Should universities give clearer information on degree career routes and prospects?

[LyndallMay]

Parents of university students or applicants, would you have wanted to know this before they chose their degree?
I have started a UK Parliament petition asking universities to give prospective students clearer information before they enrol or become financially committed.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/776439
Require universities to explain degree career routes and job prospects
The petition asks for students to be told about the full career route connected with a degree, including what the degree does and does not qualify them to do, any further training, examinations, professional requirements, work experience, time and costs.
It also asks for clear and recent information about realistic graduate employment prospects, including where entry level roles may require previous experience.
This is not about guaranteeing anybody a job or discouraging people from university. It is about giving students the full picture while they still have a genuine choice about their degree and career route.
If you agree, I would be very grateful if you would sign and share it.
IMPORTANT: After signing, please check your email and click the confirmation link sent by UK Parliament. Otherwise your signature will not be recorded.

Asking again …

Your own History example actually illustrates my point.
If someone may need a Master’s or PhD for a particular route, with further time, cost and potentially low pay afterwards, that is exactly the sort of information a prospective student may want to understand before committing

WHAT ROUTE???

Sorry to shout, but - a history degree could lead down an infinite number of routes. I've known history graduates who ended up in accountancy. How can a university possibly publish information on all the possible career paths a history student might decide to take? It's probably one of the most versatile degrees in terms of skills acquired - which includes reading, understanding and analysing information, so a history student of all people should be capable of doing their own bloody research.

This, with bells on.

You’re still not giving specific examples or linking universities that aren’t doing it.

With my science degree I could have gone down several paths - teacher, vet, doctor, occupational therapist, researcher, biochemist, pharmacist, anthropologist etc etc etc

They definitely put up examples of future careers but it is not possible for them to put up everything.

I know people who have done a 3 year psychology degree but they do not come out of it a clinical psychologist, that require further training.
The uni website will say that you may go on to do the clinical psychology doctorate but it will not imply you are going to be something you are not.

Surely you have multiple examples of universities not doing what you think they should do.
If you link a couple then I’d be more than happy to support this.

Perhaps ask here as OP has issued edition 2 of this thread, timed 17.41hrs, perhaps hoping for a different response https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/petitionsnoticeboard/5572392-petition-calling-for-clearer-university-course-and-career-information-upfront

Google is not able to provide the answers prospective students need, apparently. Only universities can do that.

Typo

This is a very frustrating thread because the OP is refusing to give an example of a degree & career path which illustrates her point.
Maybe it's Architecture? There are universities in the UK running bachelor degrees in architecture which are not RIBA accredited, this means that their graduates are no closer to becoming professionally qualified than they were before they started but have incurred the usual amount of student debt.
If you didn't know that your BSc/BA needs to have RIBA Part 1 accreditation I imagine it's a shock when you discover that the rest of the qualification pathway (including placement years & Part 2) are closed off to you.
It's still a case of 'buyer beware' but lower tariff unis running these courses should be very upfront that they will not lead to qualified architect status.

This probably isn't even what the OP is miffed about but it is an example of a degree (Architecture) not leading to the specific career you think it will (Architect) because the university hasn't been upfront about their lack of accreditation.

Sorry I’m confused - you say you did a law degree but didn’t want to study law - so why did you choose it?

Or do you mean you studied it but decided a career in law wasn’t right for you?

How long ago was this?
Every uni I know has a careers department that you can use before, during and after your degree.

Bloody hell.
The responses here have been pretty unanimous so can’t see that thread going any differently!

They’re obviously a disgruntled graduate who didn’t do the proper research before signing up
to a degree. Instead of taking personal responsibility they want to blame the university ( or all universities!!)

This thread is about my UK Parliament petition asking for clearer information before prospective students enrol or become financially committed.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/776439

The petition is about two things: understanding the full known career route, including what the degree does and does not qualify someone to do and any further training, examinations, experience, time or costs, and understanding the realistic employment picture afterwards, including graduate job prospects and where entry level roles may still require previous experience.

I have answered a lot of questions and criticisms here already. I am not going to spend all day repeating the same answers to people who simply disagree with the petition.

If you agree with it, please sign it. If you do not, then do not sign it. I am still happy to answer genuinely new and constructive questions.

This is not about whether someone is clever enough to use Google. You cannot reasonably search for a requirement you do not know exists or ask a question you do not know you need to ask.

It is about giving people the information they need to make an informed choice before committing years of their life and potentially significant debt.

Do people really just do whatever degree takes their fancy and then wonder what job they might be able to do with it once they’ve got it??? That seems very poor planning

People used to do degrees because they were interested in the subject and wanted to be intellectually challenged.

