Are degrees in the UK value for money?

CKhalvashi

Andy_L wrote: »

A nursing degree is already a 50/50ish split of practical on-the-job training & academic work.

As are other medicine-based qualifications.

The practice in some areas needs to link into theory. My mother works for the NHS (not nursing) and I wouldn't like the idea of being the patient of someone doing certain jobs within her wider department without knowing both the theory and practical elements.

At the same time with her qualifications and years of experience, she has medical students shadowing her for part of the year (as I'd imagine some nurses and most departments have in most University Trusts), which saves the NHS the money of having doctors trying to explain things to students while getting the job done (although extra non-clinical time is given to account for this).

I think £66k is an extremely good use of taxpayer money for this type of qualification, however I'd like to see the old bursary system brought back, possibly with a range of apprenticeships on the condition that those training will be working for the NHS for a fixed period of time in order to reduce a theoretical bond payment that must be paid to leave the NHS within a certain timeframe.

Cakeguts

It is going to be difficult to change anything until parents realise that the vast majority of the degrees that people get these days are not the difficulty or quality of the ones that they remember their own parents saying that successful people had. A degree used to be a sign the someone had had a good quality education. Now it often means that someone has wasted 3 years doing something that used to be done at school before the age of 18. It isn't just the waste of money. What is more important is the waste of time. That time could be better used in some form of training and qualification in an actual job.

economic

here is an example of a university and the courses they offer. the university if not a great one (probably one of the worst in the uk) and they offer undergrad degree courses in things like photography and social work where you pay 9k a year just like all courses. this is 9k a year for 3 years at least wasted. not only is the university bad, the courses are all a waste of time and money. how ridiculous is this?

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/courses

EDIT: most these courses pretty much you could just study it in your spare time during alevels. what is the need to do a 3 year degree in photography???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

adindas

economic wrote: »

here is an example of a university and the courses they offer. the university if not a great one (probably one of the worst in the uk) and they offer undergrad degree courses in things like photography and social work where you pay 9k a year just like all courses. this is 9k a year for 3 years at least wasted. not only is the university bad, the courses are all a waste of time and money. how ridiculous is this?

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/courses

EDIT: most these courses pretty much you could just study it in your spare time during alevels. what is the need to do a 3 year degree in photography???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

If you search there are a lot of universities in the UK are offering likewise subjects. The reason is simple because it is cheap to run. Compare it to medicine, dentistry, science engineering which need laboratories, sophisticated computer with expensive license for specialist simulation software.

The big problem here is that many of these students are not using their own money to study but they are using taxpayers money. Supposed they were using their own money, who care.

Windofchange

GreatApe wrote: »

I would go back to my suggestion. Just give all 18 year olds £30k which they can use for an education or for a deposit on a house or keep it in a word stock tracker. With choice the kids would see more value in buying a house or having a pension. That way the university sector wont cry murder its upto the kids to choose and if they dont choose university then the university industry wont be able to blame the government.

Just

So

Much

Stupid :doh:

I particularly like this in the context of your other post proclaiming that you are very smart.

You've come down from giving all 18 year olds £50k from a few months back, and now you want to give 781,757 18 year olds (based on ONS 2014) £30,000 each.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/february2016

That figure comes out at £23,452,710,000. You then want to do this every year for all 18 year olds, which presumably stays as a reasonably constant figure. Given you are going to spend about a fifth of the entire NHS budget from 2014 on giving 18 year olds a nice bung, how are you going to finance the rest of your economy? Let me guess, those 18 year olds will sell their houses for 100% profit a year later and you'll get <insert number here> times your money back?

I don't know who I feel more sorry for - you or your buddies who keep liking your madness!

