Will university applications plummet next year?

[Erebus]

What do you think? Do you think we will see a wild reduction in applicants; huge pressure on apprenticeship type courses (or local Technical colleges in general!)- will we see grade requirements fall?

Do you think that universities will close, or at least reduce in scope dramatically til all they're offering is highly academic, 'pure' courses or actual traineeship degrees like Nursing, only?

Frankly, five candles, upping 'the base level' has, for example, resulted in a few modern degree qualified nurses who (perhaps not incorrectly) consider themselves too highly qualified to wipe bottoms. (I am an HCP, not a DM reader, by the way!). AND why SHOULD a lad who wants to further his interest in golf whilst getting a job have to enter it with a £21k debt in uni fees alone? And either a) have hours of unnecessary 'padding' thrown in to 'make' a degree out of something that patently doesn't need to be (again, as a HCP with a diploma AND a degree I felt forced to take later in life to make sure the degree kids didn't run past me in our modern tick-box culture of advancement, I readily say I don't believe you need a degree to do what I do, or at least, not what I'd call a degree!...) or b) actually demands the same amount of 'academic rigour' as the qualification that was called a Diploma a year or two ago. Re the US, do you mean 'HE' or do you mean 'gaining a degree'? Because the point has been made that any professional job in the US now demands a Masters, such has been the devaluation in the 'worth' of undergraduate degrees since they have been via a process of lowering the bar made ever easier to pass!

Our young may never be able to afford their own home as it is- do we really feel we assist them by insisting on gaining expensive, effectively worthless degrees- esp if they're gained whilst living in the protective cocoon of 'living at home wiv mum and dad', so not even experiencing any real independence into the bargain. Our self interest alone might tell us that we will never progress up the housing ladder if no one is buying in at the bottom! Because they can't afford to!

Answering your cross post, five, IF I believed in conspiracy theories () I MIGHT say that surely it could be seen that this is exactly what the wealthy want (read Our Government and who they 'serve'): University degrees only available to their own DCs to whom £9k a year is a cinch after the £14k of private school fees...

I think it's up to the individual to make an informed choice. You may regret doing your degree but I would guess that 9/10 graduates think it was a worthwhile experience.

Anyone who thinks a degree will provide an open door into a well paid and enjoyable job is ridiculously naive and it was never the case.

As a teacher I had to do a post graduate course as has always been the case for teachers and that was 20 odd years ago.

Erebus, I'm not sure how much you know about the changes to fees.

If you don't get a well paid job you never pay back your fees. There is significant financial help for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. In many ways it is much more financially worthwile to get a degree if you are poor than if you are from a middle class family.

To answer your question, nobody should HAVE to get a degree if they don't want to. Of course, if they don't they are likely to find it harder to get a well paid job and likely to get paid less over the lifetimes. But again, it was ever thus.

You have to be earning over £21,000 before you start paying back your fees.

And I repeat, who are you to judge whether a degree is 'worthless'. If a student does not think there is something inherently worthwhile about studying the course they have chosen then they shouldn't really be doing that degree.

Being more employable is benefit of a degree but it is NOT its purpose.

When speaking to the mature students who i come into contact with whilst they are on placement, they say that they would not have got into the debt needed to do their degree (social work). They feel that as much as they want to be a social worker and most are already working in social care, they couldn't have taken the risk.

Social work, Nursing and Teaching relies on recruiting people from mixed backgrounds and ages, this now may change.

But where would they be if they hadn't gone to university?

University is not compulsory. People have choices to make. But I do wonder what people would think would be a better alternative. There are limited jobs out there - young people face a very stark choice of leaving school/college and claiming benefits or getting insecure work without prospects on the minimum wage or going to university. You don't start paying back the debt until you're earning £21,000 by which time your degree is obviously starting to pay off. If you don't get a job or a job paying 21 grand you don't pay the money back so you've gained a degree without paying for it.

I mean, would you rather people sit on the bums claiming benefits for 3 years or would you rather they took the 1st low paid job (which they could and do do part-time at the same time as studying anyway)??

I am all for the idea of 're-calibrating' our attainment system ie making a first degree what it was: a universally recognised qualification denoting a very solid, high achievement in an academically rigorous subject requiring an exceptional level of ability- ie something maybe 15-20% of the population might hold (thinking about it, that'd be about the number who go to grammar school in a GS area, isn't it?!).

For the rest there should be an academically sliding scale (not 'worth as a human' being scale!) encompassing HNDs (remember them?) HNCs, City & Guilds and so on.

