Higher education in the UK; is a bleak future ahead?

[Matt N]

Hi guys. If you’ve been keeping the news lately, you may have seen that Cardiff University in Wales is cutting 400 jobs and axing courses as a sustainability measure for the future (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0k5n0k101lo). Courses being cut include all courses in modern foreign languages, music, ancient history, theology and nursing. This is in order to finance a £31m deficit in the university’s budget for the coming year.

Cardiff is not the only UK university cutting jobs and costs, however. My undergraduate university was merging schools and aggressively cutting costs in my last year or so there, and plenty of other unis are doing the same. Whole departments are going under, and jobs are being lost in academia around the country. There are talks of big universities potentially going bankrupt and needing to be bailed out in the next year or so. Yet on the flip side, all of this is coming off the back of £9,000 per year tuition fees, and the increasing reputation among the wider populace that university is “an expensive scam”. Students are already paying through the nose, but the universities are still facing financial peril.

In my view, something is evidently very, very wrong in the UK’s higher education sector. With this in mind, I’d be interested to know; what are your thoughts on the situation in the higher education sector in the UK? What do you think the future holds for the sector? How would you solve some of the crippling issues, such as university cash flow?

Personally, I think the situation is very concerning, for a multitude of reasons.

As much as some may be dismissive of a university education’s relevance, I am personally a firm believer in the benefits of higher education. I feel that it gives you a true deep understanding of subject matter you’re passionate about and teaches you a number of important study and learning skills as a result. As much as you may not directly apply all of it to your job or similar in future, I think that having that theoretical, academic understanding of a chosen subject can be greatly beneficial both directly and indirectly, and the university study style teaches you other crucial transferable skills such as critical thinking (an increasingly important skill in this era of misinformation, I would argue!). If the sector cuts and cuts and cuts, there will be less choice for students, a poorer experience, and eventually, the important skills offered by a university education may be inaccessible to a great many.

The value of a degree is also arguably diluted if universities are having to rely increasingly on quantity of students to pay the bills. As a Cardiff student, I was able to read some of the consultation documents behind the announced cuts (we all received an email from the Vice Chancellor with a link to them), and there were some eye-opening revelations. One such revelation was that entry tariffs have notably decreased in recent years and flexibility in offers has notably increased in order to keep bums on seats and keep money flowing in; in Maths, for example, the documents stated that students were being let in with Maths A Level grades as low as a C. If everyone and their dog can go to university, that arguably dilutes the value of degrees.

I also feel these developments are concerning because they appear to disproportionately target certain subject areas over others, namely social studies and the arts. The Cardiff cuts, for example, propose the complete closure of modern foreign languages, music, ancient history and theology at Cardiff University, and the notable paring back of other social studies, arts and humanities subjects. While these subjects may not perform as well in terms of “students in employment or further study within 15 months of graduating”, as, say, many STEM subjects or something like medicine or dentistry, I feel that they are still very important, and if we cut back on these subjects, it may have a profound cultural impact. Without music, we have no musicians. Without MFL, we lose crucial knowledge of other languages and cultures. Without arts subjects, we have no creativity. Without history, we lose vital knowledge of our ancestors and roots. You hear a lot of people wax lyrical about “Mickey Mouse degrees”, and how STEM subjects are the only worthwhile things to study at uni, and as a STEM student, I arguably have somewhat of a vested interest in agreeing with this rhetoric. However, I’m not going to. Social studies and the arts are still really, really important subjects that play huge roles in our society and culture, and I fear that the dilution of these may be hugely impactful in the years to come.

So how do we go about solving this predicament that many UK universities find themselves in? Personally, I think a lot of it boils down to the funding model. Tuition fees are an utterly flawed system of funding, and I’d argue that they present a lose-lose situation at present. Students are already (ostensibly) paying £9,000 per year to study at university, yet that clearly isn’t sufficient funding for our universities. They are having to rely on a dwindling number of international students, who pay uncapped fees, to stay afloat. There clearly needs to be more money coming from somewhere, but we can’t just continually hike tuition fees ad infinitum.

However, I don’t think free tuition fees, as proposed by many left-wing parties, are the answer either. This would cost money the country doesn’t have, or if it does have it, it should frankly be spent on more important things than subsidising universal higher education. As much of an advocate as I am for higher education, I don’t feel it’s the right path for everyone, and I think free tuition fees would only serve to push everyone to university at 18 when it might not be right for them, and only serve to further the dilution of a degree’s value.

