Which Degrees are pretty 'pointless'?

[DreadLock]

Just starting to look at courses with DS. So many choices. BUT I am sure there are some which are not particularly going to lead to much. Employers - what do you look for on a CV and what would you avoid?
And any other 'views' are welcome.
DS not even sure if he wants to go to UNI so we are having a good look into stuff.

Yes, in my year in an RG it was 7% firsts. Now in my non-RG it is more like 25%. I suspect that standards are not the same as they once were.
I also think that contact hours are rather misleading. They tend to be high in pure sciences and rather low in humanities. One reason for that is that scientist spend a lot of time in labs doing science stuff, whereas students studying History or English need to spend a lot of time reading books (of course scientists read books, too). A lot of students and parents expect university to be like school with teachers telling them most of what they need to know. In reality, lectures and tutorials are there to introduce students to topics and ideas and orient them towards further reading. Guided independent study is really what a degree is all about, but it gets harder and harder to explain this to people when all sort of bodies from newspapers to government offices are obsessed with publishing largely meaningless statistics and league tables. Everything must be quantified!

yes, poor Southampton, t'aint fair, lets find a new shorthand..how about "Slacksville City Uni"

moutarde, the study was also about hours worked independently because of course we agree that it varies by subject, and especially across science/arts split.

I know some Unis where the kids are only asked to do one essay in a term, and the third term is all just a reading term, so no input available even if you want it. Whereas other places the expected output is much higher and so is the available feedback.

I went to the Southampton Solent graduation ceremony, it was rather good fun because Scott Mills (!) was there collecting his honorary degree.

I then went out drinking in the student bars. Jesus Christ. I could barely stand.

I would look, actually, for somewhere that has terms, not semesters. May until late September is a bloody long time off.

I don't think Thames Valley even counts. It's full of foreign students pretending to be students whilst working full time in fried chicken bars. It has a massive drop-out rate - I don't think most 'students' ever intended to attend.

Actually I know two de Montfort (or Leicester Poly) people who now have very whizzy jobs. Just shows...

Funnily enough I have had a conversation with dd today. She has for a couple of years said that she doesn't want to go to university and wants to join the army or police force at 18.

She has now changed her mind and wants to study Criminology at the local university (Gloucestershire). That's a lot of money for (IMO) a Mickey Mouse degree at a lowly university.

But I don't know what to say without seeming like a complete twat, tbh.

true Original, but beware the term-that-is-not-a-term, ie the "reading term" where because there are some exams at the end of it, there is no teaching at all. Actually, they sometimes do this even if there are no exams. So you still get May to September off except you have to pay for student accommodation.

At Cambridge, if you have exams from week 7 onwards, your lectures stop at the end of week 4. NatSci have lectures 9-1 every morning including saturday morning in the first year which is harsh

LeGav- get her to look at the employment statistics for that course.

unistats.direct.gov.uk/subjects/employment/10007145-CRIDG

when she sees that the average salary is £15k and the commonest job on graduation is "Sales assistants and retail cashiers" ... Only 7.5% (10% of the 75% who are wokring) of students report a job in "Protective service occupations" which I guess means police, and 60% of all graduates who are in work are in non-graduate occupations....

Thames valley University doesn't exist any more does it?

mummy, true, its University of West London now.

Which means we could use Thames Valley as our shorthand without offending a live Uni...possibly...

Yes, I have seen that. I have been reading about it and it is dismal.

What a waste of time that would be. And all that debt for what?

Plus she would live at home. And I was planning to move out of Gloucestershire in the near future.

Has she seen it, though? what does she think?

move, that should solve it :)

Yes she does know. She is in a pretty sullen mood about it tbh.

I don't want to be unsupportive but I also don't want her to blindly sign up to something for 3 years which is not really worthwhile.

how old is she? do you have much time?

There are other criminology degrees with better prospects. Why does she want to stay local? does she understand that her mates will likely go somewhere else anyway?

Or, if she is still focussed on police, what do they say? I guess if they were prepared to sponsor her through a degree (do they offer that) then it wold be a safer thing to do

ImperialBlether - I can assure you it was 1 essay a term (I still have them). I and two others went together to tell them we were leaving at the end of the first year - and why. The only thing the senior tutor did was to try and persuade us to stay because otherwise his funding would be affected (no offers to change the course and that was with over half the students leaving).

I was studying Archaeology and there should have been a decent practical component or lab work... zilch. One of the main tutors had gone on sabbatical and I imagine that may have had a big effect - he was the reason I chose the course in the first place).