However, we can never return to those days as anything less than a degree, being so 'universally available' for a good chunk of years has established the mind-set where no one bats an eyelid at the need for a degree to start on the bottom rung of managing a golf-course (my crusty old example again, sorry!) and as for a HNC gained at a polytechnic. Hah. Failure. AND of course, we do the new 're-calibrated' students no favours who now will get a Diploma where their older siblings got a degree for exactly the same input.

I do not regret getting my degree. It ensured my transition to a senior post in my line of work (in Australia, at the time, who are well along the American trajectory of first degrees-for-all). I gained it at a UK 'university' but I would say I was disappointed at the lack of solid content and any academic rigour required to pass it. I hoped to learn new stuff over and above my original diploma but in fact I discovered I was effectively paying for a bit of paper that would act merely as a passport for more pay at work, because employers have, by society, been allowed to start demanding degrees because THAT'S what's out there. Like the tea shop owners in Salisbury demanding A levels to become waitresses because that was what was available in 1980! That was a bit different but it serves the discussion in another way, too- many of these A level girls made lousy waitresses! Their expectations of 'more' had been (temporarily) dashed by that recession and most were heading to uni in September, anyway BUT they closed out the CSE qualified girls who would have made a better job of it because that's what they wanted; a local, steady permanent job, staying near home with the chance maybe of rising to shift manager. I absolutely am not mocking or condemning that (speaking as the parent of one DS who I pray will get an apprenticeship as that is what he is academically and vocationally suited for; the other is old-school university able) but one thing this new 'uni for all' sillliness has meant is that such youngsters are forced into directions they just don't want to go in (and massive, unserviceable debts the moment they start earning a 'living wage', the sort that should allow the saving up of a house deposit) IF they want that golf club job... AND people who'd've made a far better job of that waitressing or, let's face it, Enrolled Nurse position don't get a look in as they can't jump that first hurdle, in the case of the nurse, of The Degree. No, no one's 'forcing' anybody, but you don't get on any professional ladder or a hell of a lot of vocational ladders! without it!

and us Beancounters can ONLY get our letters after a certain number of years on the job training regardless of what qualifications we had before

I absolutely don't get the notion which is expressed implicitly or explicitly that HE should be elitist and the domain of only the most academically able.

Why?

Do you feel this way about school too? If not, why not?

HE is already highly selective. To get into a RG university you now have to have entirely A*-B grades at A Level.

If students make an informed choice to pursue HE what business of it is yours? If they can't cope they will either drop out or be kicked out or fail.

And since when, why and how to you attach a 'value' to HE?

Do you also consider that school education is devalued because it is compulsory?

Some of the arguments expressed here are completely irrational and outdated.

'I agree with the people who are saying that by coaxing up to 50% of the population through a degree, it's made the 'value' of having a degree far less'

So, by 'coaxing' 100% of the population into school, a school education must by extension be entirely valueless.

Complete and utter bollocks.

And the argument that education might give people ideas above their station and prevent people, particularly women, wiping bums and waitressing was also used to try and prevent giving working class kids an education at all and keeping women out of university. God, how depressing!

Whereas, if we were feeling more enlightened we might argue, that jobs like nursing (performed largely by women) which require an increasing amount of training and skills should be raised in status such that bum wiping might be performed by people who are less highly trained and skilled. This would also be a better use of financial resources. Just as now TAs and admin staff are employed (or used to be before this Govt took over) to do basic admin so that teachers could get on with what they are trained and being paid significantly more to do i.e. teach.

.... and breathe......

I don't think applications will plummet because of the lack of other viable alternatives for kids at 18. They will slowly decline and there has been some talk that universities will go back to being more specialised institutions 'boutique universities' where excellence is concentrated in less subjects rather then spreading resources more thinly. There will not be a plummet for those top universities who will continue to attract applicants nationally and internationally (I work in a RG uni and we're not expecting any change in applicants). Smaller institutions and those lower down the pecking order are likely to retreat to their specialisms over time.

I would like to see a return to polytechnics where people could take 1-2 years of a course and gain a HND/HNC from this and enter their career. This existed when I went to uni and people cashed in their credit after 1 or 2 years and got jobs in my area (chemistry) mainly in technical and support roles. They were able to choose options in the course that prepared them for that route. Now kids who leave after 1 or 2 years don't really get anything and we are seeing people with full degrees applying for technical roles that they don't actually really have the right skills for. Polys did a good job for lots of people.

I agree, kritur. In the olden days, poly's and unis did different things, didn't they? Unis tended to offer academic, pure degrees (B.A., B.Sc.) whereas polys did more of the highly skilled, technical training B.App.Sc stuff, often via 4 year 'sandwich' courses with Y3 being in work placement, I recall, as well as HNC/Dc.

Now, it's all or nothing, it appears!