I completely agree.

I am frustrated as equal opportunities for people to attend university is something that I am really passionate about but OP is being intentionally vague and talking in riddles.

She or someone she knows has obviously been caught out and there’s no reason why she can’t give the specific example.

In all honesty I think she’s embarrassed. I think if she gave the specific example then we’d quickly see how clearly the uni had put up what she’s asking but her/her child just did not read through it properly.

Yippee! Edition 3!

How long ago was this?
Every uni I know has a careers department that you can use before, during and after your degree.

Yes, mine had one in the early 90s.

I know several people who did history degrees. One is now a head of faculty (at a university which no longer offers a pure history course ironically), another is an accountant. Two work for councils in administration roles, another was a teacher and is now a gardener. That's just from acquaintances over the last few years.

The idea of someone getting to the end of a degree course of at least 3 years and only then discovering that the job they want to do has legal requirements/restrictions and that they are not qualified to do it purely from their degree is astonishing. Most professional roles have an element of "professional curiosity" in performing the job. This graduate seems to have not had any element of curiosity about their profession!

If I wanted to be a forensic scientist or pathologist I'd do more research than watching silent witness or police procedurals. If someone wants a specific career and doesn't have the nous to simply look up the route and then accredited courses or the costs of a Masters then their ability to do the career is looking shaky. Again PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. Whether a mature student or not.
If I want to retrain in a specific field, let's say a chartered surveyor, I go and look up what qualifications I need and then find the course. I don't find a course with surveying in the title because that could cover Quantity Surveying or Building surveyor neither of which will get me MRICS or a job as doing land surveying

@mathanxiety I guess there might be something useful in knowing how many grads who have studied law at each uni are actually on a career path to be a qualified lawyer? This info is not available and is fairly critical when making decisions on which university. Of course the difficulty is what did the student actually want? Did they intend to qualify as barristers or solicitors or not? I don’t think that nuanced info is there is you want to compare law careers as it’s way too general right now. You simply cannot find this level of detail and there remains a lot of guesswork and hoping the course is going to help dc with their employment goal.

Most medical grads have historically gained medical roles (current blip excepted) and you would not expect to see much difference between medical schools. Law is entirely different but did the students actually want or expect to be lawyers? It’s difficult to drill down into employment data in any meaningful way. I guess it’s because the unis simply don’t know.

Again?

Yep. Third time lucky.

Surely if someone is intelligent enough to do the degree they can do some research before choosing it.

A perfectly reasonable assumption.

If the name on the petition ties up to the LinkedIn profile of the same name then this is a person who wants to work in law and has a degree in law and an LLM in mediation and seems to have done it as a mature student and looked at family mediation rather than employment.

The family mediation council has existed for many years and family mediator has its own page on the National Careers Service
https://nationalcareers.service.gov.uk/job-profiles/family-mediator Which shows what courses are approved. Why would the University of Law have to spell out what you can and can't do with their LLM? You also can't be a UN negotiator?

Oh dear, thread going poof in 3 2 1

All of this is easily found out.

Professional.accreditation requirements (for example in engineering or architecture), how to move on to further study in, for e.g., English Lit (masters or PhD), what you need to do after your law degree - none of that information is locked away behind a pay wall. In addition, students can glean information while they are in university, get ideas from friends, read up on the job market.

Economic conditions can change significantly in three or four years. A huge number of my fellow grads in 1980s Ireland (arts/humanities) landed on the ground floor of the IT revolution and never looked back. Equally, a DD of mine who was en route to a degree in architecture was quick to switch majors (in the US) in 2008. She has never regretted that decision.

Students should be able to discern to some degree what way the wind is blowing. We are currently in the throes of an AI revolution, and it is perhaps more difficult to figure out where many career paths will be as AI develops. But it behoves everyone contemplating university to take that into consideration.

Maybe. Like I said upthread Dd did architecture. So at 17yo she knew that a course had to be riba accredited in order not to have to sit Part One exams. Not sure how she found that out but she did.

I do know that when looking at courses online the ones which are RIBA accredited announce this prominently on their course page online. So guess that’s a big clue it’s something important and then any university which doesn’t have this on their website it’s a red flag that they probably don’t have it and needs further investigation.

she also went to open days and asked at every open day to make sure!

oh and when she started there were quite a lot of jobs. Now there’s hardly anything. It’s shit but it’s not the university’s fault and couldn’t have been predicted.

And a quick AI sugfest more research needed "The uni of law has a strong reputation for postgraduate professional legal training, but it is less prestigious for undergraduate degrees"

Kudos to the op for doing a degreee as a mature student but always thoroughly research