It's all very well telling people that they need to study just for the love of it, but it helps to be working towards a firm objective (project/exam/essay).

Beastofburden
My biggest problem with Solent is that people think that it and Southampton University are somehow connected. They have absolutely and utterly nothing to do with each other.

DH was offered a place to Chemistry by Thesis with Harry Kroto : it would have been one research project and no lectures or essays until the big one at the end. That degree no longer exists oddly enough.

"I can't honestly believe Mackerel thinks that an English degree from Cambridge is no better than one from... Southampton Solent and that an applicant would say to themselves, "Hmm, I like that module at SS so much I'll go there instead of Bristol." Duh!"

That's not what I said at all, lainiekazan. When I was 18 I couldn't see what the difference was, and my post was saying that I still wasn't entirely sure why degrees from RG were more highly-regaderd than an equivalent from another university. But I did know they generally weren't!

I just find it all very snobbish and elitist - I didn't have the advice of degree-educated parents or a decent school to rely on when I was 18, so I didn't know any of this stuff. Sometimes it just seems like the whole RG thing is just to point out to potential employers that you come from a middle-class background with the cultural capital at your disposal to help you make the decision to select a RG university. I know that's a really cynical view, and implies that there are no working class students at RG universities (I appreciate there are probably thousands), but I think the onus should be on improving or merging the weaker universities, not just sending every able pupil to the better ones. That just widens the disparity, surely?

Employers who think that the RG signifies quality in an undergrad degree need to do a LOT more reading about the history of and reason for the RG

Mackeral I agree with you. I also agree with Moutard about thee being studnets at different universities that are at a similar level of ability. I have taught at Oxford (University - not Brookes) as well as middle and low ranking universities plus Open University, and the main difference is that there are more of the brightest at Oxford but that many of the students at other universities are as bright and could have aced an Oxford degree.

There are some RG universities that are viewed very favourably by some types of employer. There are some that most definitely are not, despite what MN would have you believe. There are some 1994 group universities which are regarded as highly or better than some - many - RG universities. Despite what MN would have you believe.

Ask yourself this - do people who go to Durham, Cambridge, Imperial, say 'I went to a Russell Group university' or do they name their university (or college)? They do the latter. People who read English at UEA aren't shy about saying where they went and what they read, either. And there are other examples of specific courses at 1994 universities which have as much prestige as any course at an RG jobby.

MoutardeDeDijon I have an engineering degree, and did was a teaching assistant for labs and tutorials in my PhD.

I agree we have a lot of labs compared to the humanities. However, we also have lab time without any supervision. We'll be given projects that required lab facilities to finish. I'm not sure if the latter is counted as contact hours. But I agree most universities expect students to be motivated and study outside of lectures, labs and tutorials.

But we did feel us engineers were always working compared to the arts students .

onelittle "But we did feel us engineers were always working compared to the arts students"

That reminds me of my boss last year. DP quit his job (stress, lots of course-related stuff that was being rushed in order to work, etc) and three months later got one that was better and vaguely related to engineering.

When my boss found out he said that he was glad as he thought that DP was shirking his responsibilities to earn money as when he was at university he held down a job and attended uni perfectly fine.

I didn't bother pointing out to him that he had been an art student attending lectures for no more than 6 hours a week at any point whilst at uni whilst at the time DP was in uni for 20+ hours a week and doing nearly the same at home. I wish that I had said something!

Mack, they are better because it is harder to get in (that is one reason). If you are at place where most people could not get in and demands AAA then it is going to better. If you go somewhere you can get a place with CCC and is dead easy to get into it is not going to be as good. It's pretty simple really. The harder it is to get into the more likely it will be well regarded by employers. It is all about being clever and of course that is elitist, just as we do not want surgeons with IQs of 80. It is very important the best universities are very selective and reject loads of people. It is brilliant that they do so.

You'll get people with AAA not people who are necessarily more intelligent or more able to achieve well or more suited to demanding jobs. You'll get people who went to the 'right' schools, had 'right' upbringing, conformed in just the right way to do well at exams. Not every one of course but a high proportion of them. It wasn't hard for them to get in, their background meant they'd had 18 years of support getting them there. I agree it's about class and snobbery. I have a good academic degree from a RG. I work at a good ex poly. A lot of my students worked phenomenally hard to be there, against the odds, and with a different background would easily have been the AAAs. Some of them have won dissertation prizes open nationally so it can't just be my bias.