One idea I am increasingly receptive to is a graduate tax. In essence, a graduate tax sees all graduates charged a tax for their entire working lives that scales up and down depending on how high their salary is, with higher salaries paying a higher rate of tax. The revenue from this tax would then be ring fenced for use in higher education. I am a believer in this idea for a couple of reasons. The first is that it removes the student perception of “£27,000 in debt”, which might implore poorer students to explore university when they may have been put off by the notion of crushing debt. The second is that it provides a more reliable income stream for the Treasury and universities than the current system; currently, lots of people never pay off their student loan in full, and quite a few barely pay it off at all, so there is considerable government subsidy going on. Thirdly, it would also be egalitarian, with people who get the most value from their degree paying the most back into universities; surely it makes sense for those who benefit the most from university to pay the most back into it, does it not?

But I’d be keen to know; what are your thoughts on the current situation in higher education in the UK? What do you feel the future holds for the sector, and how do you feel the issues should be solved?

 

[Mick]

My experience as someone in my early 30s was that when I was going through school and college it was so heavily pushed that if you’re gifted you should go to university, and every other route was an afterthought. I think if the university sector shrunk a bit it wouldn’t be a disaster - the country needs more builders, plumbers, bricklayers etc (hope that doesn’t sound stereotyping), and the sheer number of uni courses available is mind blowing, some of them incredibly niche. And having a degree is in no means a guarantee of getting a good job anymore, and I think people are wising up to that.

In slightly related news - I paid off my student loan in full last week, no more graduate tax for me! But that was on the £3k tuition fees, I don’t see how anyone can realistically pay the £9k+ fees and ever expect to pay it off.

 

[NuttySquirrel]

I work in Professional Services at a university in the south west. I won't say which but it is a former polytechnic so it wouldn't be hard to work out given my location.

It's been an incredibly tough year for us, as it has for many institutions. Whilst in contrast to Cardiff we've managed to avoid big BBC headlines, there has been a significant restructuring exercise and a significant number of staff in Professional Services have taken voluntary redundancy. Conversations with individuals affected by compulsory redundancy are ongoing; this sadly includes several members of my team. I believe it's been kept out of the public eye as there haven't been any changes to academic services or course structures that might more directly impact students. Still it is going to be the case that on the administrative side we will have to do more with less going forwards to avoid impacting the student experience.

The main issue is that universities in this country are commercial businesses, yet rather idiosyncratically their revenues are fixed by the government, and they haven't been allowed to increase tuition fees in almost ten years. The paltry rise of £285 per student per year announced by Keir Starmer's government is unfortunately swallowed several times over by the increase in National Insurance for employers. So there are a very large number of courses that simply don't make a profit any more, because the cost of teaching a student isn't covered by the available revenue.

In recent years universities have been able to offset this by offering places to more international students who aren't subject to the UK government's cap, so a university could be receiving 25-33% more in tuition fees for an international student. Unfortunately though the previous goverment's immigration policies have made it impossible for certain international students to bring their families to the UK, EU students are no longer being enticed in with Erasmus grants, and some economic hardships in key markets such as Africa have made it less feasible for many students to come at all. I'm also sure that the economic situation in the UK and the increasingly vocal xenophobic attitudes are deterring international students.

Personally, I think the standard, typical 3-year undergraduate degree course is considerably less attractive to students now than it was ten years ago. The job market is more competitive than ever and students are realising that investing in a degree isn't necessarily going to land them a job at the end of it. Fortunately my institution offers some vocational degrees such as nursing, midwifery and radiography that come with NHS bursaries and have a high employability rate, which remain an attractive prospect to students, but these very hands-on courses are often some of the most expensive to teach. Ironically it is the arts and humanities subjects that tend to have a higher profit margin, but these are the ones that students are turning away from as not representing value for money.

I think institutions such as mine are going to have to become a lot more flexible in the types of courses they teach, embracing more vocational qualifications, online distance learning and modular teaching for professional employees which is typically funded by employers. We already have a successful degree apprenticeships programme which is growing and not reliant on funding from student finance; if this type of teaching could become more scalable I could see this really taking off.

