Are degrees in the UK value for money?

Cakeguts

SingleSue wrote: »

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.

There were two levels of GCSEs the top level you could get up to an A grade. The bottom level you could get up to a C grade it was the lower level of GCSE where you could pass without knowing anything at all about music or music notation or harmony or music history. The trouble was that because the level of knowledge of music was so different between the two levels of GCSE you could have two people with grade Cs one who could read music notation and knew something about music and the other who knew nothing at all and could only bang something and record themselves banging it.. That grade of C was actually educationally worse than a grade 1 CSE so the new lower level GCSEs were actually easier to pass than the old CSEs.

So anyone who thinks that GCSEs were the same difficulty as O levels and CSEs needs to know that the standard needed to pass dropped immediately on introduction. It has been dropping every since. The A levels then had to become easier so that the gap between GCSEs and A levels was smaller and every year since then more people have got As for A levels proving that each year they have got easier and easier to pass and get high marks in. People haven't got more intelligent and due to the drop in educational standards they also haven't got better at learning. All that has happened is that everything has been "dumbed down."

Most people who don't get the top A level grades would get a better job by doing an apprenticeship.

bugslet

Cakeguts wrote: »

So anyone who thinks that GCSEs were the same difficulty as O levels and CSEs needs to know that the standard needed to pass dropped immediately on introduction. It has been dropping every since. The A levels then had to become easier so that the gap between GCSEs and A levels was smaller and every year since then more people have got As for A levels proving that each year they have got easier and easier to pass and get high marks in. People haven't got more intelligent and due to the drop in educational standards they also haven't got better at learning. All that has happened is that everything has been "dumbed down."

Most people who don't get the top A level grades would get a better job by doing an apprenticeship.

I did O level German in 1980 and as I was doing some work with a German company in 2004, I decided to take up GCSE German. To pass GCSE you needed knowledge of three tenses, for O level, 6 tenses. Word order wasn't a requirement either.

The tutor was a similar age and he said that definitely the GCSE was easier than the O Level.

My DiLand her OH are both uni lecturers and they often have to teach what was once part of the A level syllabus.

I feel sorry for today's teenagers, I feel they are often being short changed.

Cakeguts

bugslet wrote: »

I did O level German in 1980 and as I was doing some work with a German company in 2004, I decided to take up GCSE German. To pass GCSE you needed knowledge of three tenses, for O level, 6 tenses. Word order wasn't a requirement either.

The tutor was a similar age and he said that definitely the GCSE was easier than the O Level.

My DiLand her OH are both uni lecturers and they often have to teach what was once part of the A level syllabus.

I feel sorry for today's teenagers, I feel they are often being short changed.

I feel very sorry for them. They mostly have to pay £9000 a year to get the level of education that used to be provided at school for free up to the age of 18 or at technical college. Some of them have to pay for a whole 3 years course to get to the old A level standard. Really this should be a national scandal.

I never understand why parents are not complaining about this.

Sapphire

Cakeguts wrote: »

I never understand why parents are not complaining about this.

One can think of a number of reasons… :cool:

GreatApe

Cakeguts wrote: »

I feel very sorry for them. They mostly have to pay £9000 a year to get the level of education that used to be provided at school for free up to the age of 18 or at technical college. Some of them have to pay for a whole 3 years course to get to the old A level standard. Really this should be a national scandal.

I never understand why parents are not complaining about this.

For the vast majority of parents and kids they do not care one bit about the actual education its to get the pass and the degree. It offers them hope its not £9,250 a year for an education its £9,250 per year for the hope of a better life than their parents.

The problem is that the needs and wants of the country do not change much at all if we educate to university level 10% of the population or 100% of the population. The result is we still need people to stack the shelves gut the fish clean the toilets collect the refuse and so on. The more people we send to university the more graduates we will have to allocate to non graduate jobs

Its already so bad that 60% of graduates who go to university never pay back their loans in full because they dont earn much above the £21,000 repayment threshold.

What makes it worse is all the idiots crying that university should be free. If university was free then we would have even more people going and thus even more of the graduates will get zero value from it. Already the marginal graduate is employed in a non graduate job

What needs to happen is that the kids need to be given an option on how to spend their £60k-£80k in loans. Only allow them to spend it on education and we end up with far too many going to university. Allow them to use the sum to buy a house or a pension and the result would be much better

Cakeguts

GreatApe wrote: »

For the vast majority of parents and kids they do not care one bit about the actual education its to get the pass and the degree. It offers them hope its not £9,250 a year for an education its £9,250 per year for the hope of a better life than their parents.

The problem is that the needs and wants of the country do not change much at all if we educate to university level 10% of the population or 100% of the population. The result is we still need people to stack the shelves gut the fish clean the toilets collect the refuse and so on. The more people we send to university the more graduates we will have to allocate to non graduate jobs

Its already so bad that 60% of graduates who go to university never pay back their loans in full because they dont earn much above the £21,000 repayment threshold.

