How many years is it going to take before 18 year olds realise that going to Uni is only worth it for about 20% of people

[Hammy02]

I went to an old poly and wish I hadn't as it didn't make much difference to my career prospects. DP went to a 'proper' Uni and earns about 60K so it was worth it for him. All I did was waste my time. Many students will now be racking up such huge debts that it will hugely impact their future. AIBU?

I agree with you, Ifancyashandy; whatever happened to believing education had a true value?

I really hope my ds does go as I think job prospects are not good either way. As long as it is at his own expense I don't mind ds having another 3 yrs of fun!

I agree with you Ifancyashandy but by pushing too many people into university the whole system is being dumbed down. University should be for the elite (intelligent elite, not financial elite) and the system we have now is not only failing them but it's also failing the non-elite who are coming out of university with qualifications that have not expanded their brains and will not get them a better job.

It's not the going to Uni that is valueless - I think that time will always be valuable for a person.

Its what you do there that detrermines how much money you will make. Some degrees/professions just aren't very well paid vs what you can do without a degree. The difference Uni makes may be that you are able to do something more interesting for the same money.

Isn't that the point though Ifancyashandy? Many degrees these days are not about true education and the love of learning. They can be to paper exercises that apply to the lowest common denominator.

PS I also think there should again be the sort of vocational education options that Polys were orginially set up for.

I think racking tuition fees up to £9K is a back-door way of shrinking the HE sector. It's pretty obvious to most people that NuLab's target of 50% of young people in HE has had very negative unintended consequences (degree inflation etc) but the HE sector is such a money earner for so many people that it'd be political suicide if the government just announced they were going to close the worst-performing 30% of UK universities. All the cafe owners, student-let landlords, pubs, nasty student nightclubs etc etc etc that depend for their livelihood on hosts of students splurging their loans there would be up in arms. Post-industrial cities such as Liverpool where the student pound is a (or the) major source of income for many businesses would become disaster zones if their universities were suddenly shrunk or shut down.

Effectively student loans represent a subsidy to the UK economy, while also shifting the cost of keeping young people off the dole statistics onto the young people themselves. If this subsidy to the economy vanished overnight, and 30% of the approx 2.5 million young people who went to university in 2010 were unemployed instead, that'd be a disaster for the UK economy (especially in the North) and around a 25-30% jump in the UK unemployment statistics. Add that together and it's not a vote-winner.

On the other hand, if you charge young people £9K a year to go to university, you're effectively using market forces to drive poor universities out of business. No-one wants to rack up £30K-odd of debt on a useless degree, so a few things will happen:

a) Degrees will become more focused on employability
b) There will be fierce competition for degrees that actually hold some value in terms of future employment
c) Lots of those that don't get on one of these courses will just think 'sod this, I'm going to do a vocational training or get a job instead'
d) The HE sector will shrink back to a more realistic size, but it'll do it slowly so the shock to all the systems that have built up around the current situation won't be so sudden.

Eventually, I think, the HE sector will shrink enough for government-subsidised degrees to be affordable for the government again. Sadly that will be too late for lots of our children

The current government was just too gutless to come out and say "we're halving the number of Uni places but we will fund those places".

Instead the current system says

• If your degree turns out to be worthwhile, you have to pay for it BUT
• If you degree turns out to be useless, we'll write it off??

WTFF? Why not say (if keeping number of places the same), we will fund (eg) nursing, medicine, teaching, engineering, maths etc(ie those where we need these people). Everyone else pays. You have to pay it back, so think about it before you commit to Modern Studies at University of Bumfuck

Unfortunately if the HE sector is allowed to shrink according to market factors only degrees that focus on employability will be retained and those that are purely academic will be lost. That means we will lose our pure scientists, mathemeticians, archeologists... basically any degree that doesn't have a direct and immediate commercial link. Those people will all go and study in other countries so UK science and research will grind to a halt.

OTheHugeManatee

Arriving at this thread 10 minutes later than you has just saved me a great chunk of time and typing.. Ta much!!!!

^^^ What Manatee said ^^^

whatever happened to learning for its own sake? Is it only about career prospects now? I think thats incredibly depressing. Why can't you be a plumber with a first in philosophy, just because its good to know things?

I think its really insulting to people to tell them a education is a waste of time for them, saying a degree is useless for you, you'll never get a god enough job to use it.

HE should be free to all, always, life long learning should be the goal of a civilised society.

I honestly believe that a degree is going to become a route to a Masters and that is what is going to separate the graduates. Our A level students work really really hard to get their A grades so to devalue that is unfair. However with so many Degrees being got, the Masters graduates are gong to be the desirables, and the courses that offer a year work experience will also become more valuable.

Manatee I agree.
There was an interview on radio 5 yesterday about this. A man said that having a degree would mean you earn £100k a year more than without it. That's over your whole working life. Let's look at that:

3 years studying - loss of income (say) £35k.
Tuition fees - £27k
Subsistence costs (allowing for grant or parental contrib - NUS guidelines £5k pa total cost £15k

Total cost up front therefore is £77k. But don't worry, you'll earn an extra £100k over the next 45 years. But don't forget the tax you'll pay on that reduces it to £80k.

