to ask if DC shouldn't bother with university if they can't get into a Russell Group one?

[TuTuTilly]

I'd never heard of the ruddy things before I joined MN. Didn't even realise I'd been to one. I do recall when I had a tedious summer job in Human Resources which included "sifting" job applications for an international firm of accountants, being told to dump any that weren't from a handful of universities.

So my question is; if your child can't get into an RG university - should they accept that they will be unemployable oiks upon graduation and resign themselves to a life working in call centres?

Well there was quite a lot of Marxist wankering in my 70s History degree too and still, if you are looking for it in the study of literature. However you get stupid posey pretentiousness that makes a mountain out of a molehill and uses big words where simple words will do in all disciplines and walks of life ESPECIALLY business, and law is certainly not immune. It chimed with me that Gloria Steinem, of "women need men like fish need a bicycle", said ?Nobody cares about feminist academic writing. That's careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted... But I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ratio to its usefulness?and what you write in inverse relationship to its understandability. [...] Academics are forced to write in language no one can understand so that they get tenure. They have to say 'discourse', not 'talk'. Knowledge that is not accessible is not helpful.?

Marxism and Deconstructionism are just two approaches to literary criticism now which you can find useful or discard much as you would a business or strategy model. Both my job and my literary studies required the application of my intellectual and analytical skills. I would assume all that exposure to great writers would have improved my writing skills and the construction of arguments within essays requires the same skills as putting together a business/ strategy proposal. I actually embarked on further study because I wanted to improve my insight into another culture, something that is important if you are going to devise marketing strategies. which it certainly did. In the end though I have been ambushed by the magic and enjoyment and an intense curiosity, plus we don't need money anymore but we do need an escape from the stress and to find out what is actually enjoyable and fulfilling in our lives.

I don't object to a creative writing course - say a year at UEA? I would pay for that.

What I do object to is spending YEARS arguing over what Dickens/George Eliot/Stephen King actually MEANT by the provocative semi colon in that penultimate line.

Newsflash. No one cares. No one will ever care. Just read the book and enjoy it.

Spero I wish I could have got away with obsessing with a colon, how about "Gao Xingjiang is a misogynist narcissist and only got the Nobel prize because he conned the Norwegians into thinking he was speaking for the people of China" requiring you to read all 700 pages, and do a lot of contextual research, and then come to appreciate that it was a bit more complicated than that and the book wasn't such a load of crap after all, paralleling pretty much all the west's misconceptions of China (and I might say those of someone who hasn't been within a hundred yards of the English Department of a university in the last twenty years or so)

Spero are you sure the child dev questions were the same? IME they make subtle changes. I was pregnant with DS1 when I did child dev. I spent the maternity leave before he was born studying in the hope that I would only have to do one essay and the exam afterwards. I thought it would be a piece of cake given that 'babies sleep all the time', don't they?

I restarted the course the next year and although I didn't have to do much work for the essays that I had done before the questions were very slightly different and they had to be tweeked.

I also dropped out of another psychology course half way through and again, the questions were similar but not exactly the same.

It might explain why you got a lower mark second time around.

Anyway, on a general point, this thread seems very London-centric. There is a whole big world outside of London where fewer people give a damn about whether your degree is RG or not. All this nonsense about you won't get a job with a big six accountancy firm or the best chambers - most people wouldn't want to and can still go on to have successful and interesting careers without all this angst about what degree subject they studied and where they studied it.

dh went to one - i didn't

i earn more

he's happier

I pushed the DCs into university in the US because of the opportunity there to be educated as opposed to trained, and paradoxically because a really rigorous university education there makes you a versatile and highly desirable potential recruit, but I still made it clear nobody was to even think about doing a degree in English Lit or equivalent once they got in.

If I had a liberal arts-leaning student heading off to university and they were good enough to consider Oxbridge I would be pointing them in the direction of highly selective universities in the US too. It's a great way to hedge your bets, subject-wise, explore what you like and are perhaps suited for, and still end up very employable. DD1 started out as an architecture student but graduated in 2012 with a degree in economics. Along the way she learned Persian, did enough maths and science to allow her to consider taking the MCAT if she wasn't such a wuss about blood, and did enough fine arts courses to allow her to think about it as a minor. Plus philosophy, psychology and history and a stint studying abroad in France. At a highly selective US university, doing English Lit or history, etc., wouldn't knock you out of the running for an analyst job in finance/on Wall Street because you would have studied enough relevant subjects at a rigorous enough level to make your liberal arts major irrelevant in many cases, but I still advised DD1 to stick with the maths-heavy economics.

DS is on a track that will hopefully see him going to med school but he could equally apply to law school. DD2 is heading off all starry-eyed about a career in the US diplomatic service or on some political think tank and will probably go to law school upon graduation. If I am successful in my lobbying efforts she will concentrate on economics or even change direction into the maths and science area her brother is focusing on. I think this is her longest and strongest suit but she likes arguing, and getting paid for it would be her idea of bliss.

Since they are studying in the US their choices are made with repayment of US student debt in mind. Repayment is not linked to ability to pay and they will not be able to defer repayment indefinitely. As the wind blows in America it will eventually blow in the UK.

At the one end in the UK there are many former polys that would be perfectly fine as polys, fulfilling the absolutely essential mission polys had when they were initially conceived, and on the other you have universities offering degrees that are far too highly specialised, and a secondary education system that forces students to foreclose on vast areas of study and employment at an early age. The result is Oxford graduate with degrees in Classics starting careers in the Treasury with little or no exposure to maths since age 16 and probably none in economics. It's a pity anyone has to throw the dice so young in the UK, but I agree with Spero that since this is now necessary it has to be done very carefully.

