Are degrees in the UK value for money?

kinger101

kabayiri wrote: »

I read that 50% of American PHD students are sourced from overseas.

The number would be similar in the UK. EU students are entitled to apply for PhD studentships. And a UK university would bend over backwards to get a non-EU student paying three times the fees.

When it comes to postdocs, there are probably fewer US than overseas students in most US research groups. A US postdoc salary is appalling, but long-term career prospects are better there.

phillw

economic wrote: »

but is it worth 60k in debt? i dont think most degrees are. you can do all that being an apprentice.

You don't get three years of hanging out with mates etc though. So maybe it is worth it, especially if you can avoid paying it back.

kabayiri

I reckon the real losers are the ones who pick the wrong subject or even university in the current climate.

I know friends with sons/daughters carrying at least a full year of uni debt and also a drop out label against them. It's tough, and seasonal work at the local amazon warehouse isn't going to make any inroads.

When it came to DD we had to think about the right kind of University atmosphere which would help her adapt best. Hopefully the plan will work, but until you're some way into your career, you just can't know for sure. It's pure speculation.

Cakeguts

Arklight wrote: »

There are some great courses being offered at poor universities, and some great universities offering poor courses. This is partly why each coure has different tariff requirements, something which seems to have escaped the notice of the armchair experts on this thread.


The ranking of universities is heavily dictated by their research output, which is great, but if you're taught frequently by PhD students because all the glam big name researchers are off doing research, you won't benefit that much.


Even if you study what people on here think is a useless degree, you still end up with an in depth understanding of an academic area, a working understanding of scientific method, and the ability to think for yourself which will benefit you for your entire life.

You have made the mistake of thinking that because I took O levels I don't know anything about standards now. That is a mistake. I have attended part time courses at two universities and at one of them someone was doing a music exercise in their third year that I did for my A levels. So that degree which was a 4 year one reached the educational standard of an old A level. So what standard was the A levels that that student took?

The other university where I attended a part time course had even lower standards than the one where the degrees only reached an old A level standard. Neither of these universities had education levels higher than old A levels one was probably nearer and old O level and that was after 3 years at university. The second one I mentioned is in London and it used to be a technical college. The courses it offers now are still that level of education but it is called a university. Anyone coming out of there with a degree will never get a graduate level job because they simply do not learn enough of anything on any of the courses to be able to cope. There is no point in anyone ever going to that university with the aim of getting a graduate level job because no one is ever going to offer them one.

Cakeguts

SingleSue wrote: »

Not sure how all that works when you have someone who was offered a place at a Russell group uni (an unconditional offer no less) but who then turned it down for what was formerly an amalgamation of a technical and art college. For him it wasn't a silly decision, the Russell group university course was inferior in that it was not accredited (needed for his career choice and the companies he would like to work for) and the content too mild, the campus set up didn't work for him and the city facilities too far away to be workable for him.

His experience so far has been a rigourous academic level with supervisions etc which are usually seen at places such as Cambridge.

On the flip side, a graduate of a former polytechnic which is languishing at the bottom of the league tables beating a whole host of other graduates from much better (league table wise, there were a fair few applicants from Russell group universities), to be taken on in a graduate level job. Which university they attended didn't come into it, it was the classification of the degree and how they performed in the very long and involved interview process.

The point about this is that someone who interviews very well and has a good work ethic will get a job regardless of the degree or university. The fact that he got a place at a Russel group would make him stand out from the students who went to his university because that was the best that they could do.

There is a huge difference between a student who gets 5 A*s at A level and chooses to go to an ex poly because the course suits them better and a student who get CCD for A levels and goes to an ex poly because they can't get into anywhere else. The CCD is like going to university with 3 O levels. There is no way that they can make up the difference between that level of thinking and learning in order to get to the standard of the end of a degree that someone else started with 5A*s.

Cakeguts

Arklight wrote: »

Your inability to understand how a normalised O level was articulated onto standardised GCSEs is not doing you any favours.

As you don't understand what an A Level is (no it is not an A grade O level) you are not in an any way qualified (ironically) to have written the reams of absolute fiction you have made up about higher education.

Full marks for ill informed prejudice and sneering dislike of young and poorer people trying to better themselves though.

