For being furious at DH telling DSD that my degree isn't a real degree?

[TooFarGone]

So DH is sat down with his DD taking about careers etc. He says to her "these days, you need a job that pays at least £20k a year but at the same time, you don't want to be stressing yourself out with difficult degrees and stuff. You want to enjoy your time at uni. That's why I think nursing would be ideal for you! you get to go to uni, you don't have to do a difficult degree and you get a well paid job at the end of it!".

So DSD says "But isn't a degree in nursing going to be just as difficult?" and he replied "no course not, they call it a degree but its not like a real degree".

I'm furious as I worked bloody hard to get my degree and he knows this. It isn't an "easy option" at all. I had it out with him and he apologised for upsetting me but still maintains that nursing is an easy alternative to doing a "real" degree.

Oh I don't know, Loopy - I've heard the nurses have a wild time!

I'm sure they do, but they have a lot more responsibility than an Arts student who has 2 contact hours per week.

many midwifes are nurses, but midwifery is a branch of nursing, whether they did the combined or singular approach.

bruffin "YABU - not that long ago you had two entry levels to nursing cse's or o'levels for the higher entry."

But that was only to get accepted on to the course in the first place. Both my elder sisters trained to be SRN (State Registered Nurses) in the days before nursing was a degree. They needed a minimum of 4 (or 5?) GCE O levels to get accepted on the course but they then had three years of hard slog and examinations and practical experience before they were qualified.

I remember them bringing home huge thick text books to study from when I was a kid. It certainly didn't look like an easy option then and I am sure it doesn't now.

With my DD1 I recently sat through a uni presentation to students wanting to become midwives. The admissions tutor told them straight that it was a full on course with a high level of achievement expected. They would be at uni until Christmas holidays and then for one week afterwards. After that they placements started and it would be six weeks practical followed by six weeks back in the classroom and so on. They would be expected to work the same shifts as their mentor (nights, earlies, weekends etc) and the course ran for 45 weeks each year. Christmas in the first year was the only holiday that the Uni would guarantee would be the same as their non-nursing/midwifery friends. The halls of residence are separate from the rest of the students to avoid being disturbed while shift working and they were told that as a student midwife it would not be possible to have a part time job because they work unsociable hours so they were likely to have a fair bit of debt when they left.

The starting salary after qualification is likely to be around the £21k mark.

I have to admit I was a bit gobsmacked by the amount of studying they were expected to do - alongside learning the practical aspects and having the responsibility of caring for pregnant women and their newborns AND I studied Physics at Uni! It is no soft option believe me.

"But that was only to get accepted on to the course in the first place. Both my elder sisters trained to be SRN (State Registered Nurses) in the days before nursing was a degree. They needed a minimum of 4 (or 5?) GCE O levels to get accepted on the course but they then had three years of hard slog and examinations and practical experience before they were qualified."

It still didn't make it a degree and you started at 16 not 18.

OP... Don't take it to heart, I'm sure that he didn't mean it in any way to downplay your achievements.

I can understand where he's coming from and actually I agree with him; he's seeing the writing on the wall with regard to 'Mickey Mouse' degrees (not putting Nursing into that category) - I mean 'media studies' and the like. He's talking about purely academic degrees and I think he's right. Employers can now be extremely choosy and the maths and science degrees, along with the other 'core subjects' are prized higher, they always have been and (hopefully) always will be. Vocational degrees are essential but they're perceived differently, they lead directly to very specific jobs. I don't know the standard of the degree but if it's conferred by a University then it's as valid as any other.

I think your husband is approaching this in the right way with his daughter, albeit in a bit of a ham-fisted way.

One thing I would say to you is that you should believe in yourself and your own abilities and value... don't let other people diminish what you believe you're worth.

I am very at this thread and at posters agreeing with him.

First of all 20K is not considered as a very good income, not a dream income anyway. Nursing is very good if you like it and you choose it yourself.

I can think of many degrees that are much easier than nursing-i did one-but i wont mention them because i don't want to insult people.

