Universities mis-selling courses

[LornMowa]

Having read a post in Money Matters and knowledge of 2 other people whose lives have taken a turn for the worse since becoming a student, AIBU to think that Universities should be much more discerning about who is allowed to take courses.

I think that by enticing people whose earning prospects are unlikely to be enhanced by a degree to become students, some universities are as reprehensible as other leaches such as loan sharks.

To the poster on MM, I do hope that you can improve your prospects and resolve your current problems.

I did a BA full time at an old university 15 years ago. I only had 8 hours of lectures a week in all 3 years. At the university I work at now, contact hours are about that. Those students would still be considered full time for benefits purposes if the university has them enrolled as full time.

I think that is the right amount of contact time (although of course the contact time is slightly higher because of meeting with lecturers for essay feedback and so on). They are meant to be learning independently; it isn't school.

Whether or not those 8 hours are worth the fees is another matter. It really depends upon the quality of teaching and feedback, provision of specialist equipment and access to that equipment for undergraduates, and quality of other resources such as libraries and labs.

White brick: became a uni in the 1960s. Not a former polytechnic but not Russell Group either. Not heard of white tile.

To qualify as full time you still need to do 15 hours per week. I'm a full time student.

i am currentl at uni and this week my contact hours are a grand total of six. Still counts as a full time course as i am expected to do about forty hours of work on top, if not more.

I think the "correct" amount of contact time depends hugely on the subject. Mine was a technical subject and therefore 28h a week was appropriate (included lots of lab time and practicals); less would be more appropriate for less technical degrees. 6h a week from our point of view was laughable - we wouldn't have achieved anything with that - but for art, it's reasonable, as most of the hours in the week would have been spent doing their own art work.

And LRD - I agree totally how frustrating it can be with students who just don't "get" that they are supposed to put in all the extra hours themselves - we had a few of those but weeded them out at the end of the first year. Despite this meaning the loss of paying students, we had to do it to maintain credibility! But again, we were an affiliated college, not a Uni - so perhaps Unis can get away with more these days? When I was a student we lost about 1/4 of the students at the end of our first year - how many would courses tend to lose now?

Re. A level situation - I agree it's unfair - the whole lowering of the bar so that more students get higher grades is fair to no one, really, because it creates false expectations. It probably didn't feel fair back in the older times to only achieve an E grade in anything, but if that's all you deserved then at least it was fair in that respect. And it didn't give you an inflated sense of how clever you were, nor that you would be able to do any course you liked at Uni with the right grades.
Sorry, am waffling. It's a source of annoyance to me.

It's 15 hours of STUDY a week. Each course has contact:study ratios that they advise students on. Mine was something ridiculous like 1:10 for my 2 or 3 (depending on whether I had a tutorial) hours where I actually saw a staff member. Others had 1:1 or sometimes 1:0.5 on the expectation you were doing the work in supervised labs or programming sessions and just writing up notes/evaluations.

I don't get students who don't do extra work. Some of mine don't even know where the audiovisual centre with all the extra set work IS. Unsurprisingly those are the ones who did quite badly at the end of last semester.

The mismatch between A level grades and Uni places is basically because, like it or not, we have a 2 tier system and you have z limited number of places. There are more very able A grade students than there are places at the universities they think are worth going to (say the top 10/15 in the country in any given year). So the top universities give out hugely inflated offers, which if you miss by 1 grade you miss altogether and have to choose between your insurance (usually a better second tier Uni) or reapplying. The not-so-good unis give realistic a offer and live in hope of insurance offers who have AAB or similar to boost the quality and the bottom of the pile take virtually anyone they can to fill the course. So it's all like a huge inverted pyramid with lots of people getting good grades and aiming for the top where there aren't the spaces.

It's ridiculous when you think about it, but until employers stop saying 'degree from Reading, pah' without looking to see what the degree was in and discovering that for that specific subject Reading is rated 3rd in the league tables people will go 'degree from Reading is no use, must go to Durham/Bristol/UCL even if they're rated 15th in the country for the subject'.

Degrees are hugely gendered, aren't they. Males tend to go the STEM route, and females tend to do more law, politics, languages ,literature.
And, naturally, prestige, power and money follow the males (or vice versa?) . In Japan, maths is considered to be a female subject (for all the book-keeping they'll have to do when they're housewives but also at degree level and beyond, maths is seen as being more logical, therefore more "female" . Literature is more "masculine" than it is in the west...)