What is also needed is direct funding from the government that doesn't have to come through the student's pocket. When I studied for my degree I paid just £1200 per year in tuition fees - the remaining cost of my course would have been covered by a central public grant. This dried up in 2012, making universities completely reliant on student fees and saddling graduates with thousands of pounds worth of debt. Frankly, it's a completely broken model - and something needs to change.

 

[Ash]

Id argue the problem isn’t so much the university’s as the world of work.

Unless you’re doing key/specialist subjects at a better russel group university what’s the point? You can learn online or through other means.

Anyone in white collar work since after 08 will tell you it’s been mostly stagnant inline with cost of living.

Unless you’re working in software, finance, law, architecture, medicine/pharma and at the top of end of the spectrum, in my opinion it’s not worth it.

And AI will do a good job of decimating the rest.

Get an apprenticeship instead.

 

[delta79]

This happened to colleges 5 years ago. Funding changes cause a shift in course type, and background services being trimmed down.
I was lucky to keep my job in the college sector, as the management offered early retirement to members of my business support service that covered the required cuts.

Now they are changing from courses to T level from C&G or BTec. Putting financial pressures on to the colleges.

 

[rob666]

Hmmm, doing my degree forty years ago, my own Polytechnic (as was) was close to the wall and closing courses.
Teacher training twenty years ago, my education provider, despite a long and distinguished period of quality education and training, was very close to the wall, and was forced into merger.

Not known higher education to be out of crisis in about half a century.

 

[Matt.GC]

If everyone and their dog can go to university, that arguably dilutes the value of degrees.

This has been happening for over 2 decades now, and the previous Labour government also have their finger prints all over this. A university education is expensive and difficult for the student, and expensive for the university. But the value has diminished by a great deal because;

Without music, we have no musicians. Without MFL, we lose crucial knowledge of other languages and cultures. Without arts subjects, we have no creativity. Without history, we lose vital knowledge of our ancestors and roots. You hear a lot of people wax lyrical about “Mickey Mouse degrees”, and how STEM subjects are the only worthwhile things to study at uni, and as a STEM student, I arguably have somewhat of a vested interest in agreeing with this rhetoric. However, I’m not going to. Social studies and the arts are still really, really important subjects that play huge roles in our society and culture, and I fear that the dilution of these may be hugely impactful in the years to come.

This is the perception. It's simply not true. You don't need a degree to be a musician, to know about history, to be an artist. It's always been this way, and there were plenty of good ones in these fields way before it became almost compulsory to become massively indebted.

You're creative or you aren't. You're a critical thinker or you aren't. University doesn't teach you these things at all, it allows you to conceptualise and prove you have these skills.

The scam is in believing what you've said here. This is perpetuated to keep bums on seats and it's grossly unfair on youngsters because many of their other options have been taken away. They're sold a lie that they don't have these skills without a degree.

I am a beneficiary of the single decent policy (yet still highly flawed!) to come out of the car crash Johnson government, the apprenticeship levy. The only thing I pay is my time (and a lot of it!). It costs my employer £22k plus 20% of my wages for study time. The government pays the rest. I messed around when I was young and have paid the price all my life, and I often feel guilty about the money being invested in me. Really relaxed entry criteria, I keep all the full-time salary I gained purely from experience, and they even chucked in level 2 maths for free because I failed it at GCSE.

Yet I look to my own kids and the grads that I employ, and I really feel sorry for them. Why is an organisation and the government putting so much money into a miserable middle aged jerk like me when I had my chances earlier in life and blew it, whilst these genuinely intelligent and decent youngsters have to jump through hoops to get a job earning a fraction of what I do?

The answer is the massive disconnect between the Department for Education, Department for Work and Pensions, industry, and University establishments. The government doesn't know what skills employers need, it doesn't have a decent workforce plan, employers take what they're given from the result, and universities have to straddle the lines. It's all broken.

It's interesting that my apprenticeship (the CMDA) is the second most popular chosen by employers themselves. Yet a business related degrees aren't anywhere near the top choices of students themselves. I do a job (which I mostly now hate) which is in high demand but no one wants to do it because of the ever present and enduring drawbacks. The ever present social stigma doesn't bother me like it used to and has changed very little. I might even write my dissertation about it actually. Yet a huge proportion of people now doing it left university with a completely unrelated degree.

