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?

But analyse what? Our own subjective opinion of someone else's subjective opinion? Sorry, still struggling to find either discipline or rigour in this.

I remember John Lennon saying he wrote I Am the Walrus to mess with the people who liked 'analysing' his lyrics.

How many in your year at UCL Spero, roughly?

Sperro but why did he do that? He certainly wasn't the first. Dickens etc were all being alternative by indulging in novel writing in the first place, and all good authors have been engaged in subversion in some form or the other

To challenge perceptions, to analyse how we feel about something,to make a difference. Books can change the world.

O god, i can't remember. Quite a lot? More than 30?

I am off to bed now. Think the best advice I can give my daughter is, come the Zombie Apocalypse, what kind of skills will you want on your team?

Yes, yes, I profoundly agree, books can and have changed the world.

People writing essays about those books however, have not. Of course, I stand to be corrected but must put my prejudices to bed now.

Night all.

Well, interestingly, the zombie apocalypse threatening Westeros (for 16 bleep years as Axis of Awesome so helpfully point out) looks like it will be solved by either book learning or dragons.

I don't think there are any degrees in Dragons on offer at the moment.

So, books it is. Sorted.

Roland Barthes, Julia Kristiva, et al.

People writing about One flew over, along with the book, changed mental health treatment around the world. Come the apocalypse I want an historian, a lit major and a philosopher. They will have read the manuals!

Dragons. Seriously.

When I learnt that RG takes 1/4 of all undergrads in the country, these two letters lost all its charm potential for me. 1/4 can not offer courses which will be substantially better than all the courses from the rest 3/4.

The same about students - it just can not be, that RG's 1/4 is the top, and a student number [1/4] + 1 is worse than everyone in [1/4]. I can imagine that to be true to a small highly specialised institution with artificially small intake and large demand like... I dunno... the Royal Ballet Upper School. In such conditions you can say - "everyone in is better than anyone out". But for RG, which takes 10% of a population cohort? Everyone from Southampton is better than anyone from Middlesex? You gotta be kidding.

This is me in my employer's hat. Now I put on my parent's hat, and say if my DD is not capable of getting AAB on A-levels, perhaps, she should not waste money on any uni. I am a skeptic on value of modern unis.

So Ken Kesey doesn't get the credit for writing One Flew etc and changing our perceptions? The critics who wrote about him do? Really?

I express polite scepticism about that.

Come the Zombie Apocalypse I want to be with the medics, engineers, electricians and plumbers. And I won't care where or if they went to university.

I love dissecting text. I find it really fun. And ,as motherinferior said, it's very good training for analysis.

That said, I do think we Eng Lit lovers need to be able to laugh at ourselves. Some of it is the snake eating his tail.

As a writer, I now find myself in the, frankly, weird position of having students email me regularly to ask me about my work. Why did I do this? What's the meaning of that? The truth is, so much of it is little more than random...

I did economics and criticism (English literature). They were both good and develop different ways of thinking.

Back then it was a pretty safe bet to get into Big Four from economics, good recruitment ties obviously, much easier than say publishing despite the poor pay of the latter.

Will be more competitive now I imagine.

sperro I may be a History graduate and have postgrad degrees in Marketing and the History, Lit and Anthropology of another continent but I'm dead good with an engine, electrical circuit, growing fruit and veg, setting up distribution and logistics networks, negotiating, basic first aid, building a wall, coping with shit and trauma and still being able to laugh. I think I'd be pretty good come Armageddon, and it will partly be to do with my (now) RG degree because it taught me to think things through, the rest was real life. I wonder how useful a law degree will be when the rule of law breaks down

I think it is sad that if your DC wants to study Literature you will be crying inside. I have one child who is a mumsnetters dream, Scientist, elite uni etc., sure she will have an assured career and may even find a cure for Cancer but I worry about her more in real life than I do my dyslexic /dyspraxic child who has empathy and creativity. She would and should never have been squeezed into a STEM shaped box, it would have made her very unhappy. However the world is full of opportunities for someone with her talents, especially as she is adaptable, there are many many ways to crack this thing called life, not just a career in the city and a big house with a nice kitchen in the suburbs? Aren't we all happiest when we get to use our talents to make a difference? And all those Literature students are wrestling with issues that are at he heart of real life. If they have read and understood One flew over the cuckoos nest as my Dd has,and better still been made to really understand and engage with it, they are going to be better equipped when they encounter mental illness as they surely will.

I think we should all be able to laugh at ourselves . But the whole 'what did the author mean to put in the book for the reader to get the message he/she wanted to send?' is not always the most useful or interesting way to think about a text anyway - though English at school seems heavily focussed on it.

Ours was all Baudrillard, Derrida rather then finding out author's meaning, that was more Year 12 with themes. Also feminism would have been bypassed without that degree. The author was dead by the time we got to university.

Economics and statistics were interesting, but I can't say balancing debit and credit columns in accounting held much joy.

Copthall, ok you can be on my team come the Zombie Apocalypse, you sound quite handy.

