't used to be a means to getting a job they were higher education. People who wanted to learn more. However historically very few people had degrees because few people went to university so it appeared that having a degree meant that you would earn more. The reason why they appeared to earn more was because of the percentage of people going to university there were a lot of degrees in vocational subjects like architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, medicine, veterinary medicine, dentistry, chemistry, geology etc. Many of the people who studied non vocational degrees did not get a better job for having a degree. So what has happened is that the parents of today's students are assumng that having a degree will mean their children will have a better future and this is part of the huge con that is going on.

Only degrees from the top universities will lead to a graduate level job. All others might lead to what is called graduate training but actually doesn't need a degree it is just a way of sorting out the students. Many of the so called graduate training schemes could have been done by someone with a technical college diploma because that is the level of some of the degrees. All that has happened is that the name of the qualification has changed the level of education is the same or worse. People who don't understand this also don't realise that they are being scammed by the education system in the UK

So starting from the fact that most degrees are the same level as technical college diplomas because people haven't got more intelligent why are people having to spend two extra years at school to get to the standard required to start the course? School education has been dumbed down and that is why it takes longer this is also part of the scam because it means that students are paying for education that they used to get at school.

Also working from the point that the population has not got more intelligent in order to get more students through school exams something has to change. The intelligence level of the population hasn't changed so therefore the only thing that can have changed are the exams. The exams have been dumbed down so that more people pass them. So A levels have to be now significantly easier or most people would not pass them.

So you have to have A levels to go to university. The only way to get the number of people through A levels in order to get them to pay for their education is to dumb down the A levels.

To those people who say I haven't given examples there are examples from the school where they put all of the German GCSE students in to the exam at age 15 and they all got A* Which they say wouldn't have happened with O levels because they were much harder. Also the maths course where they did GCSE maths at 15 then the AS level at 16 followed by a year of something else in maths to fill the time and then A levels in the final year. They did this after GCSEs were introduced because the GCSEs and the A levels were being dumbed down from the O levels and A levels.

Then there is the company where a secretary did the GCSE chemistry paper and would have got an A just from writing letters about chemical products. They would not have passed O level because they actually didn't know anything about chemistry. The same company used to take people for training if they had got A levels with one A they then had to increase this to only people with 3 A levels at grade A because the A levels had got easier and everyone got an A and they could not longer tell who knew enough to do the training.

Since then A levels have got easier and easier every year. There are now O level questions on A level papers. That started about 10 years ago and has got increasingly common.

Now we have a massive con going on. People are being conned into thinking that if they go to a university that used to be a technical college, teacher training college arts college and get a degree it will be better than the diploma or certificate that used to come from those colleges before they changed their names. It won't be. The same cut of the population go to these universities. The only difference is what the qualification is called and the fact that is has taken longer to get and it is much less likely to lead to a job.

The fact that so many people have got qualifications called degrees means that now having a degree is worthless unless it has come from a top university so nothing has changed in job terms.

Until parents and students get the message that paying to go to most universities at age 18 means that they are being conned nothing will change. Parents and students should be complaining about the dumbing down because this is costing them £1000s that they didn't used to need to pay for and there is no extra benefit.

Criminals who use distraction to steal money are not nearly as successful as the UK education system that can con unintelligent parents and students out of £1000s in fees and lost wages. The distraction in the education system consists of changing the name of a qualification and dumbing down exams. This makes it look as if the school education has got better and people are getting more qualifications but of course this hasn't happened. What has happened is that people are getting to roughly the same place in their education 3 years later. How on earth can this be better??

Students who now get a B at A level would have failed A level at the time when degrees were unusual. So because of that they won't get to a university that will make a difference to their job. They would not have done A levels what they would have done was gone to college and got a vocational qualification. Techincal colleges were local you lived at home and got the qualification for free instead of going onto 6th form. Now they finish up paying for 3 years to arrive at the roughly the same place 3 years later. This is not fair on the students they are being conned. In fact they are being conned out for 3 years of fees and 3 years of living expenses and 3 years of wages.

Until students and their parents wake up to this con it will continue and unfortunately it is the less able students and parents who don't realise that it is a massive scam.

economic

The higher education system is driven by herd mentality (nearly all students chasing degrees) facilitated by the uk taxpayer (through student loans) and companies (through requiring degrees for "grad" jobs).

Cakeguts

What makes me very sad it that the people who don't realise what is going on are not university material. So it only works because the less intelligent don't realise what is going on. The intelligent students realise what is happening and only go to university if they can get into a top one. If they can't they tend to do apprenticeships instead. Some of the apprenticeships ask for higher A level grades as requirements than many of the universities.

It is the less able students and their parents who are being taken in by all of this. If all the students who couldn't get at least 3 As at A level refused to attend university and went straight to work they would get exactly the same level of job as they do with a degree because the degree makes absolutely no difference. Some of them might even get better jobs because companies would be more prepared to train them at 18.

SingleSue

GreatApe wrote: »

I do have a degree but I did not benefit from it I was mostly self taught as a guess I did not go to 90% of lectures or tutorials

You'd not get away with that at middle and youngest's universities. At youngest's, lectures, supervisions and workshops are compulsory and if you miss one (or are late), they want a blooming good reason why. At middle son's uni, you may get away with missing the odd lecture but not the majority.

GreatApe

SingleSue wrote: »

You'd not get away with that at middle and youngest's universities. At youngest's, lectures, supervisions and workshops are compulsory and if you miss one (or are late), they want a blooming good reason why. At middle son's uni, you may get away with missing the odd lecture but not the majority.

Why is it 'getting away with that'? I still managed to get 70-100% on most my papers

And it wasn't just me, as a guess the lectures seems to be only about 1/3rd full if that so 2/3rds found them surplus to needs.

economic

SingleSue wrote: »

You'd not get away with that at middle and youngest's universities. At youngest's, lectures, supervisions and workshops are compulsory and if you miss one (or are late), they want a blooming good reason why. At middle son's uni, you may get away with missing the odd lecture but not the majority.

Your kids' universities sound just like school. At university, students should not need to be "told off" if they miss lectures or workshops. It should just be simply reflected in their eventual grades (or not as the case maybe).

Probably 90% of the lectures i attended i hadn't a clue what the lecturer was talking about. I was just there to take down notes. I would then later understand it.

There is no need to pay 9k a year to study most subjects when you can just download lecture material and form study groups with fellow students to share ideas and help others. You can have the "lecturers" designate some time in their timetable to help out students. I bet the "lecturer" will find himself bored as hardly anyone will make use of it.

economic

Remember university degree courses are just a business for the universities. You pay them 9k a year and they sell you a degree. To be told off for not attending lectures etc is just silly. I really hope once a huge group of recent grads realise they have been miss sold that they get together and sue the universities they attended.