Are degrees in the UK value for money?

silvercar

Jackieboy wrote: »

Hopefully the UK HE system hasn't yet sunk so low that the bottom third of the class has any change of achieving a degrtee in any subject whatsoever!

You'd be surprised. The idea of student life for 3 years vs low paid employment is an attractive option.

Conrad wrote: »

A typical client profile of mine;


+ Aged 45, low educational achievement
+ Business owner - roofing contractor or lighting contractor for example
+ Owns a £1.5m detached house with small mortgage
+ Owns 2 or more further properties
+ Investing is part of their DNA - they never stop exploring new investment ideas
+ Real disposable income £10 - £15 k pm
+ Tax return income ('net profit' / 'salary and dividends') £70k pa


Don't take too much notice of official income statistics when musing about whether graduates earn more over a lifetime

Totally accept your point, but I'm not sure it is so easy for current 20 year olds.

michaels

Jackieboy wrote: »

Since when has Imperial been a "middle of the road college" or Physics a "useless course"?

Either this is double irony or try rereading the post you commented on with an irony detector enabled

Conrad

silvercar wrote: »

Totally accept your point, but I'm not sure it is so easy for current 20 year olds.

I see clients in their early 20's building self employed business' and getting on with life, they don't have the slightest flicker about boomer generations and such like, they just accept reality and crack-on.


House prices are higher relative to income these days, but honestly I see plenty of people not letting this phase them, and of course unlike me, they don't face average 7-8% interest rates in their 20's

SingleSue

westernpromise wrote: »

It pretty much has actually.

When we had O Levels and CSEs, the former were sat by fewer than 50% of candidates. We now send 50% of da yoof to university from which it follows that some kids who would have been thought of in the past as CSE material - in the bottom half of the class - are now considered university material. Special universities of stupid have been set up to accommodate them.

http://www.justcourses.com/Courses/University_of_Northampton/F8WM-Wastes_Management_and_Dance/348206-1-0.html

No, that course is not a joke.

Some of those ARE university material at the right school/college.

Youngest, written off prior to GCSEs so did mainly foundation ones (equivalent to the old CSE), now a triple A* equivalent student at A level with a nickname of brainbox after moving to a college ranked outstanding and redoing a year of GCSEs. He said in one particular subject that he learned more in less than 6 weeks than he had in the entire 2 year course at his old high school.

He wasn't just in the bottom third of the class, he was in the bottom class in the year at his old high school (it's where they put all the statemented ones regardless of intelligence).

Thank goodness the college powers that be could see past the reports and see that spark, on paper they should never have accepted him but (as told to me by one of them), there was just something about him that made them take that chance.

Jackieboy

Conrad wrote: »

A typical client profile of mine;


+ Aged 45, low educational achievement
+ Business owner - roofing contractor or lighting contractor for example
+ Owns a £1.5m detached house with small mortgage
+ Owns 2 or more further properties
+ Investing is part of their DNA - they never stop exploring new investment ideas
+ Real disposable income £10 - £15 k pm
+ Tax return income ('net profit' / 'salary and dividends') £70k pa


Don't take too much notice of official income statistics when musing about whether graduates earn more over a lifetime

If it's that easy, Conrad, one has to wonder why you're still sitting in an office arranging people's mortgage's.;)

Cakeguts

SingleSue wrote: »

Some of those ARE university material at the right school/college.

Youngest, written off prior to GCSEs so did mainly foundation ones (equivalent to the old CSE), now a triple A* student at A level with a nickname of brainbox after moving to a college ranked outstanding and redoing a year of GCSEs. He said in one particular subject that he learned more in less than 6 weeks than he had in the entire 2 year course at his old high school.

He wasn't just in the bottom third of the class, he was in the bottom class in the year at his old high school (it's where they put all the statemented ones regardless of intelligence).

Thank goodness the college powers that be could see past the reports and see that spark, on paper they should never have accepted him but (as told to me by one of them), there was just something about him that made them take that chance.

This is a reflection of teachers making assessments about medical situations that they don't know anything about. It also reflects the poor quality of teaching in some schools. Most parents don't check where the degrees of today's teachers come from. The lower the rating of the university the greater the chance of the teacher not being able to problem solve.

You should see what a bad school with uneducated teachers can do to someone with a mental illness. Lot of decisions appear to be made by non medically trained teachers on the education of someone who who has a medical problem.

Cakeguts

Voyager2002 wrote: »

Some bizarre examples: Falmouth was for long one of the very best Art colleges in the UK, so courses related to its traditional strengths are likely to be of very high quality (although I have no opinion about the subjects added when it was reorganised fairly recently); Keele is a long established post-war university with a solid reputation across most subjects. This demonstrates the main point of the post, that most people (and certainly most school-leavers) have no idea how to identify the good and poor universities

As a college of art is was probably like my Poly somewhere worth going to. It is now a university of stupid. Somewhere you go if you can't get into anywhere else to do anything. Another institution where converting to a university has done for it. It now runs hobby courses but charges university fees for them.

Cakeguts

westernpromise wrote: »

It pretty much has actually.

When we had O Levels and CSEs, the former were sat by fewer than 50% of candidates. We now send 50% of da yoof to university from which it follows that some kids who would have been thought of in the past as CSE material - in the bottom half of the class - are now considered university material. Special universities of stupid have been set up to accommodate them.

http://www.justcourses.com/Courses/University_of_Northampton/F8WM-Wastes_Management_and_Dance/348206-1-0.html

No, that course is not a joke.

I wonder if the dustbin emptying companies realise that their workers could turn up for work in leotards?

chris_m

Cakeguts wrote: »

I wonder if the dustbin emptying companies realise that their workers could turn up for work in leotards?

Presumably, the Can-Can becomes the Trash-Trash-Can-Can

:rotfl:

GreatApe

Jackieboy wrote: »

Since when has Imperial been a "middle of the road college" or Physics a "useless course"?

Its a massively outdated way to learn when you sit in a lecture hall with 250 others and you have one guy at the blackboard doing his thing. You cant stop him you cant talk or debate. About half the kids (often the lessor half) would spend the hour or two just copying out what the lecturer was writing. This was a waste as no information or learning was happening just photocopying. The other half of the students were a mix of those who did not care and those who already knew the stuff being lectured on as they read the material before hand.

So overall I will stick with my view that it was a middle of the road university. The reason the kids there do quite well is simply because the college can take the cream at A-Levels. When they only take in triple A students they could put them in a tent with a kerosene lamp and a cell phone and the kids will still more or less get the same grade at the end of the year despite no lectures or tutorials.


As for physics being a useless course it really is for about 95% of those who study it.
It is perhaps very useful for society to have lots of kids study physics in the hope that a few of them will push the boundaries of science and discovery further but for the individuals doing it its largely a waste of time and resources as they are not going to become one of those 1/1000 that will push things forward