University closures disproportionately impacting working class students

[mids2019]

Are we in danger of a situation where a lot of working class students who often have A levels that aren't all at A or A star level will be removed of opportunities for higher education?

We are looking at universities predominantly those that are attended by working class students facing departmental closures. Academic courses that possibly don't have high entrance tariffs are closing or will be closed.

One of the advantages of the newer universities was that entrenched inequality was challenged by allowing working class children to study the same academic courses as their middle class peers e.g. English, philosophy, physics, maths etc. Employers are encouraged to look at degree classification and not institution levelling the playing field and giving a lot students from deprived backgrounds access to professional they may not have had access to otherwise .

We now have degree apprenticeships flouted as the way forward but these simply aren't degrees in the academic sense but vocationally based tailors to employers needs not the students. Degree apprenticeships are mostly work based with blocks of academic learning of restricted length embedded in essentially a work environment. Isn't this pushing working class students down an essentially vocational path similar to the old grammar secondary modern divide but pushed on a few years to post level.

Are we going back to only the middle class being entitled to the advantages both professionally and personally of higher education?

My DSD did a degree apprenticeship (Level 7) She started on a level 2/3 straight after A Levels, then did a level 4, before the degree apprenticeship. She was a Chartered Accountant (plus masters equivalent) by her mid 20s. She has no student debt. She was earning £30k at 19, and was on £50k+ before she’d even qualified. She also has years more industry experience than her uni peers, and was able to buy a house while she was still an apprentice. She absolutely feels it was the right decision. To her it was a complete no-brainer.

ETA: She also aced her A Levels and was offered places at three RG unis. It was a conscious decision not to go.

Erm…what????

Currentlyvworking on nursing recruitment for the trust I work in. This is utter baloney!

Absolutely this - I couldn’t agree more

I suspect the debt the NHS owes other, generally poorer, countries by recruiting their trained doctors and nurses would outstrip this by a long way. Swings and roundabouts.

I think this is an interesting post, @SunnyDaySummer and I would like to explore it with you because I do understand that you eant to hire good people, and agree this is a legitimate concern.

Starting from the top: you want evidence of capability as a filter. Do you use the name of the university and/or the degree class as a proxy for this? As an academic I would be wary of that.

What is the difficulty building a viable capability filter into the recruiting process? Perhaps it would help to have an idea of your field, BTW.

These questions are meant respectfully; I hope that is clear

True. I know of several NQ nurses who couldn’t get jobs at our local hospital because there’s a recruitment freeze despite the wards being understaffed hell holes. Also the many many Indian and Nigerian nurses we have taken on have to work at the trust for 5 years I believe. If they leave there’s a considerable financial penalty.
We were interviewing for HCAs the other day and we had a junior doc amongst the candidates plus a sprinkling of qualified nurses. Crazy.

Might be in your trust but it’s not baloney nationwide.

I’m a university lecturer on a healthcare programme and work closely with our partner trusts trying to help our 3rd year students get jobs. 150 applications for 8 jobs? Other trusts not advertising at all. And it’s not just locally, my tiktok feed is full of recent graduates upset as they can’t find a job 🤷‍♀️

But I’m glad if your trust is recruiting. But many are telling me the same story that they have vacancies but no budget so currently can’t advertise.

Come to London. Lots of vacancies here.

That’s the point. Most nurses can’t afford to move down there unless they have family to put them up !

There’s still nurses accommodation available.

No good if you’re married with kids. 😁

The fact is that not all universities are equal. This has been heightened this year with the numbers in clearing.

When the top 20 universities require an A-star/A in chemistry to do chemical engineering and a bottom tier university takes someone on a C/D to do the same, it’s clear these universities are not teaching to the same standard/curriculum in many cases. There will also be some who could have got the A had they worked harder/had better luck but not most.

We need more local and varied universities but we need to be honest about their success in academic subjects and see some consolidation too.

I’m old, and I have seen a decline in academic standards in parallel with the increase in availability of degrees ( and higher degrees too). Of course quite a lot of this is a more serious problem for people for a less ‘privileged’ background: but the university stage is too late to fix it.

