To think social mobility in the UK is awful?

[cnwc]

AIBU to think that social mobility has actually got much worse in the last decades rather than better?

I think house prices in places like London have got a lot to do with it, and too many of the best jobs are located there.

It seems pretty much impossible for people to move up in the world

Unfortunately I know far more than I ever imagined I would need to know about plumbing, having lived in apartment blocks where all the occupants sued each other permanently due to leaks!

You are hilarious Maria.

Exactly. The plumbing in our house is dreadful. A tangle of ill placed pipes. A bright child could have worked out that a lot of the drainage was going to be very poor because water down the plug hole does not then flow uphill.

Do you actually know any tradespeople Pass?

LOL, Tinkly. I haven’t had to contend with attempts at uphill water flow but I have had to reroute metres of hidden pipes that meant that leaks could not be identified before huge water damage had occurred.

there are pretty many useless degrees, that's a fact. Maybe not as much "useless", but the industry is either very niche or extremely competitive.

It’s such a mess. Children aren’t receiving the education they need in order to do a job required by society and for which they could earn a reasonable living. Our governments have preferred to import skilled workers, trained at another country’s expense.

"The U.K. government does plenty of analysis of outcomes for university degrees and unfortunately many are worse than worthless because they make for worse outcomes than no degree at all."

Actually that's not the evidence given by the research at all. The ONS data shows that graduates earn more than non graduates and are more likely to be in employment.

www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/news/Pages/Graduates-more-likely-to-be-in-employment-and-earn-more-than-non-graduates-new-statistics.aspx

There are also working class kids with degrees they don’t seem to know how to monetise.

DD’s friend has a good degree in history, a subject she has always loved. Having decided against teaching, she now works in a pub and feels pissed off about her wasted money and time. No thoughts of topping up with a more vocational masters or applying to grad schemes or even the civil service or entry level jobs in a big organisation.

My kids are not geniuses (standard Russell group 2.1s in Arts subjects) but because DH and I were clued up enough to say, “Get a bit of volunteering experience in this, try applying for that,” they have managed to start decent careers.

So your "facts" are just made up.

www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/graduatesintheuklabourmarket/2017

There is analysis degree by degree that shows very distinctly which degrees add value and which don’t.

It’s a bit of a flawed study though isn’t it? Unless it is comparing two groups with exactly the same IQ and qualifications except one lot took a further step and got a degree.

If it’s just generally comparing graduates and not graduates, then it’s just saying that people that people who are mostly bright (graduates) earn more than people who are mostly less bright (non graduates).

Link to it then?

Except the over all findings is that even non Russell group graduates earn more than non graduates.

There is evidence too that private school students out earn their state school counterparts, even if they attended the same university and got the same degree qualification.

It was the very vague notion that, because graduates on average earned more than non-graduates. governments expanded access to higher education. Unfortunately none of that took into account other drivers of financial success of graduates such as IQ, school attended, subject studied, sex, A-level results, quality of university teaching etc etc. Now that we have a couple of decades of mass HE and powerful statistical analysis tools we can dig down and understand much more deeply the “recipe for financial success”. And it isn’t “a degree”.

Except the over all findings is that even non Russell group graduates earn more than non graduates

Again that can be correlation not causation. People who are mostly bright (and motivated enough to go to uni) earn more than people who are mostly less bright (and not motivated enough to go to uni).

The study is not showing in any way that obtaining that piece of paper that says you have a degree, makes a difference.

Except the evidence doesn't show that, you are just making stuff up to fit your opinions.

Still no links.

"The study is not showing in any way that obtaining that piece of paper that says you have a degree, makes a difference"

Except that it shows that graduates out earn non graduates and are more likely to be employed, so it does show that.

www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/27/lse-london-school-economics-graduates-earnings

Except that it shows that graduates out earn non graduates and are more likely to be employed, so it does show that.

The PP is quite right that it's quite likely correlation rather than causation, though.

“For men, studying creative arts, English or philosophy actually result in lower earnings on average at age 29 than people with similar background characteristics who did not go to HE at all.”

At Bolton University and 11 other institutions, not over all.

Talk about selective quoting,

And its not correlation rather than causation. University education opens doors to higher earnings.

Why did you not quote this bit:

"The analysis found that a student’s earlier educational results, including GCSE and A-level grades, as well as their social and economic status, was strongly linked to differences in graduate incomes"

And its not correlation rather than causation.

How do you know this?

When dealing with statistics, it is generally wise to assume correlation unless you can prove causation.