But even if Nursing degree was easy and pleasant..... hmm If i was going to advise my dcs i would rather they have few hard years studying and then a well paid or an easy job. Not few fun years and then a hard job. Nursing is not an easy job at all. Studies last 4 years, your working life is about 40 years. What is more important?

Your dh not only is rude to you but he doesn't sound very bright tbh.

Do you have any son aswell?

I'd love to see people who say nursing is 'the easy option' actually experience even a couple of months, let alone the full 3 years!

Not only do we have to attend lectures and seminars, hand in assignments, do course work, do around 20 hours of self directed study per week etc we have to do it all whilst effectively working a full time job when we're on placement. And receiving around £2.50 an hour which we are expected to live on.

We also have to sign in for every class and make up any time we miss with extra work. Compare with pretty much any other degree, history, english, engineering etc where students can decide to stay in bed if they've got a hangover and only go to a couple of lectures a week, IF they can be bothered!

Yeah, really easy!

I'm stuneed at the breathtaking ignorance of the posters who are making assumptions that this man is pigionholing his daughter because of her gender... perhaps he has good knowledge of her grades, capacity for sitting down to study and just general life wishes.. he is her father after all. Either way, he knows more about her than WE do.

Go take your sexist agendas elsewhere and stop making this about something it isn't.

YABU. There is no way that a nursing degree is as academically trying as a degree in physics or a hard science.

The country needs nurses and doing a nursing degree is worthwhile but only if a person wishes to be a nurse.

I don't doubt you've worked hard, but the truth is that a nursing degree is only really good for nursing or going into nurse -related activities.

With a good degree in physics or a hard science, the world will be the student's oyster.

PMSL - I am making the assumption that your DH is not a nurse. Of course if he is I take this back - but once he has completed a nursing degree only then is he in a position to tell the rest of the world it is an easy degree.

NurseSunshine a friend was studying Nursing and i remember we were at the work she had to do. (when all we had to do was attending 2wice a week and type some blah blah on the computer-i worked at my job , 60hrs a wk while i was doing that, a nurse student couldn't keep a 60hr job!)

Erm my sister's doing nursery atm, her course is way harder than my humanities degree was.

Mine involved about 10hrs of lectures a week, hers involves 12 hr shifts.

Nursing- the easy option?! Oh how misguided....

I'd be more worried about the fact that he seems to be saying nursing is an easy option. It really really isn't. It is physically and mentally challenging, many patients are pretty difficult to deal with and the hours are antisocial.

I don't want to stick my head above the parapet and suggest any jobs are easy, but if you want something that pays £20k a year+ and isn't too taxing I'd have thought an administrative role would be the sort of thing you want.

And I absolutely agree with all the posters who say that going to university should be about more than studying. But with fees going up students are partying less and less. I'm a university lecturer and I feel quite worried about just how hard some of our students work and the amount of pressure many of them are under to succeed.

I'm in a discipline which is generally seen as pretty hard (law) but I don't think there are any 'easy' degrees to be had out there at the moment.

If you want to support your DSD encourage her to go to as many Open Days as possible this summer and preferably don't go with her, or hang back so she can talk honestly with the students she meets about the workload, social life etc. I get thoroughly pissed off at Open Days when I have to spend all my time talking to parents about the job prospects for law graduates, when you can see the young people themselves really want and need to be asking questions about how much work they'll have, whether they'll be able to work part-time too, whether they'll still have time to socialise etc.

Actually, I can't disagree or agree with your husband unless I know what your child is capable of.

If she is averagely bright (I don't mean this disrespectfully) then I would say he is absolutely correct as nursing may be well-suited to her academic range. And it's not really bad money for what you do, really, although the hours are shit-no getting away from that, however...

If your daughter is REALLY clever and capable of so much, much more- like being a surgeon or a physicist or an award-winning investigative journalist then he is most definitely being unreasonable!!