I opened a brand new store in 2013 and took on a young lad fresh from finishing an environmental science degree. Over £30k in debt and head full of ideas about what he wanted to do. In November I was driving through the area and thought I'd pop back in that store (my proudest achievement, I won store of the year for it 11 years ago). Looked at my receipt when I got in the car, and his name was on it as the Store Manager. Very happy for him, as I saw him go through the motions of realising how much in debt he was and how much the world wasn't what he expected. Now he's settled and will be earning a decent salary.

We just shouldn't be in this predicament. It should start with employers and our education system should be fit for purpose. But it can't be until all the dots are joined up. University remains a major export for this country, yet government policies discourage foreign students. Employers are desperate for skills that people don't have. Students are desperate for jobs that don't exist. It doesn't give me much hope that the Department for Education themselves are desperate for teachers, yet can't pay them properly and makes them foot most of the bill for their own education! It's crackers! And universities are in chaos trying to keep the lights on shouldering the pressure of it all.

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

This has been happening for over 2 decades now, and the previous Labour government also have their finger prints all over this. A university education is expensive and difficult for the student, and expensive for the university. But the value has diminished by a great deal because;


This is the perception. It's simply not true. You don't need a degree to be a musician, to know about history, to be an artist. It's always been this way, and there were plenty of good ones in these fields way before it became almost compulsory to become massively indebted.

You're creative or you aren't. You're a critical thinker or you aren't. University doesn't teach you these things at all, it allows you to conceptualise and prove you have these skills.

The scam is in believing what you've said here. This is perpetuated to keep bums on seats and it's grossly unfair on youngsters because many of their other options have been taken away. They're sold a lie that they don't have these skills without a degree.

I am a beneficiary of the single decent policy (yet still highly flawed!) to come out of the car crash Johnson government, the apprenticeship levy. The only thing I pay is my time (and a lot of it!). It costs my employer £22k plus 20% of my wages for study time. The government pays the rest. I messed around when I was young and have paid the price all my life, and I often feel guilty about the money being invested in me. Really relaxed entry criteria, I keep all the full-time salary I gained purely from experience, and they even chucked in level 2 maths for free because I failed it at GCSE.

Yet I look to my own kids and the grads that I employ, and I really feel sorry for them. Why is an organisation and the government putting so much money into a miserable middle aged jerk like me when I had my chances earlier in life and blew it, whilst these genuinely intelligent and decent youngsters have to jump through hoops to get a job earning a fraction of what I do?

The answer is the massive disconnect between the Department for Education, Department for Work and Pensions, industry, and University establishments. The government doesn't know what skills employers need, it doesn't have a decent workforce plan, employers take what they're given from the result, and universities have to straddle the lines. It's all broken.

It's interesting that my apprenticeship (the CMDA) is the second most popular chosen by employers themselves. Yet a business related degrees aren't anywhere near the top choices of students themselves. I do a job (which I mostly now hate) which is in high demand but no one wants to do it because of the ever present and enduring drawbacks. The ever present social stigma doesn't bother me like it used to and has changed very little. I might even write my dissertation about it actually. Yet a huge proportion of people now doing it left university with a completely unrelated degree.

I opened a brand new store in 2013 and took on a young lad fresh from finishing an environmental science degree. Over £30k in debt and head full of ideas about what he wanted to do. In November I was driving through the area and thought I'd pop back in that store (my proudest achievement, I won store of the year for it 11 years ago). Looked at my receipt when I got in the car, and his name was on it as the Store Manager. Very happy for him, as I saw him go through the motions of realising how much in debt he was and how much the world wasn't what he expected. Now he's settled and will be earning a decent salary.

We just shouldn't be in this predicament. It should start with employers and our education system should be fit for purpose. But it can't be until all the dots are joined up. University remains a major export for this country, yet government policies discourage foreign students. Employers are desperate for skills that people don't have. Students are desperate for jobs that don't exist. It doesn't give me much hope that the Department for Education themselves are desperate for teachers, yet can't pay them properly and makes them foot most of the bill for their own education! It's crackers! And universities are in chaos trying to keep the lights on shouldering the pressure of it all.

I'm regrettably going to have to disagree with you on this one. I think you've got completely the wrong approach.

