OK, government keep telling us graduates make £100k more across their working life than non-graduates.

But it’s going to cost £33k to go to uni.

Crunching the numbers (very simply on Excel) that gives around 6.5% to 7% rate of return over your working life.

My employers (technically Warren Buffet if you trace it back) won’t invest for that sort of return – so in pure financial terms why should you. The stock market will probably make more than that over a similar period.

Unless your getting something out of uni that isn’t financial (and I know you do/did – I’ve done it twice, as has my wife), then you have to question the sanity of going.

Have the Condems killed the value of uni – discuss.

unfortunately my daughter wants to be a dentist. no other route into it but uni. cock.

No. Labour killed the value of Uni when they started aiming for 50% young people undergraduate. But then Im an elitist dinosaur.

i read that as “have condoms killed the value of uni” :-/

It’s the value of having degree that’s dropping.

So you make more money (whether it is a large amount or not, its still more).

You have a great time (I know I am, and I’ve only been here for a few weeks).

You meet loads of awesome people.

You avoid the real world/getting a job for another 3-4 years.

Why wouldn’t you want to go again?

i read that as “have condoms killed the value of uni”

+1.

stoner in one (don’t normally consider myself an elitosaurus 😳 )

how do “they” calc the value of a degree ? – is the control group made up of matched a-level results or just “everyone else” ?

I’d be surprised if the monetary value hasn’t dropped as intake went up

Stoner and catflees, you bring me to my next thought. Will a degree really raise your salary by £100k (ie a whole £2500 per annum) when 50% of people have them. More than, say, hard work would?

Bring back 5-10% of people going to uni, grants for uni, polys for the purely taught “degree”, decent white and blue collar apprenticeships, and real social mobility like my parents (and I suppose indirectly I) benefited from.

problem is by aiming to have a high percentage of the population with degrees the value of GCSEs and A Levels is zero. You want a job it seems you have to have a Degree, and probably a masters as well.

What would help would be a move away from University to a more positive attitude towards Apprentiships and the like. We need fitters, plumbers, brickies, sparkies, etc. and rather than rely on Poles it might make sense to train out own.

As has been said above. The value of education, not just a degree, has been dropping steadily for some time (deliberately vague, I’m honestly not sure how long for but I’d hazard a guess that the roots of the problem preceed the current tuition fees system introduced circa 1999).

all of the above rests on the notion that the only value of gaining a degree is the vocational and financial oppurtunities that it might present.

so much for self development and enlightenment.

Agree with stoner 😯
Condemshardly been in power long enough to be blamed for an entire sector of our education system being poo…give them time and they probably wont disappoint 😉
Should be free should for the most able. I know plenty of skilled tradespeople who make far more money than me, electricians, engineers , tree surgeons, hair dresser [own company mind]. I would not advise my children to go to Uni unless they were doing something with guaranteed vocational opportunities afterwards- I work as a careers adviser and it surprises me how willing people are to go to Uni and incur debts for no real gain*. The premium exist now but I doubt it will be anywhere near as substantial for non vocational degrees from today onwards over their working lifetime. Remove.doctors.lawyers, accountants, engineers,scientists etc and I doubt most humanity degree students will experience much premium.

* we are starting to see bright and able people not going to Uni as there see little point taking a 20 K + debt when they have older graduated siblings doing non degree jobs for not much money.

EDIT:

self development and enlightenment

Absolutely true that this happens to everyone who goes to Uni.However you get the same [in a different way] if you go and travel the world for 2 years. Not sure it is worth getting in 30 K debt for this or for the state paying for everyone to do it.

My employers (technically Warren Buffet if you trace it back)

Good for you, you must be living on sponge cake!

People born in the 50s and 60s were much more likely to be socially mobile than youngsters today…plus I did it on a full grant for 4 years. Today it’s unlikely to be worth it money wise. I wonder where they will find the people to e.g. qualify as teachers. They’ll be promoting LSAs as teachers next, at least for state schools.

Shall we extend this to anything Government funded? If you choose to work for EDS/Capita/hospital PFI or anyone else overcharging the Government for substandard work you should pay a “fleecing the government tax”.

Charging people to study for a degree doesn’t take into account the desirability of an educated population, or that research is one of the few areas in which the UK is a world leader. E.g. say you want to go into biomedical research, or become a teacher. You’re going to have to pay off your fees, maybe struggle through a PhD (often partially self-funded), then go into a job which isn’t that well paid in the first place despite the benefits it brings to the country.

