Education versus money

Why would you go through the whole process of A levels, personal statement, UCAS if you weren't interested?

- because you have to stay in education till 18 now.
Once you have "stayed on" to do A' Levels (that maybe you were or were not interested in), if you are bright but no idea what you want to do you will drift off to university.

It's a bit like graduates I knew in the 1970s who did an year extra at university training to become a teacher because they couldn't think what they wanted to do. It was an "easy" choice for some people with no other ideas as to what to do.
They may or may not have become good teachers but they were a very different group of people from those who came to university to do a dedicated education degree who were focused on teaching from the beginning.

Because it’s expected of you?

Sorry, I see GSM has spoken for herself.

Doodledog

Not according to GSM.

To be fair, (and without reading the thread again) I thought GSM was saying that it's a filter before you get the interview.

JaneJudge

I don’t think it’s a bad sign but if they don’t know what they want to do it’s better to get a job for a few years (or more) before embarking on an expensive course in something you are not interested in

Why would you go through the whole process of A levels, personal statement, UCAS if you weren't interested? It isn't for the faint-hearted these days you know!

I haven’t said that, Doodledog. I have said that people straight out of university may find that their choice of university or degree may land their application in the the bin. As you know, I can only speak of my experience in the law. The last firm in which I was a partner took a good many trainees who were looking to pursue a career in the law after a first career in a completely different setting. They tended to be in their 40s.

I don’t think it’s a bad sign but if they don’t know what they want to do it’s better to get a job for a few years (or more) before embarking on an expensive course in something you are not interested in

Not according to GSM.

I did two further 'professional' degrees after my first degree I financed and paid for both. Was it easy? No, it wasn't, in one case juggling work, childcare, a husband whose job meant he was often away from home and studying.

But when employers are recruiting they may want someone with a degree, but it is other aspects of their character that gets them the job, I have done staff interviewing and while you need to know the educational calibre of candidates, it is other aspects of their character that do or do not get them the job.

JaneJudge

I agree with your last post Monica. I’m uncomfortable with the idea you get one chance at this university/education if you are poor and take out finance. It should be carefully considered and not treated like some kind of race. How many 18yo know what they want to do? Not many I imagine

I did, my brothers and sister did and we all stuck at it, so far all the GC know what career they are aiming at, wether they achieve what they aim for remains to be seen but they do have aims.
At 18 they all should have a good idea, they chose their options 3 yrs previously not having any idea is a really bad sign

I disagree, for all the reasons I've given, but I'm not going to repeat them. The fact that life's not fair is not, IMO a good excuse for not trying to make it fairer, but I don't think people are ever going to agree about this, and as long as we have a Conservative government there is not going to be a political will to do anything that doesn't advantage those who have money.

Norah

Doodledog when everything is reduced to money it is very difficult to be fair to everyone

There, right there.

Fair is a nice concept, but extraordinarily difficult to work out.

Those who are lucky, charismatic, beautiful, clever not daft, with big legacies, Bank of mum, higher earners, etc - life isn't fair.

I don't understand free university fees, not having loans as fair to the taxpayers, perhaps less government debt is a better idea.

For the government to get best value out of higher education it needs to set targets of the number of places in each discipline it is prepared to offer loans or scholarships each year. That would ensure that only the best students get places regardless of their ability to pay.
It doesn’t stop anyone getting further education, they can get it from local colleges or from work related qualifications.

Maybe employers need to be more accountable for paying for their workers qualifications if they are working and progressing in a given field.

Indeed Norah, life isn’t fair. Unless you possess wealth, great intelligence, beauty - it is what you make it. And we live in a society which does enable people to progress, if they are willing to put in the necessary hard graft. It may be difficult and require sacrifices - which in my experience makes achievement all the sweeter. I never met another lawyer who valued their practising certificate as highly as I did.

Doodledog when everything is reduced to money it is very difficult to be fair to everyone

There, right there.

Fair is a nice concept, but extraordinarily difficult to work out.

Those who are lucky, charismatic, beautiful, clever not daft, with big legacies, Bank of mum, higher earners, etc - life isn't fair.

I don't understand free university fees, not having loans as fair to the taxpayers, perhaps less government debt is a better idea.

My grandchildren who are at uni both have jobs for quite a few hours a week, some late night hours too. We didn’t have to do that, they actually paid us to go. How lucky are we, looking back ? I think they should make any training for professions like medicine or teaching free, especially considering shortages. If not free, heavily subsidised. All the business studies and legal studies and politics can remain as is. Not that I am biased of course.

Yes, and that adds to the expense. Should they be funded? Currently they qualify for student loans, but only if you don’t already have qualifications at that level and you are under 60. This makes retraining difficult for well-qualified people who want or need to change careers at a time when they have mortgages and children to support, as they have to find the money up front. Meanwhile (in some subjects at least) there are many early retirees who take them before they are 60, safe in the knowledge that they won’t have to pay back the loans which young people have to add to the cost of their undergraduate ones. That doesn’t seem fair, but is in the spirit of learning for its own sake, so I don’t know what to think really.

