UK Politics: Picking Your Career

[mormont]

1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

i disagree with HOI on almost everything, but the amount of people going to university that have no business going to university, and leaving with 50 grands worth of debt and no discernible skills is absurd.  

As someone who has worked in HE for his entire career, I've learned that this is a meme that won't die. People are simply not willing to accept any amount of factual information to the contrary - and pretty much all the factual information is to the contrary. 

Almost everyone who goes to university in the UK benefits from doing so in multiple ways, even if they don't graduate. Survey after survey shows that they acquire useful skills, disproportionately wind up in high skill jobs, and also gain non-career benefits like better resilience and health outcomes. 

Almost no-one under the current system actually repays their full tuition fee debt. (Non-tuition fee debt is a more serious issue, and the government are implementing changes that mean this will no longer be true, but that's another story.)

The actual biggest issues with universities these days are that they are chronically underfunded, like everything else in the public sector, and this is giving students a poorer educational experience. But the idea that there are too many graduates, which has been around for about twenty years and to which middle class people cling like a limpet, is just not true, and we know it isn't true. Anecdotes abound but the data is clear. 

ETA - relating it back to the conference of fools that we were discussing earlier, you can't have it both ways here. If the UK is to be a high skill economy, we need lots of graduates. If it's fruit pickers you want, we're not going to be a rich country. 

Somewhere in the middle there is also a shortage of skilled trades, as everyone knows, but that's another discussion. The solution to that is not people doing plumbing instead of a nursing degree. 

Edited May 16, 2023 by mormont

[Heartofice]

35 minutes ago, mormont said:

As someone who has worked in HE for his entire career, I've learned that this is a meme that won't die. People are simply not willing to accept any amount of factual information to the contrary - and pretty much all the factual information is to the contrary. 

 

Also worth pointing out the obvious here, that people who have spent their entire career in HE probably are not going to have the most balanced view of the situation. 
 

35 minutes ago, mormont said:

Almost everyone who goes to university in the UK benefits from doing so in multiple ways, even if they don't graduate. Survey after survey shows that they acquire useful skills, disproportionately wind up in high skill jobs, and also gain non-career benefits like better resilience and health outcomes. 

I'd really be interested in seeing the research into this, is there any proof that it's university that provides these benefits or is it simply correlation between the sort of people who go to university who might be more likely to have more money and better life and health outcomes. 

There is also a big variation when we talk about university courses. If you go to one of the Russell group unis, if you study law, medicine or go in a direction that leads towards a higher paying career then you will do well out of university. Those results are really not the same if you go into a course in the creative or language fields where the financial benefits for doing so over your lifetime are basically zero. 

This is where the problem lies, an over expansion of courses and a whole mini industry and pointless education designed to just grab cash off of unsuspecting kids who think they need it. I know personally I wish I had never bothered wasting time with university, it was a lot of fun but I learnt every single thing I know from being in a job and from the real world. 
 

35 minutes ago, mormont said:

But the idea that there are too many graduates, which has been around for about twenty years and to which middle class people cling like a limpet, is just not true, and we know it isn't true. Anecdotes abound but the data is clear. 

Ok well, the student population of this country has almost doubled since the 1990s. You have to question whether that was necessary. Worse still  only 36% of jobs achieved after two and a half years from completing the student’s degree, were related to the chosen fields.

So I would really challenge this notion that there some mystical benefit to going to university or that it is the correct life choice for everyone. 

 

Edited May 16, 2023 by Heartofice

[Ran]

  

1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

I have one child in care 3 days a week, and it costs me £858 a month.  Its insane, my sister lives in Norway which for almost everything else is absurdly expensive, yet the childcare was about 1/4 as much. 

In Sweden the maximum fee is about £126 per month. If you have two children in daycare, it actually comes out slightly cheaper for both of them vs. one child (about £120). On top of that, once they hit 3 years old, they're entitled to 15 hours of free preschool education, and so that time is deducted from the fee.

The Local has a breakdown looking at other countries. The UK is indeed abominably high.

  

1 minute ago, Heartofice said:

Worse still  only 36% of jobs achieved after two and a half years from completing the student’s degree, were related to the chosen fields.

Link not working. That said, university education in and of itself prepares you for a wider range of white-collar work than just your "chosen field". Plenty of philosophy majors end up becoming lawyers and doctors, for example, or are involved in AI and other tech.

Edited May 16, 2023 by Ran

[James Arryn]

13 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Also worth pointing out the obvious here, that people who have spent their entire career in HE probably are not going to have the most balanced view of the situation. 

 

Ah, see, when not Ivory tower, too up close and personal, nice one.

[Heartofice]

15 minutes ago, Ran said:

  

 

Link not working. That said, university education in and of itself prepares you for a wider range of white-collar work than just your "chosen field". Plenty of philosophy majors end up becoming lawyers and doctors, for example, or are involved in AI and other tech.

https://thinkstudent.co.uk/how-many-graduate-jobs-are-there-in-the-uk/

Fixed it. 
Well that is the question actually, does it in fact prepare you for a wide range of white collar work, more than just doing the job straight out of school. If only a small proportion of students leaving university are actually going into their chosen field then it's highly debatable that it as all that necessary to go to university at all. Which soft skills are only available to be learnt by spending 3 years on a degree unrelated to your degree. Could those skills be picked up on the job, and a lot quicker and more efficiently? I'd suggest they could.

