BBC News: Degrees

[bibblebub]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-10748313

The top news story on the BBC is about universities/degrees and one of the people included in the report is someone who graduated a year ago, who still hasn't got a job and she is saying that her degree feels like a waste of time and money.

Is it too cynical to simply say that a degree in entertainment management is inevitably going to be a waste of time and money? Too many degrees in soft subjects like entertainment or the media where experience is probably the best approach?

[mollykins]

Yep and you get people doing soft gcses and a levels and they wonder why they can't get into uni, unless its for a rellevant soft subject, then wonder why they can't get a job.

[jno]

but it's hard to say which subjects would benefit more from experience than from study. jno jnr works in a field similar to entertainment management - but after doing a degree in English. He got the job because he bumped into a schoolfriend who offered him work. Would this woman have been better off skipping university and mooching around until she bumped into a convenient old friend? I'm not sure what the answer to this is; but I'd say, on the whole, you're better off well-edicated than not.

[LoftyLottie]

My son chose to give up his degree course as he was totally bored and it was not stretching him in any way. He wanted a degree to increase his knowledge of a subject that he already had vast knowledge and experience of, rather than for employment opportunities. He got his job through a friend of a friend who knew his capabilites. Degrees can be a waste of time and money and they are not the only way forward.

[LoftyLottie]

Yes, education is very important, but whilst it's so easy for so many to get mundane degrees, employers are looking for more. Degrees from recognised good universities in worth while subjects are still highly valued.

[bibblebub]

Well-educated is one thing, but does a degree in e.g. media studies equate to being well-educated?

If someone chooses to spend/borrow £20,000 to spend 3 years of their life on such a woolly subject then they only have themselves to blame if employers show no interest.

[New Judge]

I have to agree, bibblebub.

The notion that up to 50% of youngsters should go on to further education was mooted by the Labour Government. In my view the main reason for this was that education up to the age of 16 or 18 had become so poor that keeping them in class until 21 was the only way to ensure that some of them turned out with a half-decent education. Of course such large numbers of youngsters could not be trained in the traditional degree course subjects (those where a degree was an absolute necessary requirement to even enter a profession such as medicine or law) and nor did they need to be. So Polytechnics turned into “Universities” and the age of the soft degree subject was born.

The result of this folly is now apparent: large numbers of young people who were led to believe that their degree was a passport to a career languishing with either no job at all or doing work that they could have undertaken five years earlier.

Of course people without degrees languish similarly, but they are five years younger than their counterparts, are under no illusions about their future and are not saddled with a £20k debt.

Lottie is quite right – good quality degrees are still valued by employers. But only a small percentage of youngsters need them and, more importantly, are capable of achieving them. Meantime lesser degrees are becoming more and more worthless.

The dumbing down of secondary education (which I am not blaming entirely on the previous government as it has been going on for at least a quarter of a century) and the accompanying philosophy that only those with degrees will be able to get a job is one of the great scandals of our time.

[Playbill]

My daughter got a degree in media studies and two weeks later accepted a job as a trainee reporter on a newspaper. It was not exactly what she wanted (radio or television production was her goal) but she kept the job for 7 years until moving to a different part of the country.

[jno]

just so, playbill. Some people get apparently 'soft' degrees and do indeed find work. Others don't. The problem might be with the university, or it might be with the industry, or it might be with Ms Hayward. Before you can say anything for sure you need to know how many people on Ms Hayward's course did or didn't find work - and whether she would have got a job any quicker if she hadn't been to uni.

Otherwise all you've got is one person saying her degree didn't get her work - and that isn't news at all; I could have said the same thing 40 years ago, as could jno jnr now.

[boxtops]

I am very mixed about this. Forty years ago I was one of only 4 people in my year who opted not to go to Uni but to go out and get a job, and live in the real world and get genuine work experience, which has proved invaluable to me in my career. Fast forward to the late 1970s, I was working in industry where degree-level management traineers were taken in, with irrelevant degrees like mediaeval history, and thrown into the world of work without a clue about industry rules and regulations - it was really hard for them. It is one thing - like molly and my niece, who always wanted to be a doctot - to take a relevant degree and then seek work in that field, and another, as so many youngsters seem to do, to enter higher education because their mates are or because they got good school grades. I know at least one young man in his mid-twenties who just cannot get work in his degree subject, but he has work - that is better than no work at all. I finally passed my Masters degree when I was in my late forties, studying a subject highly relevant to the career I moved to around that time - personally I felt that bringing real-life experience to the study was far more valuable than it would have been forty years earlier, when it would all have been theoretical. I'm not decrying a good education but three years' degree study from 18-21 years old doesn't necessarily equip you for life in the real world.