Are degrees in the UK value for money?

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

Its easy to say but close to impossible to do.
Its why I say the only way the bubble can be deflated is to give the kids more choice on how they spend the £60-£80k rather than just university give them the option to spend the same sum on housing or pension or even perhaps starting/buying a business.

what about slowly deflating the bubble. start from the worst like photography and women studies. reduce funding for these degrees in line with an increase in apprenticeship programmes. this is akin to deflating a balloon slowly rather then pricking it with a pin to burst it in one go.

i would say itll take about 10 years to do this. but its important to encourage apprenticeships offered by companies at the same time.

you seem confident that kids make wise decisions. they usually dont.

phillw

Cakeguts wrote: »

The reply I got was the surely they knew this before they went there. So he expected the schools to tell them. The schools didn't and neither did the university so where should this information be coming from?

Life is a competition, knowing which University to try to get into is all part of it.

If every school told their students to apply to one University then that wouldn't achieve anything either, because they still wouldn't all get in.

If every university could attract the highest calibre of staff so the courses were equal, then when you left you're still competing for a small amount of jobs.

When all the CSI programmes became popular there were thousands of people wanting to do a degree in it, even though there were very few jobs in the UK and they were all already filled.

The problem as I see it is that half the country don't care about education or working and the other half expect really impressive degrees and jobs.

GreatApe

The universities will cry murder they won't let you shrink the sector and they definitely are not going to lie down and take the sector from 50% down to 10% over a decade.

That is an annual 15% shrinkage. If there are 150 universities you would need close almost 20 in the first year

You won't get reelected the opposition will paint you as a monster and that they will stop this madness etc

But if you give the students choice and they choose something other than university its not your fault they have no one to blame. 15-20 years down the line when university has deflated to less than 15% of the population you could withdraw the options and have university only loans and cap the numbers at 15%. Personally I would keep the alternative options but you could much more easily remove the loans for housing arguing that mortgages from banks are available

Filo25

Too many relatively weak students going to relatively weak universities doing degrees which do little to enhance their career prospects.

Annoyingly those who don't do this and actually should be at university end up funding not just their own degree but effectively the degrees of those who arguably shouldn't be there in the first place, but will often end up not contributing financially.

I would rather we made real investment in improving other skills and offering apprenticeships in the economy which might make a real difference and sending fewer, more able people to university to do more relevant degrees and they should pay less for it.

economic

GreatApe wrote: »

The universities will cry murder they won't let you shrink the sector and they definitely are not going to lie down and take the sector from 50% down to 10% over a decade.

That is an annual 15% shrinkage. If there are 150 universities you would need close almost 20 in the first year

You won't get reelected the opposition will paint you as a monster and that they will stop this madness etc

But if you give the students choice and they choose something other than university its not your fault they have no one to blame. 15-20 years down the line when university has deflated to less than 15% of the population you could withdraw the options and have university only loans and cap the numbers at 15%. Personally I would keep the alternative options but you could much more easily remove the loans for housing arguing that mortgages from banks are available

if i was PM i wouldnt care. I would just get the job done the right way - at the source of the problem. i wouldnt care about getting re-elected. of course other people dont think like me so maybe thats the real problem - political corruption.

maybe we should get even deeper into the heart of the problem. set term limits for politicians. they can not work in the public sector after say 4 or 8 years in the public sector.

SingleSue

Cakeguts wrote: »

What I worry about is the stress that is caused when someone realises that they have not been told that not all universities courses are equal. How can a student find that out? They would have to go through all of the information of each course at each university and visit each university and talk to current students all while studying for the A levels to get a place.

When you get to the end of your course and discover that you have been to the wrong university for what you wanted to do like get a graduate level job it is too late.

Information about the different levels of university courses should be provided at school if university is mentioned to any of the students.

I would still be interested to know if schools get money from universities to promote their courses?