If the proposed uncapping of fees goes ahead, i think it will save the value of uni.

+1 for Labour screwing up uni for everyone who needs to go to uni to get the qualification they need to do the job they want.

The stupid thing is that I don’t think that the students end up enjoy going to uni because if you now don’t have a first plus extra curricular bits on your CV you’ll never get an interview (that might have been possibly over the top).

Bring back elitism, bring back the opportunities for people who don’t have the mental ability to get a degree and get people earning money sooner!!!!

oh and we could probably allow teachers to teach whilst we’re at it rather than enforcing endless targets on them.

The worst social mobility in western Europe just got worse. This one streches my support for the coalition to its elastic limit.

K, government keep telling us graduates make £100k more across their working life than non-graduates.

Is that before or after tax?

Anyway, that’s on average so if we do get a bit of cost/benefit analysis going on then some of those media degrees might not get so many applicants. Boring, but I did business and IT – including a MSc paid by the Govt with a grant 😉 – and I’ll make a lot more than an extra £100k over my career assuming it doesn’t fall off a cliff any time soon….

finbar – Member

If the proposed uncapping of fees goes ahead, i think it will save the value of uni.

Explain please?

It’ll kill off the arts and humanities by encouraging people to be mercenary and philistine about the payback on their investment.

All the talk of elitist universities is fine but it removes what the UK economy is based on now. For a number of years we have been touted as a ‘knowledge based economy’ – if these proposals become reailty it will do more to deepen the divide between the classes (how many of the current cabinent or shadow cabinet didn’t go to oxford or cambridge). Also students will need more money to live. The mean graduate wage is (i believe) about 21k – this is massively skewed by the top earners so the median value is closer to 12-15k. How can you pay off the 40k of debt, plus save for/buy a house, plus have a family, plus save for a pension? The figures just don’t add up. The only degrees worth having will be doctors, dentists, lawyers and accountants all of which represent either no net gain to the economy or a loss. Dark times ahead. 😥

No, those courses will exist, they may only be taken by better off kids as will the best universities

Probably showing my age too but agree with Stoner igm and junkyard… 😯 I think the % at Uni was about 16% in my day and even then it took doing an MSc and a PhD to get a bit of differentiation from the crowd – with all the downsides that that entails… Would not be bothering now if I were my 17 year old self looking at options.

I dont think you can Blame this on Labour to be honest, they may have accelerated it, but the programme of reform was started far earlier.

I also recall watching the “acceptable qualifications” for civil service posts creeping up from the Early nineties.

one example being Forestry – in about ’91 the “industry standard” qualification was a BTEC ND Sandwich, heavily practically orientated – by ’96 it was a degree, predominantly book learning.

multiply that trait across the civil service as a programme of justifying both increased money and increased demand for university degrees, so to get a Civil service post you needed a degree (doesn’t matter what its in, as long as the box is ticked) allied with the 1992 change from Polytechnics, and the subsequent explosion in degree courses was to be expected, that can only have a devaluing effect on the degree system.

The whole thing reeks of ‘self licking ice cream cone’ – creating more uni’s, then justify that by regrading jobs so they need a degree, which justifies the need for 50% to gain a degree, which justifies more uni places… regardless of whether the people are actually better qualified or experienced for those jobs…

finbar – Member

If the proposed uncapping of fees goes ahead, i think it will save the value of uni.

Explain please?

Basically the same point as various others have made. At the moment, a lot of university degrees are more-or-less worthless additions to peoples’ CVs. By reducing the number of graduates and making people think a lot harder about what they want to study and what benefits they will accrue from it, we might get to a situation where having a degree actually means something again.

I remember a classic quote in David Lodge’s nice work where the University Lecturer said ” … that Universities are egalitarian where they should be elitist and elitist where they should be egalitarian ….”.

Twenty or more so years since I read the book and watched the series on BBC, but it stook in my mind and I still believe it to be true.

So I am with Stoner and co on that point, but then again I hail back to a times when 3 A’s at A level was something pretty special.

Give them time and what will they not have killed off?
So let’s not give them time – RIOT!

By reducing the number of graduates and making people think a lot harder about what they want to study and what benefits they will accrue from it, we might get to a situation where having a degree actually means something again.