University isn't, and shouldn't be, about future employment prospects. It can be an additional benefit, but it was never the original intention of these institutions to give you better employment options. In the history of Universities this is a fairly recent and novel idea, pushed to the forefront when every single polytechnic training college could call itself a University and had to compete against the others for applicants.

University is about the expansion of knowledge, learning and research. It is about giving you the time and resources to discover new things, and attempt to progress humanity, purely for the love of doing so.

I also do not buy the massively indebted argument, at most it's a graduate tax. I'm still repaying my student loans, I will never pay off my student loans, but they never count against me. If I don't earn enough, no one comes chasing me. They will be written off when I reach 46. They do not impact my credit score, they do not affect my ability to secure other finance. It is not crippling. I pay a nominal amount out of my pay every month, but that's the bargain I struck.

We have a fundamental misunderstanding about what University is and what it should do for us, an issue I primarily put at the feet of Tony Blair. It was his ambition to have half of the country go to University, unfortunately he didn't want them to go for altruistic reasons of furthering a passion, or a love of learning. He wanted them to go to improve their employment prospects, a purely financial and capitalist endeavour. It's this disconnect that we need to address.

 

[Matt N]

There are a few interesting points to dissect here!

My experience as someone in my early 30s was that when I was going through school and college it was so heavily pushed that if you’re gifted you should go to university, and every other route was an afterthought. I think if the university sector shrunk a bit it wouldn’t be a disaster - the country needs more builders, plumbers, bricklayers etc (hope that doesn’t sound stereotyping), and the sheer number of uni courses available is mind blowing, some of them incredibly niche. And having a degree is in no means a guarantee of getting a good job anymore, and I think people are wising up to that.

In slightly related news - I paid off my student loan in full last week, no more graduate tax for me! But that was on the £3k tuition fees, I don’t see how anyone can realistically pay the £9k+ fees and ever expect to pay it off.

Despite what I said above, I actually do agree that university has perhaps been pushed too hard historically as a catch-all for employment prospects. We do have a shortage of trades in this country, and people are definitely pushed towards academia who might be better in a trade or other vocational profession.

With that being said, I don’t think we should push everyone into trades or vocations either. Some people don’t suit trades; I, for one, know I would be useless as a tradesperson, and am very glad I was able to take the academic path post-18 rather than train in something manual.

Id argue the problem isn’t so much the university’s as the world of work.

Unless you’re doing key/specialist subjects at a better russel group university what’s the point? You can learn online or through other means.

Anyone in white collar work since after 08 will tell you it’s been mostly stagnant inline with cost of living.

Unless you’re working in software, finance, law, architecture, medicine/pharma and at the top of end of the spectrum, in my opinion it’s not worth it.

And AI will do a good job of decimating the rest.

Get an apprenticeship instead.

You can learn things online, but I still think there are things a degree teaches you that can’t be taught online, in some subjects at least.

I’ll use my discipline (previously studied a BSc in Computer Science and currently studying an MSc in Data Science and Analytics) as an example. There are many boot camps and online courses claiming that they can “teach you how to code in 2 weeks”, “make you a Data Scientist in 1 month” or whatever. These teach you how to code, but I’d argue that they miss out on theoretical underpinnings and fundamentals that are important in making good quality software or good quality machine learning models. Your online course might teach you how to code in Python, or how to use Pandas and SciKit Learn, for example, but it probably won’t delve into the theoretical underpinnings of algorithms, data structures, computational complexity, machine learning and such. These theoretical underpinnings, while perhaps not immediately applicable on the face of it, are vital to learning the mindset and techniques required for these professions. The software will change, but the fundamentals will always remain the same, and I think it’s these fundamentals that a degree teaches you better than an online course. An online course teaches you the “how” in terms of how to use software, but the degree teaches you the “why” and how to actually pick the best solution for a given use case.

I’m not saying these things can’t be learned without a degree, and there certainly are many successful self-taught/bootcamp individuals in the programming/tech industry, but I think the degree makes it a lot easier to learn these things and makes the path ahead easier than if you don’t have a degree and use boot camps and such.

With that said, I get your point, and perhaps it is different for other subjects. Maybe the way forward is these degree apprenticeship type schemes, where students still get a degree to learn the fundamentals and the “why”, but manage to get on-the-job experience to better reinforce the “how”?

