Ridiculous to try and sue a university over a "mickey mouse" degree?

[Creambun2]

thetab.com/uk/2018/03/10/a-graduate-is-suing-her-university-for-60000-for-giving-her-a-mickey-mouse-degree-62377

Surely, it is down to individuals to research their university and course appropriately and understand that whatever degree or university you go to, getting the job you want will be mostly about you and your skills?

I agree universities pump out lots of propaganda about "employment prospects" but saying, for example, 90% of graduates employed within 6 months means nothing is 89% of those are not in graduate level jobs.

"I think that before 27k tuition fees for a 3 year course existed, students could go with the aim of widening their horizons, learning more about a subject they love."

Maybe very rich ones. Even when there were no fees, there were living costs. Of course, students didn't always know where their degree would get them if it wasn't a vocational one, but they did think it would improve their prospects.

"I remember thinking how the fuck to people know Town Planning even exists so apply for it?"

Exactly. I would have chosen another subject if I knew it existed.

I remember studying A Levels at a FE college and deciding to go to uni. I had no family support. I did huge amounts of online research but all the lists and tables were overwhelming. I tried to create some kind of meta spreadsheet listing and comparing all the ones I was interested in but I couldn’t make it work and couldn’t see the wood for the trees. The lecturers all parroted the line that all universities and university courses were created equal and a first from Oxford Brookes is equal to a first from Oxford (for example).

I was so stressed by it all I considered not going.

Finally my (foreign - Danish) maths lecturer took pity on me. He said look let me boil this down for you:

• old universities are more prestigious and prestige = employability. Therefore Oxford (v old) much better than Oxford Brookes (new). This is true all over the world - Harvard and Yale are a couple of the oldest American unis for example and incredibly prestigious.
• degree courses described with one word (Physics, Philosophy) are more prestigious than longer ones
• if you go to a prestigious uni you’ll mix with people from a wide range of privileged backgrounds and that will help you work out what career you might like (for example, what ‘working in the city’ - my vague idea for a future, actually means in terms of job title and employers)

This did give me some erroneous ideas (for a long time I thought PPE was a bit Mickey Mouse, ha) but it gave me some grounding in guessing what course to go for. Because ultimately I think he was right - if you don’t have a career in mind, prestige is the big deal.

I didn’t have a career in mind because I had no fucking clue what careers were available. The adults I knew were, on the whole, fucked up. Or they were teachers. I didn’t even know advertising was a field, I thought company bosses wrote their own adverts

I know there’s a lot of information around but processing it is hard. Anyone who thinks it isn’t probably already has an internal automatic filter that they aren’t acknowledging doing some of the work for them.

"for a long time I thought PPE was a bit Mickey Mouse, ha"

That made me laugh, but if it was taught at the local former higher education college it probably would be considered Mickey Mouse. How will philosophy help you get a job is what non-privileged students will be asked? "And if it's combined with economics, they're probably not serious about either".

The thing about old unis though is that it's not that clear for me what counts as old, many were theological colleges first weren't they and might only have been called unis more recently.

for a long time I thought PPE was a bit Mickey Mouse, ha

I know Oxford science graduates who deride PPE as what their friends who couldn't hack it transferred to. But that was the best part of forty years ago.

A better test is that, rightly or wrongly, and with a few exceptions, the more a degree sounds like a job title the lower status it tends to have. There is some hideous snobbery around that (amongst some people, medicine is "trade") but if your objective it to choose a degree that has maximum long-term value, then you need to be aware of what people who are the "consumers" of your degree think.

I had no clue how prestigious Lancaster was until i read it in a Dick Francis novel about 5 years after graduation. I hadn’t even considered it as I’d only really manged to get as far as big city uni (manchester, leeds etc)- probably better than small town uni (eg teeside or wolverhampton) which all seemed to be ex polys.

Heriot -watt i knew about, also from a book somewhere.

Lancaster is an amazing high ranked university with high proportion of poorer kids getting a world class education. It’s not RG which goes to show it’s important to look beyond these meaningless labels.

Similar to a pp I would always interview someone with an OU degree. Many people with OU degrees have worked hard to overcome disadvantage and value their education. No sense of academic entitlement there.

When I went to uni (late 80s), you ‘read’ for a degree. Ie. You attended a lecture which covered a basic outline, and was possibly given reading lists, and then had to go and read around/research the topioc yourself. (Small Welsh uni)

Yes petalflowera! Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work like that these days - and students seem to want to be handed everything on a plate. Maybe it's the tuition fees forcing this shift.