People need to understand that a degree is a bit of paper given out by a university. It has no connection to education other than the will of the university to give it to you.
A fork lift truck license has more provable educational value than a degree. Sad but true.
Personally i agree some people take the mickey, but bunching everyone into the same category as layabout waster is unfair and untrue. What people believe students do and what students actually do are often quite different.Originally Posted by Larkspeed
I did have a lot of help from my parents financially but that's because for me to do work which was relevant to my field i had to work for free, so i was putting in 15 hours a week as a community volunteer, 15-20 hours a week in uni (depending on what we were doing in the studio) and then mixed amounts in the library depending on what work i had on.
Did i also spend a lot of time playing computer games and getting drunk? damn right i did, just the same as i do now working fulltime.
The problem is that what you see is drunk students, what you dont see is that they man up and go to lectures in the morning regardless of their state. Obviously this statement is not true for everyone but as previously mentioned, grades will often reflect the effort put in.
Im somewhere in the middle of privilege and right. It definitely is a privilege but i don't think it should be a privilege sorely for the rich. I also dont think it should be free, dont get me wrong but the vast amounts that are being charged at the moment is just ludicrous. They are scaring people away from degrees using expense when in reality they should be turning people down because they don't have what it takes. Higher education should be for those who are intelligent enough to use the skills learned to effectively give something back, im more than happy to subsidise that kind of education system with my tax money, especially if it encourages those who have had a less privileged upbringing to push themselves to achieve more than their parents have.
I'm not saying that at all.
Would it be useful to have a world of 100% art students? No.
Would it be useful to have a world of 100% med students? I wouldn't consider it a life worth living if we all lived soley for the existance of the NHS to service our existance.
However, we simply don't need the number of Arts students we have, we can't pay for it if they are only earning £16/18k.
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
I do think that council tax itself is stupid, after all the value of your residence doesnt necessarily have any relationship to either your wealth or service usage.
However, students do want police assistance, use public footpaths and produce waste.
And I think that everyone should be paying for services they use, even if passively, just need to bring back a better managed poll tax, lets call it a "local sales tax" to ensure its collected...
I certainly did not intend to tar everyone with the same brush.
My post was aimed at those students who feel they should be able to sit on their butts and do nothing and still get through uni, and I personally know plenty of them.
Our 21 year old son is slacking of and screwing up his future and we are leaving him to it. if he ends up with massive debt and a crap job that's his own stupid fault not ours.
I agree that Uni should not be reserved for the rich. But I think it should be reserved for those that are willing to work for it not the ones that just want to sit with their hand out for more money and party all the time.
Having worked in the Revenues section (the bit that collects Council Tax and pays HB/CTB) of a local authority, I can guarantee that any discretionary charge a council is permitted to levy will be levied. The same thing happened when councils were given the discretion to charge up to 90% on unoccupied properties (a discretion intended to allow popular rural "second-home" councils to recoup some of the losses they made only being allowed to charge 50% on unoccupied properties), and they've done it more recently, using what I assume is a discretionary power to charge up to 50% on empty and unoccupied properties (used to be an exemption for the first six months)*. I've been hit by both of those despite not being one of the intended targets for either discretionary power.
Where a council is given the discretion to collect more Council Tax, it will. No question.
This. The last government's plan to get 50% of 18 year olds into Higher education was simply ridiculous. Degrees are meant to be a gold standard, the pinnacle of academic acheivement. If half the people in a particular age group have one, that gets utterly devalued.
I haven't quoted Dave's post about university education being about learning to learn, but it's a great point, and one that is sadly now lost on most universities. Modern degrees simply don't teach those transferable skills, because there's too many students, and not enough good academics to teach them. We're not just producing too many graduates, we're requiring too many lecturers. That means that degrees are increasingly being taught by people who are simply not capable of teaching to degree standard. It's rapidly approaching a death spiral, and HE in this country needs a *huge* rethink quickly if we're going to get back to having anything like a decent post-18 education and training system.
I'll get off my soapbox now
*checking online, it looks like this might just be the council trying it on and only applying the exemption is you specifcally apply for it. Will have to follow that one up!
Last edited by scaryjim; 07-03-2012 at 11:45 AM. Reason: correcting assumptions!