If he wants her to have a good time at Uni nursing is to be avoided.
[a] you don't get the traditional uni holidays.
[b] when in uni, you tend to be there all day, my hours for example when i was in year 2 were 9-6 Mon/Tue/Thur/Fri; and 9-1 on Wednesday. The time between uni and placement is/should be 50:50
[c] When you're on placement you are expected to work the shift pattern that the staff work. When I was mentoring students I made that very clear to them, good reason were acceptable i.e.: childcare issue, though with this student I did point out that while I could be flexible an employer may not be and what were his plans to cover childcare when he was working full time.
You are also expected to produce written evidence/ case studies while on placement.
[d] the old nurses know how to party chestnut, I hold my hands up, yes when I lived on site and we had a social club that was subbed there were a few lost weekends; and due to shift pattern if my 2/3 days off were wed/thur, my 'friday' night was tuesday if you know what I mean.
BUT at that time you could only live on site if you were [1] a student and/or [2] unmarried. The average age was between 19-24 i'd guess.

Now the average age of a student nurse is 28, on site accommodation in my old hospital has been sold off, and the social club is now a car park .

Academically nursing is quite hard, the problem is that you have so much to cover that due to time constraints some subjects aren?t covered in the depth that you would in any other Degree. E.g.: just looking at an old diary, in 2nd year on a Monday I had 3 hours of Pathophysiology, 2 hours of Nursing Practice (which could be in the lab or learning Manual handling) 1 hour of Ethics and an hour of Sociology.
At the end of year 2 you were expected to hand in 3 essays , pass an exam in biology, and do a combined exam in Nursing practice/ethics and sociology. Pass Mark was 60%, in this year I also did several different placements, would have had to produce reflection essays for each of these and would have been graded in my practical nursing ability. (oh and because you don?t have the long break to work and build up a buffer of savings I would say that 90% of my cohort also did at least 2 bank shifts a week or had some sort of part-time job). You also had to sign in to classes and missing, oh I can?t remember the % now but it was low meant you were kicked off the course. (And any you missed and didn?t get kicked off had to be ?made-up? and at end of course. )
You are expected to do a lot of self-study. And that doesn?t end when you qualify, you must be able to show how and where you have studied in order to keep your registration.
Trust me it is not an easy option.
You can now do Midwifery as direct entry or as a post qualification course.

Oh and by the way I no longer am a nurse I work in a very different area but I got my interview on the back of my nursing degree.

angelpantser, a midwifery degree is very different to a nursing degree.

Either way, nursing is not an "easy option". I'd advise him to let her choose something she wants to do rather than something her sexist pig of a father thinks will be easy.

I'm wondering what did your dh study

TooFarGone - every single word your DH said was wrong.

Your DSD needs to do a degree that is the right one for her and if it is Chemistry at Cambridge or Cake Making on Consett that is what she should do. Telling her to do an easy degree and have a good time is rubbish advice. Telling her to do Nursing because it is easy is rubbish advice.

This makes me grind my teeth. Kids need all the support they can get to go to do the best degree they are capable of. Girls in particular need to be encouraged to aim high. Ooooh I'm steaming mad.

Actually, I have more to say.

When DW was at University she used to go back to her home town and voluntarily tour around Comprehensive schools to talk to 6th formers about Oxford and tell them to apply if they were bright.

Some schools refused to let her in at all and those pupils she did see there were so many who said 'oh my teacher told me not to apply because its not for people like me'.

FGS! I can't believe that people are talking to children like this nowadays.

MoreBeta Exactly right. Be a nice little nursie when she could be so much more. He's doing this kid down!

And while I?m on a roll, the pure physical and emotional demands are huge for really fuck all money.
Within 3 weeks of qualifying I was left to run a 15 bedded unit with 1Heath Care Assistant, 1 first year/first placement student and a 3rd year student.
At 18 months of been qualified I was running a 30 bedded unit with one other qualified nurse and a HCA , on nights where despite what patients think we don?t sleep you catch up on paperwork , nurse patients, try to study, try to mentor students. All with none of the support systems available during the day. For this I was paid the grand total of 24,523 a year.
Personally if I had heard your husband I'd have broken his neck; I know how to do that I have a nursing degree. . .

All of this aside what does your DSD want to do?

What if nursing is something they've talked about before? Does that trouble your argument any?