That is why, for the average student, a degree is worthless economically.

I hated the last govt for lying about tuition fees. Same for this one.

It is worth it.

I think the fees are immoral and wrong, but that is the work of the government and doesn't detract from the high-quality teaching and research going on in UK universities. It is a measure of the quality that UK research fairly often stands up to that conducted in the US (where Harvard alone gets more research funding than every uni in the UK PUT TOGETHER).

Certainly, we need to break the link that suggests that attending university will get you a job. Will a uni education guarantee you 50K per annum? No. Who are the people pushing that myth? The government. And they're only pushing it as a strawman so they can berate the universities for not acheiving it!

Young people should have a chance to think and learn and write.

Manatee I agree, except that if you don't earn enough, you don't have to pay your Uni costs back, so whilst the idea to use the market to drive the crap places out of businesses isnt necessarily a bad one (rather than the government arbitrarily saying "you Uni's are hereby designated as crap and will be closed") they're then hobbling that mechanism by saying that the more worthwhile degree courses will be paid for, whilst the worthless bits of paper ones will be funded by the taxpayer.

I left school at 15 and started work for a high street bank the day after my 16th birthday. My first day was spent working along side 5 other newbies. 2 of which had degrees. One in History of Art or something totally unrelated to the fincial services industry.

Anyway - in the 10 years I worked for the bank their degrees did nothing to progress their careers any further than mine. Many degree newbies joined us during my time in the bank and their degrees were wide and varied but none of their careers seemed to be progressing any better or faster than mine.

To my mind degrees and going to Uni has become so the norm it really does not set anyone out from the crowd these days.

Was the big government plan to get everyone into education to reduce the need to provide jobs and off benefits?

Unless you are studying something for a specific career like medicine to become a Dr or law to become a lawyer or similar then I dont think a degree is worth the cost of debt.

Someone was telling me the other day that more & more big companies realise less people will be going to uni because of the costs and are intending to set up their own schemes - like professional apprenticeships instead.

I have no idea what I will advise my DC to do. They all seem to think they want to go to Uni, and I dont wish to discourage it but I do question whether it really is worth the cost these days.

And as I am in my late 30's the happiest people I seem to have met in the last 10 years have been self employed hairdressers. They seem to be the people more able to juggle the home life, mothehood and a career earning a fairly good income way above those who have professional careers struggling to juggle the need and demands of both a career and family life. I have some friends with fantastic jobs they love earning serious ££££ but they moan and struggle with the family demands alongside the demands of their jobs. I really do sometimes think, I hope my DDs go to the local college and do the 2 years hairdressing course way above a law degree at Uni because ultimately I think they will end up with a happier work?family life balance in 20 years time.

Ultimately though I realise its their choice.

You can be a plumber with a degree in philosophy but that's not the situation we have. We have universities offering degrees in plumbing and TBH I'd rather have a plumber who has learned on the job and has vocational qualifications than one with a plumbing degree.

If the only value you place on a degree is how far it advances your career, then that's a very narrow view to have. University-level education should offer a whole lot more than that.

Slightly off topic but I see applications to the accountancy firms which offer 4 years to ACA from A-levels have huge interest this year. What surprises me is that this interest hasnt been greater before.

You can start work at 18, get paid c. £20k per year, and in 4 years you'll be a chartered accountant. Or, you can pay to go to Uni, do a degree, then start training for ACA which takes another 3 years.

I can understand that not everyone knows they want to be an accountant aged 18 (i didnt) but some do or they wouldnt apply for accounting degrees.

Manatee that I am sure that was the intention, but the implementation has been so cack handed that as TheBride says, it will quite possibly work the opposite way.

Victor I also agree with that, but many degrees we have now offer very little in terms of either career advancement or intellectual rigour (i.e. knowledge for the sake of it)

Please don't take this as me being snarky, TheBride, but you must know something I don't because I've not come across a degree programme (I'm going to have to restrict myself to in my field, but it's a pretty broad field) that isn't intellectually rigorous.

Genuinely, I have been to a Russell Group uni and a 'lesser' uni and there was no difference whatsoever apart from the holdings in the library.

I agree with those who say it's going to have a negative effect on 'pure' academic subjects. I did English Lit, which I feel massively enriched me as a person but has no direct application to anything. If I'd been paying £9K a year for my degree I'd have stuck with the original plan and done Modern Languages, which I wouldn't have enjoyed as much but which would at least have put me on the career path for translator work etc.

Ifancy: 'I think it's sad that we've lost the 'education for educations sake' ethos. A degree doesn't have to lead to a specific career / income bracket - expanding your brain and knowledge can be the required end.'

Learning for learning's sake certainly doesn't require the purchase of information from an institution.

We will have to agree to disagree then, or maybe we have different definitions of intellectual rigour, but arguably, if you can pass a degree course having only got 3 Ds at A-level, then that speaks volumes about the degree course IMO.