I dont want to preach to you how to raise your child, but my first go at university i realized i was on the wrong course and i wasn't interested. I stopped going to lectures and just pissed about so my parents actually intervened and put pressure on me to sort it out. Turns out it was the best thing they could have ever done and i actually benefited from it more than i could have ever imagined at the time.
I left that uni, got a job, saved some cash and then went back when i had the motivation and drive to do something proper.
I had to make the decision myself, but i am eternally grateful for the support and pressure put onto me by my parents to do so.
Absolutely, going to University now is more about ability to pay than academic ability.
(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")
Been helped or just 'Like' a post? Use the Thanks button!
My broadband speed - 750 Meganibbles/minute
LOL you have no idea how much pressure we have already put on him.
You reach a certain point where you realize all your effort is getting you nowhere and you have to decide to let him face the consequences of his own actions.
No your are right i dont, which is exactly why i simply stated my own situation as an example rather than suggesting directly what you should do. No offence intended what so ever.
This is a valid point. I (Mechanical Engineering) had around 14 hours a week, for the full academic year for 3 full years. I generated £20,000 odd worth of debt. I then effectively instantly went into a job which started me paying back the money.
My best mates girlfriend did Film Studies. She had 2 hours of lectures a week, and 2 hours of tutorials a week for 3 'terms' during the year. For 3 years. She also generated £20,000 odd worth of debt. She is still stacking shelves to fund 'travelling' 5 years later, and has not started to pay any of the loan back.
In 25 years both of us would/will have whatever debt outstanding written off, but I will pay my FULL loan back well within that time (as is the general idea), an generate a lot more in taxes.
Value for tax payer is a very valid point, and I also believe in 'tiered' degrees offering more money for certain subjects.
Low class (yes, some degrees are worth far more then others) degrees should not be subsidised as much compared to the higher class degrees which are in higher demand, require more work, and produce a far more employable character.
Last edited by Andeh13; 07-03-2012 at 02:22 PM.
Stinks of elitism. Further education should be for everyone willing to learn (with th ecaveat its a decent subject and competitively marked).
Having worked so hard to get to where I am, and having cost the tax payer as much as I have, I now want my taxes spent on something that will see a good return. I don't want to fund some numpties 3 year jollies whilst they learn dance, or the history of line art, or social theatre studies!!
Bunjiweb (10-03-2012)
Irrespective of employers being stupid (that's nothing new, at all), university education arms young people with the knowledge they need to innovate and move us along. Lobotomising our entire society to bring employers to heel is retarded, that can be done in other ways.
Speaking from personal experience - there are many students who do not really know what do to with their lives and end up following their friends into higher education, attaining average/poor grades consistently through their degree. These students are following the crowd, they do not know what the real world has to offer them and where they fit in, but they truly believe everything will be OK once they get that degree which they have been told to aim for by their teachers/parents/peers.
Sad, but my ex-girlfriend and two friends of mine are some of the casualties of that state of mind, my ex has 2:1 in Spanish and Business and is a sales assistance at H&M, she never really could see beyond her degree and what to do with it. One of my friends has a 2:1 In Sociology but works in an Argos warehouse, he doesn’t have a clue what do, and my other friend has a third in Computer Science and works as a sales assistant at Currys. They have applied for various jobs, had several interviews but have had no success and it’s been over 2 years since they finished Uni.
They all did their degrees before the fee increase, however I’m sure they would have gone down the same route with the existing fees. There will always be students like them, wasting time and money with degrees that they don’t know what to do with or actually need.
So back on to the original topic, I think the Lib Dems are insane with their recent suggestions as it discourages poorer students from higher education, and it will eventually help cause a larger divide between the rich and the poor, and forcing the poorer to be less well educated.
The way I see it, it’s very crowded out there, you have the richer people driving up the property market by buying houses near good schools, meaning the poorer people are financially forced out of the area and having to put their kids into schools which aren’t their first choice, to put it politely.
I think teenagers need to be made aware of the facts, there are professional qualifications out there which are just as worthy as a degree, not all of them are going to be solicitors/doctors and that there are many careers out there which don’t require a degree. There are just too many people going into higher education with no real targets to aim for once they have finished.
Are we lobotomising our society by not paying for someone to study a worthless degree for 3 years? Personally I don't think so.
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Reply With Quote