My law degree will of course be useless when the rule of law breaks down. As will any degree in any arts subject.

I think we seem to be misunderstanding each other. I am not saying that a big flashy city job is the only way forward in life. I think I have repeatedly said that there are many ways to live a good life which is why I am so suspicious that university is being touted by various Govs as the ONLY solution when patently for many children it is not and they would be much happier being allowed to develop more practical as opposed to 'academic' talents.

For me it boils down to this - if you want to get a degree in a subject with no immediate and obvious applicability to earning money, make sure you go to the best university you can get into. Because competition is fierce. If you think employers don't rank, you are wrong. They do it, not because they think graduates at all other institutions are crap but when your desk is covered in 100s of apps you have to have a sifting mechanism.

Not so fussed about 'Russell Group' but it does seem that in the past 20 years or so the Top Ten have remained pretty constant.

O and of course I agree that reading One Flew will inevitably make you more attuned and aware of issues surrounding mental illness and its 'treatment'. I think I said that a few posts ago.

I have no doubt books change the world, by changing people. I have read of various studies which demonstrate that people who read fiction are more empathetic - I am not sure if this is because by their nature they are drawn to fiction or that reading about other's experiences increases their ability to emphathise.

But I utterly reject any suggestion that then dissecting a book and writing about it is in any way comparable. It is like taking a beautiful living creature and dissecting it then arguing about what the liver really means.

I have frequently been moved to tears by things I have read. By authors. Things I have read by critics have also moved me to tears, but not in a good way.

Well it's a good job that surgeons and medical researchers don't spend their time looking at beautiful living creatures crying about how lovely they are, isn't it!

And no, I'm not saying a literary critic is comparable to someone who finds a cure for cancer, obviously... appreciating literature and becoming a more empathetic person for the reading of it is great, of course. I often think there's a mismatch between people who want to do a literature degree because they see it as a form of appreciation and want to discuss books, and those who are interested in a more dispassionate form of analysis. We're not here to giggle about how much we'd like to boff Mr Darcy in a pond or whatever, or sigh over how very very true it is that beauty is truth and truth beauty...

Nobody in this job could argue we're splitting any atoms: I consider myself lucky to live in a world/country where I can do this, and teach it. No argument about that - but I hotly contend the idea that it's all just subjective opinion.

(conteST, sorry!).

Of course Kesey gets credit, but if people hadn't read/reviewed/commented/analysed it may have sunk without a trace, as many very good books do.
As for taking apart a book in the way that a surgeon does, no, it's different. Does Hard Times demonstrates that Dickens was an ameriolist? Was Jane Eyre the first feminist writing? These are discussions worth having. It gives us a perspective on history, women's lives etc. Which can in turn give us a perspective on today.
The unreliable narrator gives a different perspective on a book and the society from which he/she comes.

Of course surgeons aren't crying over the beautiful body they have to cut open, and thank goodness for that, otherwise a lot of us would be dead.

No one has explained where the 'objective' element comes into literary criticism.

A surgeon has to cut open flesh to cure. He/she has to know where to cut and what bits to cut out. There is little room for debate about that.

A book can be read and interpreted in a thousand different ways. Yes, I am sure I can learn a lot about a narrow strata of upper middle class society from reading Jane Austen but to say that reading the novels of authors of the time is more than just adding colour to a historical analysis of conditions at the time is just bonkers. It is a frequent criticism of Austen that she is so narrow - no discussion of all the horrible wars going on at the time etc.

I care little for that because I don't read her to understand the political/social/economic situation of England in late 18th century. I read and enjoy her for her treatment of universal themes of love, loss and compromise.

My life would not be enriched one iota by reading what somebody else thought about her work. I am simply not interested. If someone else tells me Jane Austen is crap - as did Mark Twain who I greatly admire - that is their opinion. I don't agree with it, they are entitled to have it and it doesn't greatly interest me because it is all wholly subjective.

Of course, others may not agree with me and may find that ploughing through essays of literary criticism is what makes their day. Well, good for them.

But this thread addresses another point; this isn't a battle between arts and sciences and which is 'best', we aren 't talking about that. (But I would say it is probably the biggest problem our country has that for so long we were in the grip of an elite who despised science and thought only Latin and Greek were fit topics of study)

We are talking about the depressingly practical point of the path our children are to take in terms of higher education, now that it is no longer free.

So I stand by what I say; if you want to spend your time talking about what other people create, think long and hard about the institution you go to. If what you want to do is of limited use or enjoyment to the vast majority of people so you will NEED the credibility of a very good university, unless you want to risk chucking your tuition fees down the drain.

Well yes, but of course no literary critic writes 'Jane Austen is crap', do they? They're not - not since F.R. Leavis - there to assess the merit and value of a literary text.

If only literary critics would express themselves with such economy!

So what on earth ARE they talking about that historians, sociologists, economists and pyschologists etc can't do a whole lot better with rather more impressive research/statistics/original source docs??