I accept I have very negative views about Eng lit so. So nothing I say should be taken as impartial career advice.

As far as I recall the essay title were exactly the same, hence I just submitted the same essays. But even if there were 'subtle tweaks' how do I plunge from a near first to a low 2:2? Kind of hints to me that the marking depends on the individual marking it.

I agree we will inevitably go the way of the US re funding.

Spero I don't think I said or implied that a 2.1 from any old place will suffice to get you a top training contract or pupillage, I merely said you don't need a First from Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, UCL or the LSE and you certainly don't need to have pulled parental strings to shadow at the US Supreme Court (that could actually backfire, big time).

You avoided the point that law degrees are good intellectual training in themselves. Given your uncompromising line on the utter futility of English degrees (and all Arts degrees?) I'd expect you to recant slightly and say actually no harm done wading into a law degree without being certain quite what it is you want to do later.

math some students enjoy specialism. I daresay my elder DC could have been in the running for a decent Ivy League place but didn't want to stay broad and/so preferred to stay here. I think the end result will be very little different. It's just a matter of how to skin cats.

I am a lawyer. I earn six figures. I didn't go to a Russell Group university (although it is a very good university and i did check the list to see if it was in there!). I worked for a top international law firm for many years plus one of the big five accountancy firms in the city. You do not need to go to a Russell group university to do well.

Having said that I've also seen hundreds of cvs from young people who have wasted their time doing law degrees at former polytechnics or new universities, gained a 2.2 or even a 2.1 and will never unfortunately get a training contract to enable them to qualify as a lawyer. Because quite simply the legal profession has changed massively. We have been hit hard by the recession and many law firms are restructuring so that they have partners at the top, paralegals at the bottom and far fewer mid level lawyers. Law graduates are expensive and can't do much (in many cases no more than unqualified paralegals). We don't need as many new lawyers and so those who get the training n contracts will be mainly those with firsts from Oxbridge who can also show they are rounded people with good interpersonal skills and something about them.

I also went to a crappy comp, got an E in A level maths and got a 2.1 at my non Russell Group University.

I went to a RG university and my siblings to Oxbridge. I think it has helped us in terms of how we are perceived in our professions and our careers although after a few years it is whether you are good at the work that counts.

For some of the better paid jobs in London it definitely helps to get into a good RG university. I suspect but might be wrong my daughter got her job partly because she had been at Bristol whereas had she picked London Met or Middlesex or Hertfordshire "University" she definitely would not have done. Plus she needed a lot of As, 2/1 etc etc and all the rest.

Some people are just forced into a certain avenue because it's where they perceive their strengths to lie when choosing A levels, and because they have not been required to keep at subjects they found challenging (or subjects where they were poorly taught) and could progress to choosy universities without a broad selection of subjects, they have dropped maths or history as soon as they they could -- too soon imo. I believe a system that forces students to be excellent all rounders at least up to their second year of university produces a better calibre of graduate, certainly a more versatile one. Versatile graduates make for an adaptable economy.

Allowing students to graduate from a university without a decent level of fluency in a second language seems especially dim-witted to me as a policy, but I think there is also something to be said for making students continue with maths to calculus and beyond as a graduation requirement.

The Russell Group was created in 1994. Nobody who went to university before 1994 went to a RG university. Some of the universities now in the RG were pretty poor in the 70s and 80s. Some of the top universities in the 70s and 80s were not founder members of the RG or are still not members today.

Ha, sorry to go back, but 'evident passion for the subject' and 'engaging writing style' are what I say as the bread in a very shitty shit sandwich....

Sorry, that ^^ was bitchy - but as an English Lit lecturer, obviously that's how I'm going to feel! (watch too for 'it is clear you have engaged with some of the important themes here, and have been inspired by the text') - but even aside from the fact that, obviously, I would defend the analysis of the literary text as an academic subject, and aside also from the fact that I think that some of the comments made about it are a little bit daft - if a DC wanted to do it, good for them: better a degree you're committed to and care about than one that fits with someone else's utilitarian notions of what HE is or should be - but even apart from that, I make reasonable money doing it; I love doing it; it's a good career if you stick at it.

I think my English degree trained me in rigorous analysis. I didn't find it particularly 'easy', because I don't think it's supposed to be easy if you take it seriously. I did enjoy it hugely, and it trained me to think.

I have found thinking, and the ability to analyse and interrogate a text, really quite useful in subsequent life.

Yellowtip - why on earth would anyone chose to do a law degree u less they wanted to practise law? It is very tedious. If you want academic challenge there are any number of other subjects which are challenging, interesting and useful.

I don't think I met a single law student in both my time as student and tutor who did not want to practise law. The sad fact is that quite a lot did not make it.

All this 'do something just for the hell of it, you never know where it might lead' is lovely in theory but sadly it's thinking which applies to another time and place. Very few students will now have the luxury of floating about while they deliberate their next move.

I am not saying I think this is a great state of affairs but it is the world we live in now. My daughter will get one bite of the higher education cherry because there is no way I could afford more.

I will be deeply unimpressed if she tells me she will give a law degree a go because it sounds challenging and she can't think of anything else.

BTW none of my peers from my English degree days are in bedsits in Finsbury Park either.

Mother-totally agree with you re English degree. And I now have a science masters so am in a position to compare.

LaQueen I also spent my undergraduate years drinking and having a good time and suddenly woke up to how interesting it was around three weeks before finals and still got a 2.1. That was then. This is now.... None of the undergraduates at my uni can get away with that now, they work incredibly hard and they are off overseas to get work experience every holiday and they work very hard at getting jobs.