I know I talk about youngest all the time here but he took his degree planning very seriously. He really was that student that took it to the nth degree rather than just looking at the headline information (his approach to everything in life, yes it can be a bore sometimes but it does have its downside as he can then become paralysed with fear through either not enough or too much information and fear of making the wrong choice which then turns into another 100 hours of research and more notebooks)

Each of his choices/offers were listed, researched and then ticks put in the positive or negative boxes whilst also looking at the careers pages of a good selection of companies in his chosen sector and what their requirements were. For him, it wasn't just the course or university itself (which was gone into in great depth) but also travel distance from home, ease of that travel, cost of travel to home, distance to the train station from halls and university, distance from halls and university to shops, distance between halls and university....ah, you get the picture, the list went on and on and on.

We are not just talking about a page or two of stuff but enough to fill a couple of large notebooks plus backed up files on a computer.

Middle son there were important factors such as the content and did it contain a wider scope but without losing quality so there was a greater chance of related employment post degree, driving distance (unfortunately he/we didn't look at the ease of public transport home...it's a blooming nightmare and not easy for someone with his disabilities), their position in the league tables and whether halls were available as it is not a standard for his course choice.

I think eldest's mode of choice was, ah they do my course, let's apply. His issue I think was that he wasn't seen by his head of 6th form as uni material, so little advice of the process was given (and I had absolutely no clue at the time). As it was, he performed better than he and everyone else expected and in the head of 6th form's own subject, was the best performing student.....it surprised (and shocked) the pair of them :rotfl:

Our schools around here tend to mention our local university a lot to students and there is a certain element of students being pushed towards it but apart from that, no other alternative ones unless you are classed as Oxbridge potential. Weirdly, youngest has found lots of previous students of his college at his uni and there was certainly no pushing towards them from the college and it can't be distance because they are not close either!

[Deleted User]

Lol, and to think my decision process was..

* Russell Group (was doing science, research status was important)
* Couldn't be in Liverpool or Wales (Stupid teenage me was biased)
* Appropriate course content

I ended up at the University of Liverpool and my first job at Cardiff University.

My school/6th form college never pushed anyone to uni. Frankly they were hopeless.

Filo25

I will add that I went to University back in the early 90's there was a lot less information readily available than there is now but I still did everything I could to research a large number of universities before deciding where to apply to, that just seems like common sense to me.

I may not have had to pay for the course but irrespective it was still a massive decision in terms of my economic future, and one I took very seriously.

If people are incapable of realising the importance of that research and finding the relevant information now with the wonders of the internet at their fingertips I would have to start questioning whether they should be going to university in the first place.

It is one of the biggest decisions you can make to influence your future at that stage in your life, TAKE IT SERIOUSLY!

economic

the problem is that most employers by far require degrees - only as a filter for applications. probably only 5-10% require the skillset learnt from a degree. the rest require a degree because it is easy to filter out candidates. worst still some employers require a 2:1 or higher in any degree so a grad from warwick uni with a 2:2 would not make it through any grad scheme application whereas a grad from luton uni with a 2:1 would.

so do you really blame the kid deciding that any degree i can get into is worth it then no degree as chances are i wont be able to apply to any graduate programs if i dont do a degree.

the source of the problem is the funding of these courses by the public which has led to a massive rise in the number of degrees being offered. and so companies use degrees as a way of filtering.

as i said before the way to fix this problem imo is to encourage apprentice programs (maybe force companies to hire x% of intake every year from people with no degrees on an apprenticeship program) and turn off the student loan tap slowly but decisively.

Malthusian

SingleSue wrote: »

And you are not getting my point either, by doing what she has, she has a better chance of making a success of her life than if she had done nothing.

This simply isn't true. By not doing what she has she would have three extra years worth of experience on her CV. She wouldn't have wasted her time applying to graduate schemes that are completely unsuitable. She would have three years in which she could accurately assess what she wants to do with her life instead of the completely unrealistic "go to university, do a made-up course and then get a part time / flexible job doing ?????? that will pay a high salary while also giving me as much time off as I want to look after my child".

Even working in Asda on minimum wage would have been better for her prospects, even without any realistic chance of promotion, because she could think about what she wanted to do to get out of minimum wage. Being stuck at university for three years meant she couldn't think about that because she was fixated on the imaginary flexible working high salary graduate job that requires no marketable skills that she expected to be handed to her as soon as she graduated.

It is better to have tried and then failed than to not try at all.

Who said the alternative to going to Sheffield Poly was to not try at all? There are any number of things she could have tried within those three years that would have actually had a realistic chance of improving her prospects.