[Closed] Most graduates in non-graduate jobs

MoreCashThanDash - Member

Firstly, 50% going to uni as a target predates Blair.

Really? Any source?

And yet in engineering good quality graduates are like rocking horse poo

How would you rate the employ-ability prospects of a slightly older bloke with Foundation Degree in mech eng, v good grades and lots of practical experience?

If you don't get a degree premium in your pay packet, you probably would have been better advised to do something else.

Why? I'm 5 years out of one of the best uni in Scotland, with a 2:1, and earn less than 25k. But going to uni was invaluable for the experiences and contacts I made. Money isn't everything - I'm happy with what I've achieved professionally since and my parents are proud too. I don't need the pay packet to prove my achievements...

I don't think uni is for everyone but as a few have said, uni is for learning not necessarily to bolster future financial gain.

People are put off engineering because you actually have to knuckle down and do some work. I was doing over 30 hrs of lectures a week with the same amount of work outside of lectures, and in my first year it was 42 hrs. That was more hours of lectures in one year than a lot of my mates were doing over the full 3 years of their courses. University was just a 3 year pi$$ up for them - so maybe the answer for some degrees regarding the cost to students is to condense some 3 year degrees into 1 or 2 years.

Also students are being sold a pup regarding expectations of salary as soon as they come out of uni. 20yrs ago when I left uni and stated on a grad training scheme my pay was crap - 20yrs on it's half decent, but grads coming into the company these days expect to walk straight into a senior managers position. I have no idea where they are getting this level of expectation from, or that they are even capable to do a job of that level in a large organisation.

Also a lot of degrees in uni's these days offer very little value to society and industry. A lot of degrees are there to attract some people who normally wouldn't go to do the traditional subjects to earn money for the universities rather than their usefulness to industry.

Also my school mates, most of whom didn't go to uni, are all in a similar situation to me regarding job and salary, so a degree might help you get that first job, but after that it's all about experience, delivery and performance.

A degree as an automatic pass to a good job is a myth and the last 15yrs or so where graduate numbers have rocketed has only served to devalue the qualification - supply and demand innit - the more graduates there are out there on offer to industry, the lower their value and therefore the salary level.

There seemed too many grads when I was a student in the early 90s, I decided to do an MSc as wanted to differentiate myself. Not sure how much that helped in the end but it was funded and I got a good job. These days I see more Indians than Brits on my IT projects so shortage there it seems.

wobbliscott - Member

People are put off engineering because you actually have to knuckle down and do some work.

It's not so simple. The biggest problem with engineering is that kids lose interest in the necessary subject areas, before they really find out what they're for. Intermediate maths at high school is, basically, dull as **** and generally pretty unapplied too. So kids lose interest and both underperform, and choose not to progress, and engineering closes as a (straightforward *) option. It's a pretty vicious combination, maths is both hard to inspire people with, and yet completely essential for some areas of further study.

Course, it's possible to return to maths after losing interest, but the UK mostly lays out simple paths to uni and anything that takes kids off that is a harder sell.

This, incidentally, is one of these things where the problem's really obvious but nobody really knows what the solution is.

(* there's plenty of ways to get back into it, if you want- but the UK in general puts too much focus on the simple school-uni progression, and routes outside that are both poorly understood, and often stigmatised. "What are you doing at uni" "Actually I'm doing a HND..." "Couldn't get into uni, dur")

And yet in engineering good quality graduates are like rocking horse poo

because the pay is shite.

Not in Electronics / SW in the South East. You'd easily earn 2x UK average with a few year experience.

Some degrees seem to be in such Mickey Mouse subjects I doubt much of value is learned for the 30k debt .Craft ,surfing and sport to name a few

There was an MSc in brewing when I went through UCAS nearly 40 years ago, so it's not new.

Now, if 50% of school leavers go on to do a degree and pay fees, they directly support the universities without government (the general public) having to cough up. If it's necessary to come up with some shitty courses or drop the entrance requirements well so be it. That's my take on the political thinking behind it anyway.

Of course the fact that many student loans will never be repaid does conversely add to the burden on the exchequer.

MSc in brewing

Which I would hope would turn out to effectively be a Conversion Course to Chemical and Process Engineering, for that is what brewing is.

Thank heavens for universities. Coming from a sheep farm high in the welsh hills I am not sure if I would have ever lost my virginity to a proper female or discovered drugs and alcohol had I not got a place in uni 30 years ago 🙂

The fact that I went on to get a PhD and yet somehow still ended up running a sheep farm in the welsh hills has nothing to do anything.

Which I would hope would turn out to effectively be a Conversion Course to Chemical and Process Engineering, for that is what brewing is.

Thank heavens for universities. Coming from a sheep farm high in the welsh hills I am not sure if I would have ever lost my virginity to a proper female or discovered drugs and alcohol had I not got a place in uni 30 years ago

The fact that I went on to get a PhD and yet somehow still ended up running a sheep farm in the welsh hills has nothing to do anything

sounds like that 'year out' that mormans have 😉

[i]It cost me £23k to go + £160k in lost earnings. I still think it was worth it. [/i]

Nice that you were in a position to afford it and you're Karma'd up 🙂

Me - MSc in Environmental Planning. Now drive a black cab a couple of days a week.

I am indeed living the dream.

The best brewers these days very probably have no qualifications in brewing or chemistry.

Probably not, but if it's bigger than homebrew it'll be a batch process plant, whatever you'd like it to be 😉

Which I would hope would turn out to effectively be a Conversion Course to Chemical and Process Engineering, for that is what brewing is.

