Are degrees in the UK value for money?

Cakeguts

Lingua wrote: »

Depends on the degree. Good luck doing a lab experiment at home.

For primarily theoretical degrees, there's a reason the Open University is popular for part-time study

Lingua

I have done a science course with the Open University that included lab experiments done at home.

zagubov

In some countries, the education isn't the key part, it's the status and snob value of the university.

Successful candidates join the uni, stay until they've had enough and leave.
Nobody asks how they did or if they completed their degree, they just let everybody know they attended and they just wear their university tie to job interviews. I'd hate for this country to have such an elitist attitude.

On the other hand, that's how we used to do it here in the UK. People would go to uni and stay until they felt they knew enough and then they quit.

Part-time study and distance learning would work for many people. What is just as important is that there be summer schools where students studying something online can meet up and exchange ideas. As we're clearly not interested in restoring national service, we need to create opportunities for people to meet others from different areas of the country, for the sake of national cohesion.

SingleSue

Malthusian wrote: »

I went to a top Russell Group university and barely attended lectures in the final year. It was a waste of time - the notes were available online and all the lecturers did was read out the notes. Nobody cared.

It sounds like they really are turning into schools. University students are adults. They should be allowed to not turn up and fail.

They still are...

economic

Cakeguts wrote: »

And people pay £9000 a year for this?? Why not just do the whole thing on line at home?

What degrees really are, are a mechanism by which we can transfer wealth from the taxpayer/student to the university/uni town economy/btl landlords in the uni towns. There is almost 0 added value. That's all it is 90% of the time.

Whilst the left cry for free higher education for all, they also cry about greedy btl landlords. It is the higher education system that leads to the education bubble that has created the greedy btl landlords in these uni towns (and elsewhere as locals are priced out and so have to move elsewhere). Free education will just make the problem worse.

westernpromise

GreatApe wrote: »

Lab work is, do experiment get the results and data and draw a conclusion.

What turned me off sciences at school was that this did not happen.

The way it was taught was profoundly anti-scientific and - in a term I did not then know - anti-empirical. That is, the answer was known in advance, and you wrote up the results of your experiment accordingly. If the result of mixing one thing with another was supposed to be a white precipitate, you wrote up in your exercise book that you had duly obtained a white precipitate. You wrote this whether you had done so or not, and if you had not, then your result was not explained but explained away, or more simply ignored. You didn’t experiment and write up what you found; you ignored your own results in favour of the established answer.

As well as writing up observations you had not made, you were also expected to swallow the “it just is” explanation for everything. A staple of physics lessons was to be presented with a series of circuit diagrams, in which some arrangement of wires, batteries and bulbs made a circuit. You then had to say which bulb came on if you connected the circuit. To me the answer to this was obvious: every bulb would come on for an instant, as the electricity passed it. It would then go out again as the current reached a dead end and could no longer move. The current did not know, when it set off down a cul-de-sac, that it was a cul-de-sac; so should not every bulb fleetingly be lit?

I never got a good explanation at school of why this reasoning was wrong. At university five years later, a physics undergraduate finally explained it to me properly: the current is the individual electrons in the conductive material, and the battery simply sets them into circular motion. A bulb in a dead end would not illuminate because there is no way for the electrons to move to anywhere. Rather than seeing the set up as I did, as being like a model train layout, it is better understood as a system of water pipes, with the battery as a pump and the bulbs as water wheels. If the circuit were water, what wheels would turn if the pump were to be switched on? Seen in that light, bulbs in dead ends would never come on.

This made perfect sense, but nobody thought to proffer this explanation at the time. The explanation was “it just is”. White light was another example. We were informed that white light is a mix of all the colours. To prove this, the physics teacher projected three colours of light onto a white board and asserted that where they overlapped, the resulting m!lange of colours made white light. No it didn’t. It made green.

I was also impatient with what seemed to me the sloppiness of the language used in science. We were taught about how oxygen combined with things to make oxides, but then the terms oxide and oxidation seemed to be used where there was no oxygen involved. Substances were called salts even when there was no sodium chloride involved. It all seemed as arbitrary as a foreign language, but less useful.

I've frequently needed to understand French, German (and even Latin when in Venice or Romania on business). I've frequently needed to write a grammatical sentence. I've never, ever needed to know that this mush plus that mush make a white precipitate.

GreatApe

westernpromise wrote: »

What turned me off sciences at school was that this did not happen.

The way it was taught was profoundly anti-scientific and - in a term I did not then know - anti-empirical. That is, the answer was known in advance, and you wrote up the results of your experiment accordingly. If the result of mixing one thing with another was supposed to be a white precipitate, you wrote up in your exercise book that you had duly obtained a white precipitate. You wrote this whether you had done so or not, and if you had not, then your result was not explained but explained away, or more simply ignored. You didn’t experiment and write up what you found; you ignored your own results in favour of the established answer.

As well as writing up observations you had not made, you were also expected to swallow the “it just is” explanation for everything. A staple of physics lessons was to be presented with a series of circuit diagrams, in which some arrangement of wires, batteries and bulbs made a circuit. You then had to say which bulb came on if you connected the circuit. To me the answer to this was obvious: every bulb would come on for an instant, as the electricity passed it. It would then go out again as the current reached a dead end and could no longer move. The current did not know, when it set off down a cul-de-sac, that it was a cul-de-sac; so should not every bulb fleetingly be lit?