It seems to me that there used to be far more esteem for academic and intellectual pursuits and accomplishments , and that there was more access for children who were interested than there is now. When I was a child, our local library had twice as many non fiction and reference books as fiction, and it offered tables and chairs in a silent environment so that people whose homes might not be conducive to reading had a facility. They didn’t have playgroups, or allow talking or offer the homeless a refuge from the weather, they were for reading , and preferably reading ‘serious ‘ books ( I can hear the shouts of non inclusive’ from here).

Places like the National Trust houses had informative guidebooks and signage.I went to a NT Roman villa site recently, which used to have such signage, it was long and sometimes complex, but fascinating. Now they have some large type signs with a joke about Romans eating snails. A boy of about ten was there, he kept asking his mother where the hypocaust was, but the signs didn’t mention it ( I showed him and we had an interesting chat about how it would work).

Has anyone watched the reruns of ‘The Ascent of Man’ and Clark’s ‘Civilisation’? . They took no prisoners intellectually , and I remember desperately trying to follow up some of the avenues they opened up. I think most modern documentaries aim much lower.

The bright working class ( or just poor) kid had so many more opportunities to broaden their horizons ( and don’t let’s start on unstreamed class teaching).

We’re talking about newly qualified nurses on this thread who proportionately won’t be in that position

Museums also used to be deathly boring for young people and could just as likely suck the love of history out of them. That’s why they changed.

This is of course true to some extent. However teaching and learning methods can level the playing field to some extent at university; and there is the question of how and why those A level grades were obtained in the first place.

I am in STEM and our offer is very high. But, for example, a substantial minority of our students have got excellent Maths and FM results that just didn’t stick. They don’t retain the knowledge for even a few months and they cannot apply it in novel situations

WC pupils are less likely to have access to FM in the first place and life circumstances may have a lot to do with lower A level results. Without suggesting that this is the full story, I argue that the spread at entrance, except at the extremes, isn’t as great as statistics suggest.

Will a more in depth programme produce more knowledgeable and intellectually supple graduates? I hope so. But to what extent are employers really looking for these qualities? How much is the expressed desire for, roughly speaking, RG graduates really a proxy for the desire for well spoken, well mannered middle class graduates?

The full story appears to me, from following the job searches of my personal tutees, to be rather complicated

She's been very successful and in a completely non passive aggressive way, good for her, it sounds exactly the right decision for her, and she's played the system we have. But this does highlight another issue that nobody seems to want to confront, which is the disproportionate inflation of salaries, especially in the financial sector, and the ripple effect on expectations of student demographic and their parents. Does nobody else feel that £30k, let alone £50k, is a ludicrous amount to pay someone who isn't qualified? These kinds of figures aren't helping to reduce inequality or to remunerate appropriately those who are most valued by society, rather than by similarly wealthy individuals.

Sure start centres weren't just for the working class.

There are plenty of middle class parents who don't know how to parent their children and plenty of working class parents who do.

I actually know where two of my local Sure Start centres were and they aren't in areas with deprived people.

Not strictly true. I’d say getting on for 50% of nursing students are mature students, certainly over a third. So would certainly be an issue for a significant number.

Just to clarify, she wasn’t yet qualified as a chartered accountant (Level7), but wasn’t unqualified. She was still AAT qualified to Level 5/6 and her job role hasn’t changed since she became chartered. She’s still doing the same job, she’s just got letters after her name now.

No.

Graduates who are part qualified get the same or similar wages when they have passed their professional exams. They are just older.

As I say - proportionately won’t be in that position.

Interesting points @poetryandwine . I will consider these when I make that point again.
I guess for teens of similar-ish background, my point stands but I take your point especially for parts of the country where attainment is low.

Thanks for the clarification @Anonym00sethat makes more sense. If still a lot of money for an early career professional.
@Reugny Well, that seems a strange system to me. Professional qualification should be recognised.

Can I ask which universities you think are the ones at risk of failing?