I remember GCSEs being introduced and going on courses to learn about them. The music GCSE was easier to pass than the O level music right from the start. You could get a grade C in music without being able to read or write a note of music and without knowing the notes on a piano. Students submitted recordings of them "playing." Basically anyone could get a grade C in GCSE music. It was not the same standard as a grade C at O level. You needed to know a lot more about music history and harmony to pass O level music. For GCSE you need to be able to bang something and record yourself banging it. Someone else I know put a whole class of students into GCSE maths and they all got top grades. I asked if they would all have got top grades in O levels and the reply was that O levels were much harder. This is when GCSEs were first introduced not recently they have got much much easier since then.

Then it was discovered that the gap between GCSE and A level was very big so what happened then? A levels were made easier so that more people could pass them and go to university.

The standards of GCSEs and A levels have got easier and easier and easier which is how we have arrived at the situation where some degrees are now the level of old O levels. The result of this is that students now have to get a masters to get to the same level of education as an old first degree so they get conned out of another year of fees.

Basically education levels have not changed. People still leave the old technical colleges with a technical college level of education. What has changed is that they now go to these technical colleges 2 years later than they did and are expected to pay for the experience and the diplomas and certificates are called degrees. However these "degrees" still lead to the same level of jobs as the old certificates and diplomas did from the old technical colleges but two years later and with a lot of debt. The students though think that they are getting real degrees they don't realise that they are getting the old certificates and diplomas.

People haven't got more intelligent or better at learning. What has happened is that the exams they take have got easier and easier to pass. That is why more people pass them. If A levels are the same standard as they used to be there should never ever be an O level question on an A level paper and students in their third year at university studying music should be a lot further on in their understanding of harmony than someone taking A level when I did mine. If you don't understand basic harmony before you start a music course you can't learn about any of the construction of pieces of music and chord structures and if you can't do that you can't play the music correctly either. So what did those students do for the first two years of that music course? I have no idea it must have started at the point where I had finished my O level music. So they must have got into college with an A level in music that was the same standard as an old O level.

There are really not enough people telling young people the truth about university degrees.

SingleSue

Cakeguts wrote: »

The point about this is that someone who interviews very well and has a good work ethic will get a job regardless of the degree or university. The fact that he got a place at a Russel group would make him stand out from the students who went to his university because that was the best that they could do.

There is a huge difference between a student who gets 5 A*s at A level and chooses to go to an ex poly because the course suits them better and a student who get CCD for A levels and goes to an ex poly because they can't get into anywhere else. The CCD is like going to university with 3 O levels. There is no way that they can make up the difference between that level of thinking and learning in order to get to the standard of the end of a degree that someone else started with 5A*s.

They are two different people, the one who got the Russell group offer has just started university. You are right about the work ethic though as the one who is on the graduate scheme (who didn't get any high ranking university offers) has always had a briliant work ethic and confidence.

SingleSue

Cakeguts wrote: »

I remember GCSEs being introduced and going on courses to learn about them. The music GCSE was easier to pass than the O level music right from the start. You could get a grade C in music without being able to read or write a note of music and without knowing the notes on a piano. Students submitted recordings of them "playing." Basically anyone could get a grade C in GCSE music. It was not the same standard as a grade C at O level. You needed to know a lot more about music history and harmony to pass O level music. For GCSE you need to be able to bang something and record yourself banging it. Someone else I know put a whole class of students into GCSE maths and they all got top grades. I asked if they would all have got top grades in O levels and the reply was that O levels were much harder. This is when GCSEs were first introduced not recently they have got much much easier since then.

Then it was discovered that the gap between GCSE and A level was very big so what happened then? A levels were made easier so that more people could pass them and go to university.

The standards of GCSEs and A levels have got easier and easier and easier which is how we have arrived at the situation where some degrees are now the level of old O levels. The result of this is that students now have to get a masters to get to the same level of education as an old first degree so they get conned out of another year of fees.

Basically education levels have not changed. People still leave the old technical colleges with a technical college level of education. What has changed is that they now go to these technical colleges 2 years later than they did and are expected to pay for the experience and the diplomas and certificates are called degrees. However these "degrees" still lead to the same level of jobs as the old certificates and diplomas did from the old technical colleges but two years later and with a lot of debt. The students though think that they are getting real degrees they don't realise that they are getting the old certificates and diplomas.

