Integrated Masters mean that you can get student finance for all four years. Plus you know the fee level in advance. If you want to shock yourselves look at some of the Masters fees changed by the likes of Imperial (in particular their management courses) and LSE for finance/economics. Some are in excess of £30,000 for the year.
The drawback of an integrated Masters is that you are tied to the same institution, so can't trade up or move location.
Quite a lot of technical professions, like engineering, require a masters. DS equally needed a Masters if he wanted to continue with economic forecasting type work (no integrated Masters available, we just had to cough up) or to continue onto a PhD in mathematical economics. However job in his field are well paid so if it were a straight financial decision it would have been a good one, and he earned some money working as a research assistant and lived at home.
However amongst DCs peers there are a lot of panic masters, even panic PhDs.
Once again our experience of LSE is different to that of Percy. Students are incredibly career focussed and for many, University is just the next step towards an identified career path. 70% of students are from overseas, often paying huge fees. Most will not have travelled half way across the world, or across the Channel, for the "student experience" but to gain advantage in the future career race.
Even in my day at the LSE we felt that living and studying in London gave us a head start. We were already urban and adapted to the City and so switching to working there was not such a big leap.
When DS started the LSE offered an orientation day for parent. Many overseas student had not visited before, indeed had never visited the UK, so this was their chance to explain how things worked to the accompanying parents. Some bits were great. The shock as American parents tried to compute the fact that their DC could and should use the NHS in an emergency. The many ways in which you could pay the fees, with a strong caution that parents should pay the LSE directly, not give the money to their DC.
The Director at the time outlines various services including the careers service. If your child was not ambitious or career minded, not to worry. By the end of the first year peer pressure would almost guarantee things had changed. Then lots of graphics showing future career destinations listed by employer: GS; JP Morgan and so on. They knew their audience.
DS played the game for a while. Because of its location there are frequent "networking events" where major banks etc send along their senior economist to give a talk, students turn up in suits clutching a CV, and get a free breakfast. However within as year he had decided the last thing he wanted to be was an Investment Banker. That said peer influence still applied. From an early stage he knew Masters students who were planning PhDs, and was well informed about the courses he needed to take and the direction he needed to follow. By third year he had managed to inveigle his way into a regular session for PhD students, their supervisors and senior academics, where someone would present their research to date and peers would provide constructive criticism. That, and regularly attending office hours, meant that he was able to obtain quite personal references from internationally recognised academics. He is now studying for a PhD in the US (applying with good knowledge of who was where and who was most likely to offer funding) along with a healthy network of LSE peers. Add in the sheer wealth of visiting academics and the strength of their public lectures, and the links between academic staff and Government and private research, and it is culturally quite different from a campus University, with, I would argue, naturally higher aspirations.
(DD is studying a biomedical subject in London at the moment and it is similar in that the academics teaching her are from all over the world and involved in exciting cutting edge research. If she wanted to be an academic there is a clear path through to a PhD and beyond.)
As part of the orientation day current students gave tours of the campus. Our guide was an earnest Portuguese student who pointed out the careers service and explained that in your first term you could only have three face to face appointments, which he seemed to think was a deprivation. Surely all first term student would want to visit the careers service more than three times! DS was paid to be a guinea pig a couple of times for City firms designing recruitment schemes, but though he applied from his first year onwards he only got one internship, which was at the end of the second year, though picked up some useful RA work at other times, and was given a free summer school place at the end of his first year by a supportive lecturer. The practice was useful not least because he realised fairly early on that though his technical skills were good his interview skills were less so. I organised a small amount of coaching and was runner up for a really prestigious internship at the end of his third year.
This was a DS with relatively few career ambitions when he started. Many others were far more focussed. LSEs biggest course is Accountancy, with plenty of others taking Law, Economics and Finance, with even courses like Geography focussed on practical applications. It could claim to be the worlds most prestigious vocational college.
DS earned some money from a tutoring agency by helping a new international student chose course options. You need your first for GS, and this student was not going to leave anything to chance. The courses had to be hard enough to open the door for useful second and third year options, but not so hard your grades might suffer.
And yes. Internships play a big part in recruitment. One of DS' friends landed a really sought after GS Easter internship, and was then offered the even more sought after, and remunerative, summer internship. She turned it down. IB was not what she wanted to do with her life. Many of her peers would have thought she was mad.
I hope that helps. Once DS decided he wanted to head for research or academia he valued the aim-high culture. Those friends that took jobs with consultancies etc, also did very well. Part of the way to be successful in job search is to practice. If you do have your three career interviews in your first term and then have internships after your second and third years, you will be a step ahead of others who have waited until after their finals. Though students elsewhere will be doing the same, I suspect that what is normal at LSE is less common in other places.