What makes it worse is all the idiots crying that university should be free. If university was free then we would have even more people going and thus even more of the graduates will get zero value from it. Already the marginal graduate is employed in a non graduate job

What needs to happen is that the kids need to be given an option on how to spend their £60k-£80k in loans. Only allow them to spend it on education and we end up with far too many going to university. Allow them to use the sum to buy a house or a pension and the result would be much better

It isn't just the money. If someone studies for a degree that is never going to be wanted by any employer they also waste 3 years that could have been spent on getting a qualification or training that the country does need. This 3 years makes them older when they go for their first job that needs no qualifications so it makes it even more difficult for them to get a job that needs any form of training. Why would an employer needing unskilled workers or minimally skilled workers employ a 21 or 22 year old when they can get an 18 year old? The skilled jobs go to people who have done apprenticeships or job training. It has got to the point that many people with degrees are having to get jobs that are worse than their parents skilled jobs because they wasted 3 years of valuable job training time studying at university.

What you then get is people complaining that they are over qualified for the job that they are doing because they have a degree in Fine Arts from a university but that degree is probably about the same standard as an old A level and it doesn't have any training for any job in it. So actually the student isn't over qualified because they aren't qualified for any job that the UK economy needs so the job that they have got is the right level for them. They can't get a graduate level job because their degree isn't the level of education and learning that the graduate level employers are looking for and they can't get a better job because the people who have done apprenticeships are getting those. So the students going to the bottom 75 or so universities are in danger of having to take the bottom level of unskilled jobs. In the meantime the country is short of skilled workers.

It all starts with school league tables.

westernpromise

Carl31 wrote: »

your mate sounds like a right hoot

Well, he became an actuary, so his idea of fun wasn't one many people shared. Being a natural pedant, he thought it intellectually sloppy to just assume that exam standards were lower simply because empirically they appeared to be, so he sought evidence. Hence his little hobby.

Based on him, I reckon if you have three good 80s-vintage A-Levels, plus eight to ten O-Levels, in any combination of sciences and languages, you can probably achieve a pass in the majority of GCSEs. Simply by being able to write a grammatically literate sentence, you would stand out quite prominently.

I wonder if anyone has yet passed 100 GCSEs? Project for my retirement if not! The next challenge would be to see how many you can get relative to how many O-Levels you got - eg if you got 10 O-Levels and you pass 100 GCSEs that's a score of 10.0 but if you only passed 4 O-Levels in the 1970s and you get 100 GCSEs today, that's a score of 25.0.

Sapphire

westernpromise wrote: »

I wonder if anyone has yet passed 100 GCSEs? Project for my retirement if not! The next challenge would be to see how many you can get relative to how many O-Levels you got - eg if you got 10 O-Levels and you pass 100 GCSEs that's a score of 10.0 but if you only passed 4 O-Levels in the 1970s and you get 100 GCSEs today, that's a score of 25.0.

Some people's minds do work in funny ways…

Thanks for the laugh! :j:rotfl::T

Arklight

economic wrote: »

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

You can do all that as an apprentice if you can get an apprenticeship. If you'd like to get a flavour of what that's like open up Yell, get a list of all the plumbers, builders, electricians and engineering companies and contact them pretending to be one of thousands of 17 year olds at an FE college in your county doing an NVQ they can't fully complete without a job placement.


Good luck! (you'll need it...)


But no of course, degree courses should be free or massively subsidised in the UK like every other developed country. Even the US provides cheaper education than us.

Cakeguts

Arklight wrote: »

You can do all that as an apprentice if you can get an apprenticeship. If you'd like to get a flavour of what that's like open up Yell, get a list of all the plumbers, builders, electricians and engineering companies and contact them pretending to be one of thousands of 17 year olds at an FE college in your county doing an NVQ they can't fully complete without a job placement.


Good luck! (you'll need it...)


But no of course, degree courses should be free or massively subsidised in the UK like every other developed country. Even the US provides cheaper education than us.

You can do apprenticeships in Law, property managment, arts management, health care, film, marketing, IT, sport, fashion, lots of things other than trades. Modern apprenticeships cover most of the subjects that you can get a degree in other than degrees in medical subjects like medicine and nursing. Lots of them are better than degrees because of the work experience element and the qualifications in the actual job rather than an academic qualification which in lots of cases is in not very much. There are also graduate apprenticeships on offer where you study for a degree as part of the apprenticeship.

There are a fair number of university courses that people used to do as hobbies at evenng class. Ceramics, (pots), performing arts, film, fashion, photography etc. I don't see why tax payers should pay for other people to do degrees in hobby subjects although I suppose they already do because most of these hobby courses lead to minimum wage jobs. I actually think that if people want to do these hobby courses they should pay for them anyway regardless of how much they earn afterwards. Perhaps it will encourage them to do them at evening class?