Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 23, 2022 15:50 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Quotes of the week by smoogen
Parent article: Quotes of the week

Which is why we need decent apprenticeships, which aren't run by "for profit" academic institutions selling paper qualifications to anyone prepared to pay for them ...

We had this mad dash for academic and university qualifications - "if you've got a degree you typically earn 3x the average salary" ... well that was true when maybe 10% of the population had a BA/BSc (and was why a UK Batchelors was considered equal to a US Masters - far fewer UKians had degrees!) Now 50% of the population have degrees, it can't be true, but most of the people with degrees don't actually have the ability to comprehend this fact ...

Now every man and his dog has a degree, they're worthless, but the politicians seem to think "more is better" regardless of quality. It does seem, however, that the general populace is cottoning on and not bothering with Uni, unless they want to go into a job where the politicians have made a University degree mandatory ...

(In which case, it's really a glorified apprenticeship and not worthy of the term "degree" :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 28, 2022 15:52 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (4 responses)

> It does seem, however, that the general populace is cottoning on and not bothering with Uni

Your age is showing. That's not because degrees don't come with a huge salary uplift any more (some still do): it's because a lot of people don't want to be saddled with £30000+ of extra debt for decades. Back in my day (and probably yours) we got grants and uni was free, but it's *expensive* now for any but the richest 5% or so, and people are washing their hands about how terrible it is that poor people don't go any more (well duh, of course not, we've made it nearly impossible).

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 28, 2022 17:32 UTC (Tue) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (2 responses)

> Back in my day (and probably yours) we got grants and uni was free, but it's *expensive* now for any but the richest 5% or so, and people are washing their hands about how terrible it is that poor people don't go any more (well duh, of course not, we've made it nearly impossible).

I'm not sure it's true that poor people don't go any more. UCAS says the opposite: (https://www.ucas.com/corporate/news-and-key-documents/new...)

> 28% of young people from the most disadvantaged areas (quintile 1 using the POLAR4 measure) have applied – up from 17.8% nine years ago in 2013. [...] Today’s figures also show record application rates for 18 year olds in three of the four nations; 44.1% in England, 37.5% in Wales and 52.6% in Northern Ireland, with an application rate of 35.4% in Scotland representing the second highest from last years’ record high.

and as far as I can see that's a continuation of pre-pandemic trends, and also pre-2012-tuition-fee-increase trends. The top universities are starting from a much lower proportion of disadvantaged students but are showing the same trends.

It sounds like a lot of the change comes from universities actively working on providing support and outreach to people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and perhaps it might have improved quicker without the tuition fee changes, and there's a long way to go yet, but it is still gradually improving under the current system.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 28, 2022 21:11 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Your figures are from 2013 to now -- that's a very carefully chosen start date, basically cherry-picking :( picking from a base year one year after tuition fees last went up is... ah... obviously UCAS trying to massage their numbers.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 28, 2022 23:40 UTC (Tue) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

2011/2012 were outliers (so they'd be a bad choice of start date) and don't seem to have changed the longer-term trend - see e.g. figure 1 in "Patterns by applicant characteristics" from https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/undergraduate-stat... which shows entry rate for 18-year-olds from 2006 to 2018, where the most disadvantaged group was the *least* affected by the changes in 2012 and has grown substantially over that whole period (and has continued growing up to 2022).

(The less-disadvantaged groups were particularly high in 2011 and low in 2012, probably for multiple reasons but at least partly due to a large decrease in deferred entries in 2011 (https://www.ucas.com/sites/default/files/ucas-end-of-cycl...) - I guess it was students who'd normally go on a gap year, but in 2011 they chose to go to university immediately to get ahead of the fee increase, so that skewed the numbers for those years without much long-term impact.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 28, 2022 19:20 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

The advice now is "don't worry about the debt, you're never going to pay it off so treat it like another tax". And yes some jobs do come with an uplift, but far fewer nowadays (and it doesn't address my point that they keep stressing PAST uplifts, when so many grads end up in minimum-pay jobs nowadays - it would be interesting to know what percentage of recent grads earn enough to even START repaying their loans :-)

And back in my day my contemporaries didn't pay to go to Uni, but because I didn't go and studied part time, I had to pay - they were stingy even back then (and because I paid for my degree, it disqualified me from going for a freebie later on!)

Cheers,
Wol