I love all the sniping at ‘pointless’ degrees on here. To me there is nothing more pointless than churning out endless shallow corporate drones who have no wider knowledge or understanding of the world and care only about how much money they can make and how shiny a car they can buy.

But each to their own eh?

I think Ben Goldacre was right when he tweeted:

“there’s something grim about ppl in their 50s+ who had free education charging today’s kids, AND expecting them to pay off their debt”

And the protests are about more CUTS to university funding too, framing it as students ‘not understanding the proposed fees’ isn’t going to work.

I know plenty of student both when i was at uni and now that spend what i do on a mortgage on drinking and pissing around.

I really have little sympathy, There are planty of options available, Work based training etc or even god forbid a part time job to pay for education rather than piss ups.

I think maybe its a little high but they pay it back when they are on a resonable wage and eventually will be in a better situation,

I’m like many people out there who did a degree and now actually works in a completly unrelated field that doesn’t need the qualifaction I studied for. It will put people like myself who wasted time and money for nothing.

I think there are a few layers of unfairness in any system, but S_S’s comments are interesting.

Plenty of students do a degree that they never use. For some its because there were no jobs in it when they left, for others it’s because they were not very good and for yet more it’s because they didn’t enjoy it anymore. At some level, if it puts some people off doing courses that don’t result in related jobs then it’s a saving, and I’m not the only person who hates the idea that you can get a degree in “surf science” etc. But at the same time, there have to be people who do arts degrees when there’s no arts jobs or the skills would vanish. There have to be people who do engineering when there’s few engineering jobs, or the knowledge is lost. There are plenty of people who treat university as a lifestyle choice – a period of their life they’re entitled to do minimal work, scrape through and use their loans to pay for beer. These people should not be encouraged to go to university, quite the opposite. But there are more than enough students who study hard, may use their loans to go to the odd party but generally do what they’re paying to do, get on with it and don’t come out earning much over average. For them, massive increases are often too much to bear and will simply put them off altogether. And for them and the government, it’s a waste of money – they’ll never recoup the cost and the student will never see these great benefits that are talked about.

Most of the people I graduated with from a good red-brick uni engineering course are not on more than 25K now, nearly a decade later, and not through lack of trying. So these high flying careers with massive wages from studying such degrees are a falacy, some people get them, but not many.

I believe the problem is at least partially caused by intake quality and entry grade lowering in order to get numbers up to get more funding, and to match their “low income family” intake. But it’s more complex than that and most people just do not understand the funding structures involved in universities so it’s hard to discuss on a public forum, but that’s the reason the general public don’t see the subtleties of where the problems lie.

tree-magnet – Member
Thanks for the reasoned replies guys. I still feel that asking the whole population to pay for something that benefits the few (in the main) is a strange concept. I understand that the tax that person pays back if they become successfull will more than cover the course, but I just can’t reconcile someone on 19k paying for the university education of someone that goes on to earn 100k.

Presumably you apply that line of thought to everything public money gets spent on? And the logical conclusion is surely over a certain income level you pay for everything at point of use.

Useless/pointless degrees – why does media studies always come up? The UK has a huge creative industries sector worth billions.

Not using their degree – degrees aren’t just about the content, but also the skills you learn.

Beneficiaries paying for degrees – there are three main benefiicaries: graduates (higher earning potential), businesses (skilled labour supply), public (stronger economy)… why not expect all to contribute?

QUOTE:Useless/pointless degrees – why does media studies always come up? The UK has a huge creative industries sector worth billions. UNQUOTE.

It tends to come up because it’s generally considered to be the very epitome of a Mickey Mouse degree. It’s even, perhaps especially, derided by many within the media.

Contemporaries of mine, now working for Future Publishing, Euro Money, the FT, the Daily Telegraph, BBC, Guardian Media, Current TV and Rock Sound share one thing in common, none of them have degrees in media studies.

Anecdotal evidence is pretty flawed, hey? Well, yes, but I’ll wager that a decent degree in English, a foreign language, history, law or politics will stand the aspiring media worker in infintely better stead, it certainly seemed to work in the aforementioned examples.

If you want to expand it to the creative industries as a whole, there are a raft of specific and technical degrees in art, graphic design, CAD etc that people require.

a highish flyer gaining £1k in salary per year

If you’re only increasing your salary by £1k a year you’re crawling, not flying

The College as a Philanthropy. Worth a read:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-College-as-a-Philanthropy/125176/