I never got a good explanation at school of why this reasoning was wrong. At university five years later, a physics undergraduate finally explained it to me properly: the current is the individual electrons in the conductive material, and the battery simply sets them into circular motion. A bulb in a dead end would not illuminate because there is no way for the electrons to move to anywhere. Rather than seeing the set up as I did, as being like a model train layout, it is better understood as a system of water pipes, with the battery as a pump and the bulbs as water wheels. If the circuit were water, what wheels would turn if the pump were to be switched on? Seen in that light, bulbs in dead ends would never come on.

This made perfect sense, but nobody thought to proffer this explanation at the time. The explanation was “it just is”. White light was another example. We were informed that white light is a mix of all the colours. To prove this, the physics teacher projected three colours of light onto a white board and asserted that where they overlapped, the resulting m!lange of colours made white light. No it didn’t. It made green.

I was also impatient with what seemed to me the sloppiness of the language used in science. We were taught about how oxygen combined with things to make oxides, but then the terms oxide and oxidation seemed to be used where there was no oxygen involved. Substances were called salts even when there was no sodium chloride involved. It all seemed as arbitrary as a foreign language, but less useful.

I've frequently needed to understand French, German (and even Latin when in Venice or Romania on business). I've frequently needed to write a grammatical sentence. I've never, ever needed to know that this mush plus that mush make a white precipitate.

You probably had a !!!! teacher sadly lots of crap teachers exist.

Even a wire on an open circuit gets charged up when you apply a voltage but the amount of charge to reach the voltage will be very small virtually insignificant
The bulb of course wouldn't go on as you won't be putting enough energy in to heat it up sufficiently to make it glow. Actually you wouldn't even heat much at all you would be mostly storing charge on the filament of the bulb but techniquely you are probably correct all the bulbs 'go on fleetingly' if by that you some measure of current flows inside it. A better example might be a capacitor its an open circuit but since it has a huge surface area it hiods a decent amount of charge so you can get a good amount of current flowing through that to charge it up even though it is a 'dead end cul de sac'

Salts in chemistry iirc just mean ionic compounds. Sodium chloride is just table salt one of the many salts. Probably just a quirk of the English language. Perhaps also becuaee a lot of Ionic compounds look like table salt

White light is typically shown by using a prism splitting sunlight into a rainbow of colours. Never heard of anyone trying to combine three different colours and create white light. Also interesting the sun isn't yellow it is white just looks yellow once past the atmosphere. Superman would have been a weakling on earth no yellow sun to power him up

Science should be seen as a hobby we need a few people who really love it doing it but not many
Its doesn't really have any practical uses in the world of work or life outside of very rare cases
You often read things like the nation needs more people studying engineering or physics or chemistry. If so why are so few of them employed in roles that actually use their degrees?

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

You often read things like the nation needs more people studying engineering or physics or chemistry. If so why are so few of them employed in roles that actually use their degrees?

This is what i have been wondering as well. i think the reason is that we realise the importance of these subjects in terms of future innovation. The innovation that has occurred over the past 1 or 2 decades have been concentrated in computing. There has been little/none in engineering, biotech, space etc.

The problem is by far the majority of future innovators are going to be those with high IQs going to one of the top 5 unis in the world and doing a Phd. they are the ones that dont need to be told at a younger age they should consider physics etc. The future innovators will most likely already know they will study something closely related to it.

Average joe who is ok at physics and decides to do it at Luton uni, is almost unlikely going to make any difference to the world and will almost certainly find the degree useless in his eventual job.

westernpromise

GreatApe wrote: »

You probably had a !!!! teacher sadly lots of crap teachers exist.

Even a wire on an open circuit gets charged up when you apply a voltage but the amount of charge to reach the voltage will be very small virtually insignificant
The bulb of course wouldn't go on as you won't be putting enough energy in to heat it up sufficiently to make it glow. Actually you wouldn't even heat much at all you would be mostly storing charge on the filament of the bulb but techniquely you are probably correct all the bulbs 'go on fleetingly' if by that you some measure of current flows inside it. A better example might be a capacitor its an open circuit but since it has a huge surface area it hiods a decent amount of charge so you can get a good amount of current flowing through that to charge it up even though it is a 'dead end cul de sac'

Salts in chemistry iirc just mean ionic compounds. Sodium chloride is just table salt one of the many salts. Probably just a quirk of the English language. Perhaps also becuaee a lot of Ionic compounds look like table salt

Science should be seen as a hobby we need a few people who really love it doing it but not many
Its doesn't really have any practical uses in the world of work or life outside of very rare cases
You often read things like the nation needs more people studying engineering or physics or chemistry. If so why are so few of them employed in roles that actually use their degrees?

I never had a decent science teacher ever. They were all bad. I got As in everything else including Maths so I figure the problem was indeed the teaching.

Sometimes I wonder if the answer might have been to teach chemistry to someone like me like it's a language. Rather than wasting my time with experiments that didn't work just explain that there are a load of arbitrary rules and vocabulary and you just brute-force learn them.

westernpromise

economic wrote: »

Average joe who is ok at physics and decides to do it at Luton uni, is almost unlikely going to make any difference to the world and will almost certainly find the degree useless in his eventual job.

Although there is that bloke at Apple who designed the iPod and went to Keele, which is for thickoes.

economic

westernpromise wrote: »

Although there is that bloke at Apple who designed the iPod and went to Keele, which is for thickoes.

When i say innovator i mean inventing new better ways to engineer buildings, cure for cancer, more efficient space travel etc etc.

Designing the iPod is just designing the casing to enclose all the electrical technology that had already existed, to make the ipod function.