I think women believe they'll 'make it' through studying and good grades, whereas men are more focused on practical aspects: networking, who you know, practical experience

What should I advise my (bright-in-my-opinion) DD to do? Something she enjoys or a STEM degree? I'll probably advise her to go in the STEM direction TBH, although totally up to her at the end of the day.,

what crappy degree can you gain with only 15 hours of study a week?

I must be going wrong somewhere cos I do a minimum of 30....

we have 20 credit modules . We dont work it out weekly but in modular time requirements - say 200 hrs with x amount contact time . One of my modules has 12 hrs contact over the semester. Its non credit bearing though. Some of my students have quite a light load at certain times of the course/year.

I don't work in education but in the last few years I've been running a development programme in conjunction with both a university and a college. It's been 'interesting' To get the course approved initially they had to specify the notional number of contact hours. These included face-to-face teaching and tutorials, on-line email support, and on-line self-directed learning. Once that was agreed there was never any verification that students required / used that level of support. So notional email support from tutors was used a fraction of the estimated time (and often not at all). The on-line learning modules 'theoretically' took 1hr20min each, but in practice could be completed within 15 minutes (if people bothered to complete them at all).

a university degree isnt just a means to and end. Its the process of learning something indepth and a feeling of achievement much more valuable than a piece of paper and a fat pay packet at the end.

University used to be about philosophising (is that a word?) there was no job at the end. I know in times like this the choice of education for the love of it is a novel idea but if we only offer doctor/lawyer/midwife/engineering courses unless you are wealthy and can do history of art or whatever our society will suffer a great ill that we will never recover from.

That's why I'm on the fence about the advice I'll give my children, NorwegianMoon I bloody loved my degree .
There was no set career path mapped out, like there are with the STEM subjects, but the experiences I had, and the subject I studied (Russian), has stood me in good stead in the most unexpected ways.

I think the trouble is people are so wrapped in going to university, that they do not investigate if they actually need to do a degree to get to where they want to be.

A lot of careers consider workplace/evening courses are more useful then a degree.

Even STEM subjects don't have guaranteed career paths at the moment. My dd's boyfriend studied maths and physics (at a good uni) but it took him a year to get a job in anything relevent. 9 months after graduating 80% of his class were in a similar situation - all working but in less-than-full time jobs, and mostly in retail or hospitality. Yet on the university website it still promotes the wide-ranging career opportunities and the high rate of graduate employment. Funnily enough the list of employers of recent graduates does not include any of bars, restaurants or shops where the majority of the graduates spent thier first year of employment .

Several of his friends are now in their final year of their doctorate studies and still have little prospect of employment.

It doesn't mean their degrees are of no value, or that they should have taken a different option, but I don't see any of the current reality being reflected in the information provided by schools careers advisors or university information services.

Reading is considered a good uni, isn't it? Never heard that it wasn't.

But, as you say, my first degree came from a Uni that was almost bottom but until you understand how unis are actually ranked - and investment and business links count for a huge amount - you wouldn't necessarily understand that for my subject it was 2nd in the country.

But employers are largely ignorant and part of the reason so many get a degree now is because employers profess ignorance at GNVQ, Nationa Diplomas and the like - 'I used to teach these and when I spoke with employers they always asked 'What's that?' GNVQ stood for Generally Not Very Quick and people saw it as the thing you did wen you weren't bright enough to get A-levels.

There is so much that is misunderstood about education. My first degree is a 'Mickey Mouse' degree but it was actually intellectually rigorous, took a lot of study and demanded a lot of effort. My OH with his degree in IT who went on to get a good management job did a miniscule amount of study by comparison.

I agree we used to study for intellectual furtherisation (not a real word!) but now it is more about economics - why should you have to have a degree in Environmental Health for example - the old days you used to work and study to get professional qualifications. Then the older people without the degrees in it found themselves with a glass ceiling and younger graduates promoted above them.

Something went wrong and it didn't start with the Blair government....

Absolutely
rankigs are very heavily weighted by research.