But what is likely to happen is that there will be fewer people going to uni, but that discrimination will not be based on aptitude but money. So less people will have degrees but the folks doing them won’t be any smarter.

ideas of egalitarianism and elitism are complex when it comes to university selection. You need to be clear about what you mean by each of them in this context.

DrDomRob – Member
+1 for Labour screwing up uni for everyone who needs to go to uni to get the qualification they need to do the job they want.

The stupid thing is that I don’t think that the students end up enjoy going to uni because if you now don’t have a first plus extra curricular bits on your CV you’ll never get an interview (that might have been possibly over the top).

You’ve got to do higher education to stand a chance of getting the job you want now. No question. I (perhaps stupidly) didn’t go to Uni or higher learning and haven’t got anything more than a Btec. I’m looking at doing a few OU courses to get me up to a level where I can at least get an interview now.
I could be wrong, but I’ve looked at quite a lot of job descriptions lately and I think I’m quite capable of the role, but I’m finding that I’m not even getting an interview because my CV lacks a HND/C. Because of this, I’m not getting past the HR department because I don’t have that bit of paper, regardless of what I’ve actually been doing the last 10 years of my career.

Basically empire building academia has usurped skills training.

Graduates end up with knowledge but not the skills they would have had if they had served an “apprenticeship” style education.

This shifts the cost from the employers into the community and the trainee is not paid a progressively improving wage like they were in the past. Which was fine until the trainees start getting penalised for it, as they now are because the community can’t afford it (got a nasty war to run instead).

Education should be free. It’s the only guarantee of social mobility.

“uni” = term used by the type of students who are mostly doing pointless fluffy degrees, who are there predominantly for the social scene and to avoid the evil moment of having to get a job!

University should be for the top 5% of highly capable talented people, not privileged toffs, or mediocre “also rans”.

What schools and parents routinely fail to understand is that success in a competitive environment is all about an individual’s personal drive and entrepreneurial spirit.

Business people want individuals with a bit of gumption and initiative, not a bunch of people who have swanned about at college for three years!

Personally, I think anything other than heavy duty degrees, such as those in law, medicine, science, maths etc are a waste of everyone’s time. I’m talking about media degrees, sports science and any other similarly fluffy pointless nonsense.

My advice is to get out there at the coalface and show employers you aren’t some lightweight flake. Take responsibility and excel in your role. Show your worth!

Condems have got to trim down the overbloated university system. It’s no big deal because, for most people, this higher education option has been nothing but a big financial mistake!

this is all a bit too late at night for me, but…..

i had the choice to attend university when i finished but decided smoking my way around australia would be more fun. and besides, i never really knew what i would have wanted to do. so i went off to australia and when i came back a few of my friends were at uni and some had dropped out as they didn’t get being-a-dick out of their system in time and consequently went awol at uni.

of about 8 that did see it through only two have done “well” out of it. one is now a bit of a highflier and has been dragged out to australia himself (doubt very much that he’ll be spending his time smokin). another currently works in the city.

these two done half decent degrees. in fact they both took time out during their studies and worked at various companies.

the rest of them done shit degrees such as art, media, and sport pyschology and are now no better off than if they hadn’t gone to uni – other than the 30K debt they are paying off on their forklift truck/car salesman/carpet salesman/pen pushing salaries.

one friend went straight into the City after finishing his A-levels and is now doing what many would consider “alright” for himmself (despite the long hours and the roll of fat he’s acquired). infact, after three years he was earning a darn sight more than most graduates in his field would expect, and he’s not burdened with any debt.

do i regret not going to uni? not really, i’m having a lot more fun being (relatively) carefree, being able to ride my bike in awesome locations than those of my mates who are fixed to their job till they’ve paid off their debt. and because they have to pay it off they are more or less fixed to one place meaning they’re either at home with their parents or looking to buy a house and live like the rest of the populace.

in fact, the cynic may say that it is all a big con and has been dreamt up by the banking illuminati to enslave generations with big chuncks of debt that they can never get on top of.

if the government were to sponser only those degrees that are needed for (proper) degree-level jobs that will further advance the british economy(engineers, doctors, the sciences) and not fund the easier degrees that are now needed for jobs where the training used to be provided on the job, we would see fewer people taking up pointless degrees and a return to some normality seen before my generation.

would you not gain more experience of your work by actually doing it, rather than learning about it in a class room or writing theoretical papers?

uni should be for the elite of mind, not the masses. (not masses in the sense of the plebs, but a massive number of people).

