Are degrees in the UK value for money?

bugslet

A friends son did a four year apprenticeship with Scania to be a fitter/mechanic and it was a very thorough, rigorous apprenticeship. AFAIK, most of the truck manufacturers run similar programmes. That's probably not a career that most people imagine has an apprenticeship.

SingleSue

For the companies my son would like to work for and in the area he wants, an apprenticeship won't do, he has have a degree and other accreditations due to them not being UK based (a lot of the UK based companies also require a degree and don't do apprenticeships).

I'm not against apprenticeships but I do despair when jobs which have no need to have an apprenticeship attached are being offered, it's then becomes cheap labour for the companies involved rather than a benefit to the young person.

westernpromise

I agree. We need fewer safe, clean jobs in offices with a high intellectual content to the work. We don't want people working in startups with a prospect of getting rich and employing other people themselves. No, what we want is traditional mediaeval indenture. Not only should we have more apprenticeships, we should also have more metal-bashing jobs and more dirty and dangerous jobs involving backbreaking physical labour.

We should go back to having tut pit village with one employer and every employee should have a sense of total entitlement tut job in tut village for ever. Nobody should ever move home to find a job. Spare time should be spent on CND marches or in a brass band.

Your pay should be based not on what your contribution is worth, but on what your union can extort on behalf of all its members, who will get the same even if - especially if - half of them are useless and workshy. Anyone who tries to better themselves should have it all taxed away, and anyone who dies with anything left to leave to their children should have it confiscated by the state and given to those whose parents smoked and drank the lot, amid a little round of self-congratulatory applause by the recipients.

All our newly-trained metal-bashers should go back to building Spitfires, dreadnoughts, and brown Austin Allegros for other metal bashers to enjoy repairing when they break down. When the metal-bashers themselves break down, in part because of the toxic filth their factories belch into the air and water, there should be filthy workhouses for them to die in. Mid-Staffs Hospital was a good start, really putting the 'pit' back into 'hospital', but we need a weekly target for how many poor old people should die of starvation on NHS trolleys. We need a 1970s NHS where 1,970 is the number of patients who die every week in an NHS hospital of a disease they didn't have when they went into it.

By going back 100 or so years, we can all get rich on other people's money which will never run out.

GreatApe

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.

Education can be good up to a certain point but trying to educate everybody to university level will surely see diminishing returns. Already some 60% of students default on their loans the universes have added such little earning power to the students that they can't even pay back their loans in full.

GreatApe

What do people imagine would happen if we closed 90% of the universities?

Would companies just decide not to meet demand where they found it because they don't want to spend the 3 months needed to train someone? Just let their competitors or nee entrants take market share?

The current system is stupid its just education inflation. Send 10% more to university and the companies will just move 10% more jobs to require a degree. Already at least half of graduates are in jobs and roles where the degree is superfluous

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

What do people imagine would happen if we closed 90% of the universities?

Would companies just decide not to meet demand where they found it because they don't want to spend the 3 months needed to train someone? Just let their competitors or nee entrants take market share?

The current system is stupid its just education inflation. Send 10% more to university and the companies will just move 10% more jobs to require a degree. Already at least half of graduates are in jobs and roles where the degree is superfluous

completely agree. i really dont understand why this isnt so obvious to people. university education is one of the biggest scams going. just because a company requires a degree doesnt mean the degree would be useful for the job itself. the requirement is only rhere to filter out applications to make it easier for HR.

Cakeguts

SingleSue wrote: »

For the companies my son would like to work for and in the area he wants, an apprenticeship won't do, he has have a degree and other accreditations due to them not being UK based (a lot of the UK based companies also require a degree and don't do apprenticeships).

I'm not against apprenticeships but I do despair when jobs which have no need to have an apprenticeship attached are being offered, it's then becomes cheap labour for the companies involved rather than a benefit to the young person.

You have missed the single most important aspect of apprenticeships. Work experience. Because for an apprenticeship you work in the job you get very good practice at working. This is not like the work experience teenagers do at school this is real work that you get paid for. This is why a lot of apprenticeships lead to better employment than many university degrees.

Now go back to the universities. We know that about 75 of the universities offer degrees that are not of the level of difficulty that any employer would want. Also only about 10% of jobs in the UK need someone educated to degree level. This means that 1000s of students are there only to pay for the staff at the universities. They are being used to pay university staff to offer a non service. So which is worse a few apprenticeships which provide cheap labour for the employer and work experience for the apprentice or 1000s of students whose sole purpose it to provide money to pay university staff?

Most apprenticeships are well run and provide a good level of education. A few are not so well run but there are about 75 universities that have no purpose at all except as a means to provide jobs for the staff.

economic

Cakeguts wrote: »

You have missed the single most important aspect of apprenticeships. Work experience. Because for an apprenticeship you work in the job you get very good practice at working. This is not like the work experience teenagers do at school this is real work that you get paid for. This is why a lot of apprenticeships lead to better employment than many university degrees.

Now go back to the universities. We know that about 75 of the universities offer degrees that are not of the level of difficulty that any employer would want. Also only about 10% of jobs in the UK need someone educated to degree level. This means that 1000s of students are there only to pay for the staff at the universities. They are being used to pay university staff to offer a non service. So which is worse a few apprenticeships which provide cheap labour for the employer and work experience for the apprentice or 1000s of students whose sole purpose it to provide money to pay university staff?

Most apprenticeships are well run and provide a good level of education. A few are not so well run but there are about 75 universities that have no purpose at all except as a means to provide jobs for the staff.

and crucially at the expense of the poor taxpayer.

this is an example of how government are completely inept and only care about votes.

Arklight

Cakeguts wrote: »

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?

And I say again, try and get one.


https://www.findapprenticeship.service.gov.uk/


This is the government site for finding apprenticeships. I put in a 10 mile radius from my densely populated part of the affluent south east.


Apart from some hairdresser vacancies, one early years company, and a couple of firms wanting man fridays there is nothing that would have any chance of leading to an actual career. They are all catering or retail wanting slave labour or pot washers they don't have to pay and pretending they are offering a career.


What would 16 year old Cakeguts have access to? I am willing to bet about the same and a UCAS application to a university he considers himself too good for.

GreatApe

SingleSue wrote: »

For the companies my son would like to work for and in the area he wants

One of the problems we have as a nation and this probably applies to most the western nations is that we seem to fool our young into this notion that work is fulfillment and the highest good to aim for.

It is true for maybe 2% of people who have jobs they absolutely love and would still go in every day with love for the job even if the wage was half what it is. But for the 98% a job is just for money and you would not do it if it paid half as much.

Kids should be encouraged to do jobs that pay well mostly because if its just a job that you would not do for free (as 98% of jobs are) then you might as well be paid well for it. Other than pay a job is just a job find fulfillment in other areas of your life as its very unlikely to come from a career/job.