Again, lawyers and doctors are really the outliers here, there is plenty of reason to think that those are fields that should require a degree. What I'm really talking about are those very middling jobs, working in an office, creative industries etc. There is nothing special about a philosophy degree that is going to prepare you for those jobs, and it shouldn't be a requirement to do so. 

Edited May 16, 2023 by Heartofice

[BigFatCoward]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

 

Almost everyone who goes to university in the UK benefits from doing so in multiple ways, even if they don't graduate. Survey after survey shows that they acquire useful skills, disproportionately wind up in high skill jobs, and also gain non-career benefits like better resilience and health outcomes. 

 

Do they benefit to the tune of the debt they accrue? I'm doubtful.  

i'd also like to see figures comparing like for like, not just university attendees versus non university pupils.  For those at the lower levels of society I'm sure there is a difference, but the more you move up the social classes i bet there is almost no difference (not that giving the poor a leg up isn't a worthwhile endeavour). 

 

 

[BigFatCoward]

45 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

 

Ok well, the student population of this country has almost doubled since the 1990s. You have to question whether that was necessary. Worse still  only 36% of jobs achieved after two and a half years from completing the student’s degree, were related to the chosen fields.



 

i bet if you took out a few obvious courses (law, Medicine, engineering etc) that figure would fall off a cliff.  

 

[Heartofice]

8 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

i bet if you took out a few obvious courses (law, Medicine, engineering etc) that figure would fall off a cliff.  

 

Anecdotal, but of my close friends at school, none went on to careers that were related to the course they did at uni, and almost all of them changed careers in their 30s to do something more rewarding.

From my own uni course I think only 2-3 people ended up actually doing something related to the course.
Even though my course was more on the more vocational side, it was still out of date technically by about 5 years and so the skills learnt were useless. The entire thing was a scam and a cash grab.
I am one of the people who ended up in a job that was related, but I took a year out, self taught myself skills whilst working menial jobs, and got myself a job in the industry. It wasn't till after I got the job did anyone even ask whether I had a degree, which seems backwards but that's the way it is.

[mormont]

29 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Do they benefit to the tune of the debt they accrue? I'm doubtful.  

Again, yes: both the original introduction of tuition fees and every tweak to the system since has relied on research that shows this. The earnings premium has declined, for sure, but it's still there. Again, until now the tuition fee 'debt' they accrue is mostly at least partially written off, so that helps. In fact I'd argue it's not even really 'debt', it's a graduate tax in all but name. A very badly designed and unfair one, that you can get out of by paying up front if you're wealthy, but nevertheless.   

ETA - in the original post, by the way, I deliberately didn't refer to 'high earning' jobs but 'high skill' jobs. We pay some graduates too much and others too little (nurses, for example). But in terms of what the economy needs, which was the original point, high skills not high earnings is more relevant. 

29 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

i'd also like to see figures comparing like for like, not just university attendees versus non university pupils.  For those at the lower levels of society I'm sure there is a difference, but the more you move up the social classes i bet there is almost no difference (not that giving the poor a leg up isn't a worthwhile endeavour). 

It's hard to do a comparison because there are lots of confounding factors. But the analysis suggests the reverse: that the bigger graduate earnings premiums go to higher social class graduates.

https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2020/social-class-still-dictates-graduate-job-trends

This is for several reasons, many of which are related, including choice of degree subject, choice of institution, access to more enriching opportunities while studying, access to better post-graduation employment opportunities, earlier average graduation age (because mature students are disproportionately from lower SE classes), and so on. 

Edited May 16, 2023 by mormont

[Liffguard]

Whole lot of question begging going on re what university (or indeed education as a concept more broadly) should even be for. If someone wants to take the position that university (and indeed education as a concept more broadly) is essentially a job training program, the success or failure of which is to be measured in financial compensation and application of skills to the workforce, then fine, that's a legitimate position to take. But it is just one position in a much wider philosophical discussion, not a given.

 

[kiko]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Also worth pointing out the obvious here, that people who have spent their entire career in HE probably are not going to have the most balanced view of the situation. 

Oh we've had enough of experts.

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, kiko said:

Oh we've had enough of experts.

Hmm.. it's a question of bias and obvious myopia more than anything.

[kiko]

5 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Hmm.. it's a question of bias and obvious myopia more than anything.

On that we can agree 

[Spockydog]

Bunch of Nazi cosplay wankers.

 

[Spockydog]

 

[Spockydog]

 

[James Arryn]

15 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

 

Conservatism has always seemed a pretty bankrupt ideology to me, but the degree to which overt asshattery is being embraced, seemingly for itself, has definitely gone up several notches in the past decade. 

[Derfel Cadarn]

The Nat-C convention have got such a hard-on for the 50’s (or what they think the 50’s were like), they’re now banging on about how married men and women shoukd stick together even if the marriage isn’t working. Because what kid doesnt want to grow up in a toxic environment 

 

[Heartofice]

57 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

The Nat-C convention have got such a hard-on for the 50’s (or what they think the 50’s were like), they’re now banging on about how married men and women shoukd stick together even if the marriage isn’t working. Because what kid doesnt want to grow up in a toxic environment 

 

Wow, people espousing the benefits of parents trying to make a marriage work for the sake of their kids. Pure evil. 

[Spockydog]

Spoken like someone who didn't have to live with parents who fucking hated each other.