Are degrees in the UK value for money?

GreatApe

westernpromise wrote: »

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.

Oh and about faking results to confirm to known values or outcomes that is sadly rife even at university level and even R&D labs. That is why peer review is necessary to confirm results were not faked or exaggerated.

I dont think chemistry was too bad on learning the lingo, you did have to know the names of a lot of compounds but there were rules to it so you did not need to remember the 1000s (or whatever it was) compounds names you just had to remember half a dozen rules which would allow you to name a compound. You may have missed that, I had a !!!! teacher for chemistry and I missed it for about one term thinking how the frack am I going to remember all these names but going through the books myself a huge weight was lifted when I realized it was just a few rules to remember something the teacher should have made much more clear.

kabayiri

economic wrote: »

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

I was at Hull where they invented lcd.

Didn't mean we would dominate the market though, did it.

economic

kabayiri wrote: »

I was at Hull where they invented lcd.

Didn't mean we would dominate the market though, did it.

That was in the 60s. Where did hull university place in the university rankings back then?

kabayiri

economic wrote: »

That was in the 60s. Where did hull university place in the university rankings back then?

Dunno. Before my time

It's alright innovating, but it's the next stage where I think we struggle.

Cakeguts

economic wrote: »

That was in the 60s. Where did hull university place in the university rankings back then?

It was one you went to if you couldn't get into a better one in the 70s.

Cakeguts

westernpromise wrote: »

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

Keele is like Oxford compared to Luton.

Cakeguts

It was a university in west London where someone on a music course got a Bmus where performance was part of the course and they couldn't tune their instrument or play it in tune. They then went on to do an Mmus. So two bits of paper worth nothing. That university is 79 in the Complete University Guide. Keele is quite a lot higher.

From this you can see that anything further down than 79 is offering bits of very expensive bits of paper to people who do easy courses that you can pass without being able to do anything or know anything about what you are studying.

So 79 to 129 complete and utter waste of time and money going to. Turning out students who can't do anything at all after 3 years. Holiday camp 3 years.

You may have to be able to do a bit of something to get into Keele as opposed to nothing in the lower ones.

Cakeguts

economic wrote: »

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.

There is now a lot of money invested by big property companies in purpose build student accommodation. If a Labour government offers free university fees that is one thing but are they also going to ask taxpayers to pay for the new student accommodation. It is not cheap.

https://www.mystudenthalls.com/student-accommodation/london/ Just look at this. How much would you have to raise taxes by to pay for all this? I wonder if the current students would be happy to pay this much tax for new students to get what they paid for free?

economic

Its simply a huge mis-allocation of capital. Imagine what we can do with the wealth instead of being wasted in the higher education system.

zagubov

Keele's a solid university, and now has a medical school as has Hull. A country this size has to have a wide base of solid universities.

Let's stop pretending otherwise.