Incidentally, there was a really interesting interview with [url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Palmer_(scientist) ]Professor Geoff Palmer[/url] on The Life Scientific the other week.

Leegee - drop me a line - your email rejected.

engineering/chemistry, science degrees are hard, things have to work or if they dont , you need to find out or know why.

Where as english, media studies, philosophy etc are just your interpretation of current thinking so easier to do and could be done as night classes part time.

Some subjects could be condensed into 2 years, I'm sure.
I did biochemistry at Manchester, and my week was full of lectures and lab sessions, whereas for some subjects, the students had very little in their timetables. I appreciate that the rest of the time was intended for individual study, but in practice I saw very little evidence of that.

I don't like this condence into 2 year lark. HND is 2 years, call it that. I know quite a few engineers with HNDs and it seems unfair that they would do 2 years (full time) and get a HND were as someone else would do 2 years and get a "degree".

vickypea - Member

Some subjects could be condensed into 2 years, I'm sure.

Chap on R4 yesterday, he was/is a University chancellor (or something), said '2 year degrees were offered, no-one applied to do them'.

and why would they?

(an 18yr old going off to uni isn't in a rush to get stuck into 40+ years of desk-jockey drudgery)

Well that's a fair point, but depends who is going to pay for all these students on courses that allow them to sit around drinking tea all day.

Let them. When they are sittign around drinking tea that subsidises the subjects that require more teaching and equipment.

30 (?) years ago, 5% (?) of people went to Uni, and we even [u]gave[/u] them money to do so.

how did we pay for that?

I went back to my faculty about 6 years after I'd graduated and as a result of the expansion they'd already dropped the last year of my BEng degree and now only covered years 1 & 2 of my degree course. The first year was spent covering what used to be called A level maths and physics....

I suspect they're now down to just covering the 1st year of my degree as that was 15 years ago.

30 (?) years ago, 5% (?) of people went to Uni, and we even gave them money to do so. how did we pay for that?

Yeah but life was different then; the internet and computers were stuck in the science/engineering departments. Mobile phones didn't exist and students were happy to live in halls with shared baths, 3 amp sockets and school dinner catering.

What dragon said. I lived in a flat of 8 students with 2 toilets and one bath between us. We didn't have mobile phones or laptops. Nowadays, everyone wants an ensuite bathroom.

dragon & vickypea + 1,
can I add that we lived opposite a mass murderer too
(you tell the kids of today and they don't believe you)

My student existence also bore a worryingly close resemblance to an episode of the Young Ones, and nothing remotely like [url= http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/student-to-get-valuable-life-experience-from-moving-to-purpose-built-luxury-apartment-20150817101164 ]this[/url] 🙂

Students don't live in luxury apartments, just the Chinese ones.

The only difference between now and 30 years ago is that a room now... that hasn't been renovated since the 70's and in a past life has been used to house room sharing/bunking smack addict prostitutes costs as much as a house if it's located near to a half decent university.

In my second year we lived in a house with no central heating and all the gas fires were condemned!

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Even McDonalds have a graduate training scheme nowadays binnners which includes getting your hands dirty on the shopfloor 🙂
http://www.savethestudent.org/graduate-schemes/mcdonalds.html
And Greggs!
https://www.greggsfamily.co.uk/management-and-office/profiles/katie-management-trainee

I can assure you that student accommodation is as crap as it's always been.

In many cases, it the [i]same[/i] accommodation that you lot stayed in, unchanged, not even the beds.

Well, I will find out the truth in a few weeks' time as my son is about to go to university!

I can assure you that student accommodation is as crap as it's always been.

In many cases, it the same accommodation that you lot stayed in, unchanged, not even the beds.

If you mean halls then there has been significant improvemtents. My hall of residence from my 1st year has been knocked down and replaced. Across a range of Uni's i've visited they've replaced a lot of halls with modern rooms with ensuite and internet.

No, I mean the shared-houses.

They're still crap and grotty, there's still 5 bedrooms squeezed into a 2up-2down terrace, the landlords are still money-grabbing, corner-cutting bastards.

They're still at the heart of the typical student experience.

Good article in The New Yorker on this subject: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/college-calculus?intcid=mod-most-popular

Kenneth Arrow, one of the giants of twentieth-century economics, came up with this account, and if you take it seriously you can’t assume that it’s always a good thing to persuade more people to go to college. If almost everybody has a college degree, getting one doesn’t differentiate you from the pack. To get the job you want, you might have to go to a fancy (and expensive) college, or get a higher degree. Education turns into an arms race, which primarily benefits the arms manufacturers—in this case, colleges and universities.

It is well established that students who go to élite colleges tend to earn more than graduates of less selective institutions. But is this because Harvard and Princeton do a better job of teaching valuable skills than other places, or because employers believe that they get more talented students to begin with? An exercise carried out by Lauren Rivera, of the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern, strongly suggests that it’s the latter. Rivera interviewed more than a hundred recruiters from investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms, and she found that they recruited almost exclusively from the very top-ranked schools, and simply ignored most other applicants. The recruiters didn’t pay much attention to things like grades and majors. “It was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige,” Rivera concluded.

Don't knock the McDonalds Grad scheme. I know a few people who did it and are now regional managers earning a decent whack with decent bonuses (10k+) every year. By all accounts they are a very good company to work for, and one benefit is that if you decide you've had enough of where you live right now then it is relatively easy to relocate to just about anywhere in the world. And you don't have to put the clown suit on.

Don't knock the McDonalds Grad scheme. I know a few people who did it and are now regional managers earning a decent whack with decent bonuses (10k+) every year.

In many fields you could.

Employees who join McDonald's as non-grads could well progress into mgt.