The University I work at has a weak research portfolio due to finance and staffing issues (and bad management). We have just about all been refused time to do any research and all our time is taken up by admin and marketing (plus teaching and ridiculous personal tutor roles). The only person "allowed" to do a phd in our department is doing so because she transferred from another Uni half way through doing hers.

We have had so many staff leave due to promises of research not being fulfilled.

We have strong teaching but are ranked quite low due to the fact we are research poor.

LittleRedDragon you presumably would put my partner into the 'not very bright' catgory as he got a D and an E at A-level and went on to get a degree in IT with Management and now holds a senior management position. He has postgrad qualifications and has taken aptitude tests that put him in the top ranks for logic and other technical abilities.

Yes of course A-level grades are an indicator of ability, but not the only one. I don't know why he didn't get good grades at A-level - though we both went to school at a time when essays were favoured over examsand he loathes writing so maybe that's why - but that doesn't mean he did not get a lot out of uni.

Value-added is the term, and some 'low-ranking' unis offer good value-added by taking in students who do not perform that well at A-level then turning them out with degrees. That does not mean their degrees are worthless or easy or 'mickey mouse', it means that they may have been given a chance, taught in a variety of ways to help them learn, and allowed them to learn and explore a subject they were interested in at their own pace and style - that in itself is valuable, isn't it?

Yet of course, when it comes to employers....

Geez yes, I know a local uni that has the same problem, though they are pushing people to do more research on top of regular duties and it's pushing staff beyond reasonable limits.

Education's a bit of a mess tbh.

Education is a huge mess.

Reading is a good uni but it's not a 'brand name'. It's ranked 45 according to the Guardian, it might have made the top 20 overall at some point, whereas Birmingham which comes in at number 30 would be perceived as infinitely superior and probably above Surrey (20) and Sussex (15). Lancaster, which my school told me to not even bother applying to, is now number 6.

Good God!

lancaster is on the "in danger of folding" list

no i dont work there lol

Actually I just looked at the rankings and strangely the Uni's with the lowest staff/student ratios have the highest rankings

PMSL

Agree, OP.

Was just reading in paper that there are currently 8,500 students studying "Forensic Science" at "university". And there are apparently only 7,000 jobs altogether in the whole forensic science field. And of those jobs, nearly everyone actually doing forensic work has a qualification in chemistry or biology.

This was actually discussed on another thread, and I found a quote from the Forensic Science website saying something like having a Forensic Science degree wouldn't preclude you from getting a job. In other words, you might as well have a degree in Hospitality Management! (Or even Festival Studies that someone found - which has to be my favourite oh my god it's a degree course ever!)

God help us gramercy thats true

I can well believe it. Forensic science is not an undergraduate discipline (although it can help you get a job in the police as you know how to maange crime scenes). I only know 3 forensic scientists but all 3 of those have advanced degrees in a specific discipline...

Festival studies

Wow I am sure Reading Uni at one point was top 10??? I have qualifications from Bedfordshire, Reading and Surrey and would say that Surrey was by far the best. In the end though, it's the quality of the staff, on top of the overall organisation that determines student experience. Some lecturers work hard and others don't.

I have to admit though, that as a 17 year old choosing a degree I had no guidance and back then (I am almost 40) there was no internet, no notion of league tables, no idea really that a degree would become the marketable commodity that it became - you were encouraged to choose a subject that interested you and that you could do, and frankly, girls were encouraged down the English/Arts/Humanities routes and boys perhaps chose more traditional subjects or ollowed in their fathers' footsteps. My dad worked in a factory and had nothing useful to say to me about studying except that he wouldn't pay for it!

I don't regret any of the subjects I studied but I DO regret how they are perceived by the general public/employers.

My exH is doing one of these watching "C.S.I" and "Cracker" Forensics courses. He has never worked and it is being funded by the taxpayer. No part-time job despite no children living with him or responsibilities, it's all free. I don't know why or how.

He wants to do a Masters and a Doctorate too. Strangely enough by the time he has done this he will be almost fifty and all of his children will be over sixteen and no longer entitled to child support presuming that he does get a job afterwards.

This man owned a book (unread) when I knew him and still can't write in sentences or use apostrophes. He has also been in trouble with the police and would never in a million years get through a CRB check. Please tell me that post-grad qualifications are harder to blag.