When I retired I took a ‘recreational’ Masters (in the sense that I knew I would never put it on a CV). I was the only person paying for it upfront, as I had other qualifications that meant I didn’t qualify for a loan, even though I’d paid the fees for them myself. I didn’t mind, as in my case it was something of an indulgence, but I felt for the young people who were adding £9k or so (plus expenses) to their debt when older ones were boasting that they would never pay theirs back.

Arguably most of them would have paid more than enough in tax to cover the fees by their 50s, but then so had I - when everything is reduced to money it is very difficult to be fair to everyone.

I agree with your last post Monica. I’m uncomfortable with the idea you get one chance at this university/education if you are poor and take out finance. It should be carefully considered and not treated like some kind of race. How many 18yo know what they want to do? Not many I imagine

Doodledog - since so many people have degrees now, many higher level jobs want research /higher degrees -
MA, PhD, MSc, MRes, MPhil etc.

In these days of online learning it should be so much easier to open up education to more people.
Agreed. I would love to see more Zoom-based courses which allow synchronous student interaction from home, but as far as I can tell there is little between traditional attendance-based courses and OU-type distance learning, where work is sent out to individuals who do it on their own, with maybe a bit of online chat. I appreciate that this model allows students to fit learning around other commitments and can be done across time zones, but it has no real interaction.

Seminars could be held over Zoom, as they were during Covid, to replicate the experience of attending university, and make it accessible to those who are unable to attend for various reasons.

Students benefit so much from talking to one another and getting the support that this entails. It’s not easy for staff to prepare good Zoom-based learning, and for some reason it got a bad press during Covid, as some people thought it should be cheaper than face to face teaching, which it’s not.

This misconception probably explains why it hasn’t taken off, but it is very inclusive and could be a way of helping more people to access education without having to travel or live away from home.

Education is of course fundamental but the UK has put University too high on its priority list. Graduates are two a penny it’s technical skills that the UK is deficient in, the government should be far more active directing students into skills we need.

I am not wanting to deny degrees to anyone, on the contrary I am saying that they should be more accessible by being available in more ways; by going to university, by online learning, like the OU, which should have lower fees than in person full time university, but also by building up, where a youngster can leave school and aspire to be an electrician, but later go to his local college and upgrade to a higher level with a second level course, and then do further higher level courses until he has reached degree level and is awarded a degree. the degree course need not be specifically in electrical engineering.

My DD's OU STEM degree, started out with her aiming at a degree in physics, but she became so entranced by other subjects she saw available to her, she changed her trajectory to study more applied and engineering topics

In these days of online learning it should be so much easier to open up education to more people.

The point though, is that that was then and this is now. There was a time in the 50s and 60s when grammar schools, technical colleges and poly's did allow working class children to move 'up' the social scale, and now many of those very people are trying to pull the ladder up behind them.

You could go to university (free and with a grant) if you passed the 11+. That is no longer the case. I am not arguing for a system that 'selected' as the 11+ did, as it was deeply flawed in many ways, but saying that it has not been replaced with a fairer system, and that culling the number of places will be disastrous for the very sorts of people who benefited from the expansion in education of 50+ years ago.

The bottom line is always going to be that a degree, like anything else, is prized if having one is rare. As soon as more people get them they are worth less - it stands to reason. That doesn't mean that they are more easily won, or that standards have dropped (although I would say that there has been grade inflation since fees rose to £9k a year and 'student satisfaction' became a metric for measuring the success of courses, but that is a separate argument and applies across the board).

The question is whether to maintain the exclusivity of degrees, so that more people are denied the right to higher education, or to accept that more people will achieve them, and that in themselves they are no longer a passport to a well-paid job for life. The basis of my argument is that the latter option is fairer, and will help to ensure that it is the best people who get the best jobs, rather than the ones who were lucky enough to be on the right side of the algorithms that selected them at 11.

Universities are not vocational institutes, they are educational and have always offered subjects that are not directly vocational, but that is relative. Some of the most improbable degrees can provide someone with a career and the careers that the most dedicated vocational graduate gets may end up being something entirely different.

The creative arts - I would add, the humanities should emphatically exist at university, you do not know where this may take some one.

As I said DD did a degree in acting, but learnt enough to not want to act as a profession, but her degree, plus secretarial skills got her into the BBC, she was then in right at the start writing content for the earliest media websites. She spent 20 years working in various aspects the media.

She then did an OU degree in STEM subjects. She is just about to start her 3rd new job since making the change from media to technical management. The USP that has got her each job has been her drama training and media background. What is more, when ever she has decided to move on, she has been offered a new job within weeks, often several.

My concern is not about excluding subjects from universities, but I strongly believe that we should have far more routes into every subject, so that if anyone wants to do something and is willing to put the work in they can get there.

Personally I think this consatnt talk of lack of social mobility is bunkum. My grandfathers started life as London dockers and Northern Ireland flax dressers and were highly socially mobile. My FiL worked on the assembly line at Vauxhall. DH was moving up in the world when he passed the 11+ at 10 and then went on to university.

My grandparents, no matter how low in the social scale they started, when I knew them had classic middle-income life styles, owning their own houses, culturally educated.

In France tuition fees for an undergraduate are less than 200€ a year; accommodation is subsidised and low cost. My neighbours are aghast at the costs in the UK.