Hmm..I’ve been to tech college, polytechnic and university (under and post-grad)
20+ years ago it tended to be universities for (more academic) degrees, tech colleges/polys tended to be more vocational (but polys also did degrees – in fact one of the former polys – I forget which – used to be the one of the best places for 3d computer graphics)
Polys then converted to universities.
There’s now a wider range of degree courses – many of them more vocational.
So it wouldn’t surprise me if many of the former polys now handle the more vocational and less ‘academic’ degrees…in which case the only thing that’s really changed is what’s called a degree.

Perhaps it’s not worth getting one’s knickers in a knot about whether a ‘degree’ is devalued – the context is – as it always used to be – the grade, the subject, and where you studied.

Plus if anyone’s any good it’ll be pretty obvious when you interview then (and certainly during their probation period) – tho’ I take the point about differentiation from other people. There would have been people on my course that at least got an Ordinary, but I certainly wouldn’t wanted to have employed them.

I don’t agree with ‘the value of education dropping’ – there’s most to it that it’s pure monetary value. Financially I’d probably have been better going into engineering management, or a s/w engineer in the City, or being a plasterer or builder. But I didn’t – I’m still a techy spod. But I had probably the best time of my life – both educationally and as an experience – at uni.

>It’ll kill off the arts and humanities

Shouldn’t do. Some of the best paid people I know came from that kind of background and are in marketing or management…I can assure you that I wouldn’t necessarily wish managers of an engineering background on anyone !

PeteG55 – Member

“DrDomRob – Member
+1 for Labour screwing up uni for everyone who needs to go to uni to get the qualification they need to do the job they want.

The stupid thing is that I don’t think that the students end up enjoy going to uni because if you now don’t have a first plus extra curricular bits on your CV you’ll never get an interview (that might have been possibly over the top).”

You’ve got to do higher education to stand a chance of getting the job you want now. No question. I (perhaps stupidly) didn’t go to Uni or higher learning and haven’t got anything more than a Btec. I’m looking at doing a few OU courses to get me up to a level where I can at least get an interview now.
I could be wrong, but I’ve looked at quite a lot of job descriptions lately and I think I’m quite capable of the role, but I’m finding that I’m not even getting an interview because my CV lacks a HND/C. Because of this, I’m not getting past the HR department because I don’t have that bit of paper, regardless of what I’ve actually been doing the last 10 years of my career.

which is an example of how stupid this degree culture has become…. why should you fork out X000 pounds in order to be given an interview?

No. Labour killed the value of Uni when they started aiming for 50% young people undergraduate. But then Im an elitist dinosaur.

No, Thatcher did that by turning polytechnics into uni’s in an effort to dilute the professional classes she despised so much.

While we need people to enter jobs that don’t need uni degree’s, the future of the economy needs graduates to remain in the game when in competition with other economies.

Some will call it elitism and I do as it makes in my opinion education which should be one of the most level playing fields, even more uneven. Only those with money now have that choice.

What schools and parents routinely fail to understand is that success in a competitive environment is all about an individual’s personal drive and entrepreneurial spirit.

That’s the libertarian drivel you spout so much, stuff like competition and the like when all its really about is those with most money, wins.

While we need people to enter jobs that don’t need uni degree’s, the future of the economy needs graduates to remain in the game when in competition with other economies.

only if those jobs actually require a degree.

+1 for Labour screwing up uni for everyone who needs to go to uni to get the qualification they need to do the job they want.

I hear that, to get a job in a call centre, you need one of these pointless degrees.

Labour’s definitely fecked things up. They made a degree a mandatory financial burden for young people.

It’s bullshit!

It’s not just the degree culture – the whole recruitment environment seems to have changed in the last 10 years or so. 10 years ago I’d have stood a good chance getting into a lot of electronics jobs just by being a reasonably bright bunny to pick it up. Now I’d need to have all the correct tickboxes – people want to buy in experience as-is. In fact you’re possibly more likely to get a job as a recent graddy from having done the right course combination but little real experience, than as an experienced engineer with not *quite* the exact experience they’re after.

My OH’s found the same thing – she’s been in marketing – academic publeishing/education for 20+ years. But unless she’s got the right tickboxes on the CV, doesn’t even get past the selection process.

Probably not helped by the scattergun possibilities of email which means agencies search CVs for buzzwords…