Are degrees in the UK value for money?

justme111

Anybody can explain what is the difference between universities and polytechnics?

happyandcontented

Cakeguts wrote: »

Basic education has got to be done at school. You can't get a good education at any university unless you have reached a minimum standard at school. The universities that offer easy degrees cannot make up any education that hasn't been acquired at school. In any case why should tax payers pay for this twice. Tax payers pay school teachers to educate ALL children not just the ones who come from backgrounds that make it easy. Tax payers should not be expected to pay staff at university to do the job that should have been done at school.

What needs to happen is that no one should be allowed to train as a school teacher unless they have a 1st class degree from a university where the entry requirements are at least 3 As at A level.

How does that sit with the fact that there was excellence in teaching way before a degree was required?

Also, to require those qualifications you would need to make teaching salaries on a par with what that calibre of graduate can achieve elsewhere.

Standards in education have slipped because of government policies, inadequate parenting and a general societal decline, not just, or even mainly, poor teaching. Teachers teach to the curriculum required, which is now narrower and more prescribed than ever before. Yes, there are bad/poorly equipped teachers who should be weeeded out, but the majority of the blame for the state of education today lies elsewhere.

CLAPTON

justme111 wrote: »

Anybody can explain what is the difference between universities and polytechnics?

there are no polytechnics in the England

Cakeguts

justme111 wrote: »

Anybody can explain what is the difference between universities and polytechnics?

There aren't any now they are all called universities. However polytechnics ran vocational courses. So if you went to a polytechnic you did a course that would help you to get a job in the subject you studied. They tended to run courses where one year was spent in the industry that the course was designed to help a student get a job in. University courses were academic courses or vocational courses like medicine. So a university would run a vocational courses for things like medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine etc and polytechnics ran courses like hospitality, business studies etc.

Now that the are all called universities it is more difficult to find the vocational courses that are not medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine etc because you have to know which universities used to be polytechnics or which universities are now running vocational courses. It was easier when these vocational courses were all in the same institutions called polytechnics.

Tabbytabbitha

Cakeguts wrote: »

This may be the case but we have now got people with university degrees who are less well qualified than people without degrees who have gone down the apprenticeship route. What many people have forgotten is that a degree is an academic qualification it isn't a qualification of competence in a particular job. For job qualifications you need an apprenticeship. To be a cabinet maker you need to be apprenticed to a cabinet maker. You cannot learn how to be a cabinet maker from studying furniture from books and photographs at university.

I don't think anybody's forgotten that because most of us know that this isn't the point of university study. It's always been the case that one does a fairly generalised undegraduate degree and then go on to post graduate vocational study.

Tabbytabbitha

justme111 wrote: »

Anybody can explain what is the difference between universities and polytechnics?

I'm pretty sure I posted this already but, when polys existed (which they haven't for years), they were teaching instititions rather than research/study institutions. That distinction has blurred over the years but still has relevance today.

AnotherJoe

"Are degrees in the UK value for money?"

not for this chap I'd say https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5598193

Tabbytabbitha

AnotherJoe wrote: »

"Are degrees in the UK value for money?"

not for this chap I'd say https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5598193

But would he have the job he has, which he says he enjoys, if he weren't a graduate?

westernpromise

I did jobs in my 20s that I didn't enjoy because I was looking 20 years ahead and reckoning there would be a return later on the drudgery now. So it has proven. I know several people - Mrs Promise's siblings - who did fun jobs they enjoyed in their 20s and who are now as poor as church mice. They are also bitterly envious of me and feel it is unfair that they are skint and I am not.

If you are on 16k a year as an archive assistant for a council in the north east and you enjoy it that's lovely, but you and your family will miss out on a great deal if the most important thing to you is that you have a lovely little job that you enjoy. Things like homeownership, travel, reliable cars, bedrooms they can personalise, pets - stuff like that.

But still, as long as he enjoys his job that's what counts.

zagubov

Tabbytabbitha wrote: »

I'm pretty sure I posted this already but, when polys existed (which they haven't for years), they were teaching instititions rather than research/study institutions. That distinction has blurred over the years but still has relevance today.

Quite so. They were highly respected HE institutions almost always in industrial cities which specialised in teaching degrees in applied subjects. They usually carried out less research than universities.

The Northern Irish one was also a university.The others (in England and Wales) converted to universities in the 1990s. This meant they could award their own degrees and include the protected term University in their titles. It almost doubled the university sector overnight.