This is the perception. It's simply not true. You don't need a degree to be a musician, to know about history, to be an artist. It's always been this way, and there were plenty of good ones in these fields way before it became almost compulsory to become massively indebted.

You're creative or you aren't. You're a critical thinker or you aren't. University doesn't teach you these things at all, it allows you to conceptualise and prove you have these skills.

The scam is in believing what you've said here. This is perpetuated to keep bums on seats and it's grossly unfair on youngsters because many of their other options have been taken away. They're sold a lie that they don't have these skills without a degree.

While I agree that you don’t necessarily need a degree to be these things, I disagree with your notion that creativity, critical thinking and similar are entirely innate skills that can’t be taught at all.

While these skills may be innate to a point (someone who isn’t inherently creative is unlikely to become so as a result of, say, a fine art degree), what I think a university education can do is help people to develop the smaller nuggets of these qualities and help them expand upon and exploit the qualities they have. Someone might have glimmers of creativity at a lower educational level, and their art degree might help them to unlock and exploit this and grow their creativity even further. Someone might have glimmers of critical thinking skill that their history or English degree might help them develop. I agree that these skills can be developed without a degree, but I do think the degree might be one of the easier ways to help people develop them.

I do believe that a university education teaches valuable transferable skills, and I feel that the different learning style compared to GCSEs and A Levels is a benefit. Where you’re made to be a bit of a regurgitating sheep at lower levels of education (GCSE in particular relies heavily on memorisation over application and nuanced perspectives, I would argue, even in ostensibly open-ended subjects like English), university teaches you that there is more than one perspective, and that one solution might not work in every context. It teaches you that there is a lot of grey rather than everything being black and white, and that what might work in one case doesn’t necessarily work in another. I will bang the drum for universities teaching critical thinking and the ability to develop a nuanced perspective, as I feel that my university education has personally taught me these things in a way that I hadn’t learnt them before. Rightly or wrongly, I do legitimately feel that my university education has been the making of me as a critical thinker, and has strongly enhanced my ability to weigh up pros and cons and come to a nuanced perspective.

And as @GooseOnTheLoose has said, I feel that going to university for the pure love of an academic subject has been lost as a perspective. Academia is a legitimate career path in itself, and I ascertain that it can be quite a rewarding one if you have the right mindset!

 

[pluk]

In the mid 90s when I was finishing college, university was for the brightest and best. Academically that was not me! A few years later and university apparently was for everyone regardless of skills or ability. I've got no idea why that became the case, but it seems wasteful of both the countries resources and the individuals time. Some contraction in this area doesn't seem to necessarily be a bad thing to me, I'd much rather wider options were available and mote relevant to future employment when my own child gets to school leaving age.

 

[Bert2theSpark]

I have a lot of really intense emotions around this subject at the moment. I'm in my third year of University currently and will be the first person in my family (including wider family) to obtain an undergraduate degree and likely the only one to obtain a STEM degree. My time at University has developed me as a person so much, but I believe that's largely due to the environment that I've been placed in rather than the subject content itself. I work (and volunteer) with my Students' Union and have become a prominent face within. They're currently opening their full-time officer elections, and I've been marked as the prime candidate to run as a Student Officer, after a very successful joke campaign last year.

However, the University is in a right state currently, I've watched the current Student Officers become a front face for the ever-increasing dysfunction and decay of the University. Multiple student housing blocks are out of action, as well as the media building, the biggest conference hall on-campus and most recently our smaller nightclub venue within the Students' Union. Whilst I think Student Officer would be a brilliant experience for me, and I would likely pull a very good campaign at the very least, I just don't want it. I won't be the face of decline.

I've also considered taking a Masters at University. The first course I was interested in was directly related to my current degree, within the same department. However, during my second-year the course was pulled very abruptly by the marketing department, as the course wasn't driving enough interest for them. The academics running the course were only informed this course was cut after the decision from marketing which has contributed to low staff morale, with many of them leaving for other (better) Universities where they can continue their research and teaching. I've even had offers to join them if I wanted to at their new Universities (Russell Group). However, I've met many post-graduate students during my current undergraduate journey has just made me realise I don't want to be in the academic system forever, and it's just as brutal as any other industry. But you're expected to follow it regardless because you somehow have the passion for it.