Windofchange

GreatApe wrote: »

Earnings are mostly to do with supply and demand there is no need to try and impose a moral value or worth onto jobs if for no other reason than the fact that it is a subjective judgement

Except as you have been told till I'm blue in the face there is a mass shortage of nurses at the moment - i.e. there is very low supply and a lot of demand. The trust I work at, we have 42% of nursing posts unfilled as of the last big meeting. There is an artificial cap on wages. The hospital cannot set the wage, it is capped. There is no supply and demand setting anything.

GreatApe wrote: »

I would say nursing is one of the subjects that really shouldn't need a degree. Most degrees most parts are surplus to requirement just train the nurses on the job in hospitals.

Because basically when you are lying in your hospital bed and need important medicine, you want some spotty 17 year old with a BTEC in nursing giving you your medications of course. If one of your relatives is in ICU, you want Barry the local drug addict altering their ventilator settings and making sure their trache tube is at the correct height. You want someone who doesn't have a GCSE in maths dosing their medication to give say 63mls of sodium chloride an hour out of a 1000ml bag?

GreatApe wrote: »

You could even perhaps hire them at below minimum wage while training. That might sound bad but while at university they are effectively being paid a negative value wage so its a lot better than that.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/21/nhs-bursaries-for-student-nurses-will-end-in-2017-government-confirms

They already are paid exactly nothing, let alone minimum wage. Let's see how that is going. Oh yeah, applications for nursing have fallen by 23%...

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/02/nursing-degree-applications-slump-after-nhs-bursaries-abolished

GreatApe wrote: »

If you take tuition of £9250 + upto £10,702 in living loans you get a cost to the state of £22k a year or £66k + interest over 3 years to train up a nurse

Except it doesn't always take 3 years to train a nurse.

https://www.allnursingschools.com/registered-nursing/degrees/

GreatApe wrote: »

In what way does it make sense to pay someone £22k a year to study nursing when you could just pay them £22k a year to start on the job working 50 hour weeks. Would help solve some of the NHS problems too.

Check you out Jeremy Hunt. So when some knackered student nurse who is at the end of a 12 hours shift to hit your 50 hours per week stipulation kills your relative with an accidental drug overdose you'll give him / her a pat on the back?

GreatApe wrote: »

I think almost all jobs can be learnt by just shadowing someone and its a good quick efficient way to train someone too that way they only need to learn what they need to learn rather than in a degree where 90% of it will never come up in real life.

It is this final paragraph that sums up your ignorance, let alone the rest of the garbage you post on here as fact. What is it they need to learn? Bottom wiping 101 followed by serving Auntie Mildred lunch advanced where you learn how to properly butter bread? Scrap the first sentence, you are beyond ignorant.

economic

Windofchange wrote: »

Just

So

Much

Stupid :doh:

I particularly like this in the context of your other post proclaiming that you are very smart.

You've come down from giving all 18 year olds £50k from a few months back, and now you want to give 781,757 18 year olds (based on ONS 2014) £30,000 each.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/february2016

That figure comes out at £23,452,710,000. You then want to do this every year for all 18 year olds, which presumably stays as a reasonably constant figure. Given you are going to spend about a fifth of the entire NHS budget from 2014 on giving 18 year olds a nice bung, how are you going to finance the rest of your economy? Let me guess, those 18 year olds will sell their houses for 100% profit a year later and you'll get <insert number here> times your money back?

I don't know who I feel more sorry for - you or your buddies who keep liking your madness!

but we spend about about 30k per student anyway right now on university loans (which most likely wont be paid back by someone doing a pointless degree). most of the degrees being pointless, hence it would be better to just give the 30k to the student to do whatever he wants with it.

GreatApe

Windofchange wrote: »

Just So Much Stupid :doh:

I particularly like this in the context of your other post proclaiming that you are very smart.

You've come down from giving all 18 year olds £50k from a few months back, and now you want to give 781,757 18 year olds (based on ONS 2014) £30,000 each.

