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.

Shit "forensic science" degrees have never led to jobs in the area. Scene of crime officers are often trained in house and if you want to work in a forensics lab you need to be thinking of subjects such as chemistry or bioscience at a top university often with phd and extensive experience of spectroscopy etc.

This argument could be a thing of the past soon- degrees rated gold, silver, bronze

ARU is currently rated silver.... LSE is bronze.... just sayin'

Yeah I saw that titchy

Just waiting for all the "university lecturers" to come and explain why the silver and bronze ratings are not worth anything

Well they're not! The majority of the score is based on student satisfaction. Put a student on an easy (some might say Mickey Mouse) course and they love it. Put them on a really hard course where they have to do lots of work (some might say RG) they rate their satisfaction much lower.

Most of the RG unis are gold though?

Yep - the whole 'all degrees are equal' thing is a lie, but its a lie the universities are all officially signed up to. That is incredibly unfair on anyone unfamiliar with the reality behind the lie, who may simply not realise that everyone is lying.

The 'world class' business is also a lie...or at least completely irrelevant. All Unis can likely dig up someone world class...so if that's all it takes its meaningless. Once you get into unis that have a genuine stab at meaning world class, you get into a morass of the stupid way league tables of all sorts are calculated, and the fact that excellence in teaching is only weakly coupled to excellence in research etc. etc.

Also A levels are indeed terrible. This is not at all the same as sayign they are easy though...they aren't. I am absolutely sure I would flunk A level in the topic I am currently a professor in an RG uni in. This is because none of my knowledge or skills would in any way be measured by the A level. A levels are terrible precisely because they don't measure anything it would be useful to know before applying to university to study a subject. (With the possible exception of maths...but we are in the process of killing even that).

What fresh hell is this gold silver bronze business?

any ranking based primarily on student satisfaction before they leave and get out in the real world and see what value their degree has actually added is going to be total BS.

I think sometimes the smaller non RG unis can be more welcoming and less arrogant.

whywhywhywhywhyyy I agree about forensic science, and to a lesser extent towards Criminology, although I find students who take the latter are often very motivated towards jobs relating to crime in a wider way, so end up getting internships/experience with prisons, charities relating to prisoners and so on. A very few end up with the police, and that's often at the bottom, but there are openings. More often, though the police train their own, or import MSc grads in research in to do the social research side. If you do a degree like Criminology, then you really have to work so incredibly hard around it to add value, it's not a passport to anything.

What are the compulsory subjects for a cat? mousing, obviously; caterwauling( university choir?); climbing (socially?). Is there any call for a dissertation on releasing live rats in owners' beds in the middle of the night?

hell yes, many RG's are so arrogant they don't care enough at all about teaching quality or innovations...they know their student stream is secure regardless of what they do or charge for it.

I think we SHOULD be aiming for all degrees to be genuinely seen as equal. We have the classification system, so it would make sense to me if RGs were mostly handing out 1sts (which they now are - talk about grade inflation!) and Unis that took in people with substantially lower quals to begin with were handing out more 2:2's and 3rds. If we actually had a national standard for comparable degrees, I'm pretty sure that's what would happen....

Entitled codswallop. Blame everyone else but yourself. Youngsters now just want spoon feeding.

It is ridiculous to think that all degrees are equal - they are patently not equal.

It's a great shame that there is so much emphasis on having a degree to follow career paths that don't really need them. DS1 carried on to do a masters as, in his words, everyone has a degree now. He felt that a masters was a basis requirement in his chosen field and he's still mulling over whether to do a PhD. All of this means more cash for universities.

I advised DS1 and DS2 to only consider RG for their chosen fields. There are very few notable exceptions to this where non RG degrees have more 'value' in the working world. The shift from true education to creating a consumer product out of education has well and truly happened and they need to be aware of this. They are paying a great deal of money and need to aim for the very best value. Very few people can afford to go to have a nice time now and I do think young people are more focused on the end result.

University teaching is in a very dark place at the moment, with students by and large wanting an easy life and plenty of spoon-feeding, and academics looking back wistfully to the days of small seminar groups and lots of independent study, but without the charisma or time or, bluntly, incentive - because they are evaluated primarily on their research - to attempt to shape a student body raised on an A level system which actively encourages mindless regurgitation.

Most of the RG unis are gold though?

No! 8 out of the 24 are gold.

The new TEF (gold,diver,bronze) also count rate of employment after graduation.

TEF always has included employment....

But 3 of the 6 measures are from the NSS.

@Unemfuckingployable in my experience I'm inclined to agree with you. However, there are still some students who are proactive and engage in critical thinking. Mature students are especially good for this. These sorts of students are the ones that make your job an enjoyable one.

I don't know if this case has merit as apart from the brief write up in the paper I can't find any more information. I did my first degree at a Polytechnic which is now a university with a reputation not dissimilar to Anglia Ruskin, my second degree at a red-brick (now Russell Group) and my doctorate/research/academia years at a prestigious (now Russell Group) university, before taking a senior post at a spin-out company thence into industry. I have some experience in all these types of institution and I will say this: a first class BS or BA graduate from Anglia Ruskin is likely to be as competent, intelligent and studious as a first class graduate from Cambridge. The focus of AR may not be the high level research that comes out of Cambridge itself, but at the Batchelors level the degrees across the board will be of an essentially similar standard. If the teaching is different this will be moderated out at marking. A student receiving poor tuition at AR will not be able to get a 1st class honours degree. Where the difference in this case lies, I suspect, is that if someone is seeking a job in international business finance, which is what this degree appears to be aiming towards, AR is not so well known internationally and is therefore less prestigious for the kind of roles this young woman may be seeking based on the subject matter of the course. This also appears to be a generic degree and she should have considered a specific Masters to support her chosen career (this is mentioned on the AR website).
The comments on this thread about 'mickey mouse degrees' etc are sadly reflected in the employing public, many of whom have no idea how the system works at all.

No UK university will spoon-feed its students and personal study is very important. When I was still in academia some of our students only received 6 hours teaching each week and were expected to do the rest independently. No university like AR would risk only offering their students only 6 hours a week....yet the RG got away with it (and as far as I'm aware still does).
One of the comments made to me by a Chinese colleague whose children have all studied in the UK is that school in China is much harder than the UK, but university much easier than the UK, because the style of teaching (drilling, rote learning, hard work reaping rewards as much as talent) is maintained throughout the education system there. I wonder if this difference in approach may have been the issue here, as the student came from Hong Kong: it must have been a huge change in emphasis.

Showmetheelf - I disagree in almost every respect.

Interesting, as I cross posted with your post of 10.23 which had similar sentiments.

I think it's really interesting that the posters on here associated with and in defence of post 92 institutions all seem to have put forward strong, well worded, polite perspectives. There are some RG supporters (and staff) who, on the other hand, are coming across less well (with usernames I wouldn't dream of using in a million years! - 'unemfuckingployable').

Just an observation

@blastomama - Gosh, your cat is brighter than me. I only got a 2:1 from Anglia Ruskin!

How do they measure rate of employment though?

I've been employed since I graduated but initially it was shelf stacking in Tescos :-)