People haven't got more intelligent or better at learning. What has happened is that the exams they take have got easier and easier to pass. That is why more people pass them. If A levels are the same standard as they used to be there should never ever be an O level question on an A level paper and students in their third year at university studying music should be a lot further on in their understanding of harmony than someone taking A level when I did mine. If you don't understand basic harmony before you start a music course you can't learn about any of the construction of pieces of music and chord structures and if you can't do that you can't play the music correctly either. So what did those students do for the first two years of that music course? I have no idea it must have started at the point where I had finished my O level music. So they must have got into college with an A level in music that was the same standard as an old O level.

There are really not enough people telling young people the truth about university degrees.

As a parent of a student who 'bangs' an instrument and records himself banging it.....he too needed to be able to read, write and know. Just recording himself was not enough to pass, he had to have the knowledge to back it up too.

He is at university studying music, they were expected to know all of the above prior to starting as they had to hit the ground running rather than be taught the basics in the first year or so.

Maybe he was lucky and was taught the extra without it being required (wouldn't be unusual, happened to eldest son..he spent the first year of his degree waiting for everyone else to catch up to what he had been taught at A level) but then everyone had the same requirement so maybe things have moved on (aka improved) since you had your experience or maybe his university choice had a different set of criteria that wouldn't have interested the ones receiving a lower level of teaching during their school years.

Who knows but the fact remains, he had to know all of that before being accepted.

westernpromise

I was at university with a bloke doing maths who in the 1990s was so depressed at the illiteracy and innumeracy of graduates he was meeting who had GCSEs in English and Maths that he became convinced you could pass them from reasonable general knowledge. So he developed a hobby of sitting GCSEs for fun.

His approach was that he would just apply to sit various GCSE subjects and turn up on the day having done no work at all. If there was coursework he simply didn't do it, and if it was a language with an oral element, he didn't turn up for the oral and just sat the paper. If it was a language paper where you had to listen he just guessed the answer based on what he knew of other languages. I lost touch with him about 10 years ago by which time he had passed well over 30 GCSEs in that way. He had failed only two - Mandarin and I think Bengali. He passed Italian and Spanish having never at any stage studied either.

He had two advantages - mathematical sense and a retentive mind. A mutual friend married a Brazilian woman and tried to learn Portuguese. Pete of the 30 GCSEs annoyed him once by picking up the text book, opening it in the middle and saying "Is this one of those languages you can understand without learning it?" and then translated the page he was on. Once we were explaining to the Brazilian wife about how babies are brought by a stork. She didn't know what a stork was so he guessed "cicogna" which is indeed the Portuguese for stork. When we asked how he knew this, it was because there was a French fighter squadron in WW1 called the "cicognes" whose emblem was a stork and he figured it must be the same word.

It seems possible that GCSEs give you no more than a pub quiz level of subject knowledge.

Carl31

westernpromise wrote: »

I was at university with a bloke doing maths who in the 1990s was so depressed at the illiteracy and innumeracy of graduates he was meeting who had GCSEs in English and Maths that he became convinced you could pass them from reasonable general knowledge. So he developed a hobby of sitting GCSEs for fun.

His approach was that he would just apply to sit various GCSE subjects and turn up on the day having done no work at all. If there was coursework he simply didn't do it, and if it was a language with an oral element, he didn't turn up for the oral and just sat the paper. If it was a language paper where you had to listen he just guessed the answer based on what he knew of other languages. I lost touch with him about 10 years ago by which time he had passed well over 30 GCSEs in that way. He had failed only two - Mandarin and I think Bengali. He passed Italian and Spanish having never at any stage studied either.

He had two advantages - mathematical sense and a retentive mind. A mutual friend married a Brazilian woman and tried to learn Portuguese. Pete of the 30 GCSEs annoyed him once by picking up the text book, opening it in the middle and saying "Is this one of those languages you can understand without learning it?" and then translated the page he was on. Once we were explaining to the Brazilian wife about how babies are brought by a stork. She didn't know what a stork was so he guessed "cicogna" which is indeed the Portuguese for stork. When we asked how he knew this, it was because there was a French fighter squadron in WW1 called the "cicognes" whose emblem was a stork and he figured it must be the same word.

It seems possible that GCSEs give you no more than a pub quiz level of subject knowledge.

your mate sounds like a right hoot