That figure comes out at £23,452,710,000. You then want to do this every year for all 18 year olds, which presumably stays as a reasonably constant figure. Given you are going to spend about a fifth of the entire NHS budget from 2014 on giving 18 year olds a nice bung, how are you going to finance the rest of your economy? Let me guess, those 18 year olds will sell their houses for 100% profit a year later and you'll get <insert number here> times your money back?

I don't know who I feel more sorry for - you or your buddies who keep liking your madness!

I'm not sure if £30k or £50k would be the better option. The reason I use both is that the lower amount is tuition while the higher amount is tuition & living loans

If we just use the figure of £30k and 700,000 kids (some of the kids wouldn't get anything as they are migrants so there would be a requirement of having live in the UK for at least 15 of your 18 years).

Anyway £30k x 700k people = £21 billion.

However this is not all costs. Half the kids go to university right now so we already spend half the £21 billion on them via their tuition. Half the kids don't pay back their tuition & living loans (assuming £30k tuition + £30k living loans) so that means you need to minus £10.5 billion from the £21 billion figure.

So we have a rough net cost of £10-£11 billion annually.

That is a lot of money but on the other hand you have savings elsewhere
For instance you have now about 200,000 additional people working an extra 3 years of their life paying taxes. Assuming a low £20k per year income that is £3.1k per year in NI and IT which = £9.3k over the additional 3 working years x 200,000 people = approx £2 billion

So our figure drops to £9-£10 billion.

There would also be additional VAT spending as they have more money than students additional council tax paid as they don't get the student discount and earn or can pay. Assuming just £1k a head in VAT payments means another £0.2 billion. Also things like higher corp tax from their additional spending etc.

Overall I think we are looking at a direct cost of about £9 billion a year. Still a lot of money.

But even that will be less than the final bill because you just gave all people entering adulthood £30k a head. That means down the line many fewer poor pensioners so savings in pension credits and other old people means tested costs like housing benefits. Not forgetting if the kids use their £30k to buy a house they will have lower rents and more disposable income for life = higher taxes paid. If they out it into a pension they have £1 million by retirement age = huge amounts if taxes paid in their pensioner years as they have £1 million to spend over just 20 years.

Overall it would in the shirt term cost about £9 billion a year to the government but the youngsters would get £21B a year of value out of it. Longer term it would mean a richer population paying more taxes.

Overall a big net win


Oh and I don't think I'm very smart overall. I am smart at particular things not everything.

Windofchange

economic wrote: »

but we spend about about 30k per student anyway right now on university loans (which most likely wont be paid back by someone doing a pointless degree). most of the degrees being pointless, hence it would be better to just give the 30k to the student to do whatever he wants with it.

So explain where the upfront £24 billion comes from now to give every 18 year old starting uni this past month the cash? I've paid back two student loans, and your assumption we lose it all is nonsense. The nurses that you two bemoan so frequently go straight into jobs starting at £25k a year in London for instance, well over the current repayment threshold, and so start to pay back their loans from month one of qualifying.

How about Dean the motorbike thieving 18 year old with a GCSE in art. You giving him 30 grand? What about Henrietta who's daddy earns 20 million a year in the city? You actually believe that there wouldn't be wholesale civil unrest if you can't find a few quid a month for heating for pensioners in the winter but you can get £24 billion for some teenagers to go on the !!!!!! / start a property portfolio?

GreatApe

economic wrote: »

but we spend about about 30k per student anyway right now on university loans (which most likely wont be paid back by someone doing a pointless degree). most of the degrees being pointless, hence it would be better to just give the 30k to the student to do whatever he wants with it.

You said better than I could rather than my rambling above.

I would only add that we actually give closer to £60k for a 3 year course. £9250 in tuition and up to nearly £11k in living loans which vary depending on if you live at home or rent and if you are in or out of London.

So not only do they not pay back the £30-£40k in tuition but they also don't pay back the £30-£40k in living loans.

Just give the kids £30k a head and let them choose to buy education or spend it on buying a house or putting it into a pension.