The second Masters I considered was more vocational and is still a relatively new course from the University, a different Faculty. So I signed up for the post-graduate notifications, like the first, but I recently had an email saying "We're potentially cutting this course", which was apparently sent in mistake, but I don't entirely believe that because there's some pretty severe cuts to courses at the moment, and a course with high costs and a small cohort is a pretty easy course for them to cut.

I've applied for summer jobs and now post-graduation jobs in retail and hospitality and I have been rejected on numerous occasions, not because I'm not qualified but because their finances are really tight and they need the work ASAP. So I can't really starting applied to jobs at the very least until I've finished University. I'm lucky to have a part-time job with my SU currently and it suppliments my maintenance loan.

With the SU I can easily fit my shifts around lectures and extra-cirricular activites and there's a limit on how much I can work so it won't disrupt my studies. However most students are not as fortuantate as this and are having to take jobs whenever they can just to support themselves living at Uni, even if that means skipping lectures to fit the hiring managers rota. A lot of my colleagues are dependent on their income from their job to help pay for their Uni costs, to the dissatisfaction of my managers because it's always been complimentary income. They're facing increasing demand for more and more shifts but are having to cut down on events because there isn't the appitite for night-time events like there has been historically. Yet my lecturers seem to think that the reason students don't attend lectures is because they keep partying too much. There really is an opportunity cost assosciated with University nowadays, yet when I was in college I was pressured into not taking a gap year or anything from both the college and my family around me.

Graduate jobs are very hard to comeby. I got rejected from one today, even though my experience and degree meet the qualifications for the role. The ratio of students to graduate jobs is estimated to be around 50/1, so hiring managers can be as picky as they like when they're overwhelmed with candidates. It's likely there were a lot of Masters or mature students who also applied, and why bother taking on an Undergraduate when you can have someone with even more experience. This is not something unique to my field, subjects like Law and Biochemistry/Biomedicine are extremely competitive too, with even Medical students facing issue when it comes to the competition for posts within residency. We all know there is a large gap in the employment market for these roles, but funding for the training needed for these careers after the degree qualification just isn't there.

I remember taking careers quizzes in high school, we'd all take these assessments and get careers like Engineer, Scientist, Law, Programmer or Healthcare and then pick on the kids who got blue-collar work like Plumber. I feel deeply bad for picking on these children, and it just goes to show how deeply ingrained this tradjectory is in everyone's mind, so I've developed a neutral stance and removed my stigma around completing blue-collar work (although that still has it's flaws). There's also absolutely no discussion of what lifestyle you'd want to live in the future, only maximising the income statistics or taking careers because "I care for people". No discussion about social life, health implications or even the moral implications of taking that line of work. At least with working in retail or hospitality I can remove myself from the job when I'm not on the clock.

I've loved my time at University, I've massively grown as a person and really have learnt an awful lot to think about beyond how it can be applied within a career setting. This experience has transformed me, but if I was to get asked about whether going to University is a good option at the moment after full-time education. I'd say no, at the very least hold of on a gap-year (or two or three) and get some experience in a career and a lifestyle that you want to live first and then tackle a degree and the university experience when you feel the need to. I've met quite a few students along my time at University who worked in a lab or a related-work setting before their degree and they have so much more assurance with their careers. Many universites offer courses part-time or online like the Open University, but if you're going to go and live their full-time, make the most of extra-cirricular clubs and societies and save up a bit before Uni. Take these courses because you're intrinsically motivated to do so, and not just "because it'll make me richer".

A really long and personal post, which is unusual for me to share on this forum in particular. I'm confident that I'll be fine in the long-run because I always have initative and I am usually recognised for it. Maybe I'll go back for postgraduate one-day, but for now I just kind of want to take a job where I can at least develop my career skills and have a decent work-life balance where I can do some volunteering, sports and regular exercise. I'll find a path that I'm satisified with and whatever opportunity is next will happen, it's just not apparent to me right now.

 

[GaryH]

I couldn’t wait to leave school back the 90s. Got my GCSEs and’s left as quickly as possible.

At the time a lot of companies were offering apprenticeships and went to takes look at a few.

However I fancied doing something computer and business related so I went to college where I did a BTEC ND and then a HND. I really enjoyed the hearing experience and being treated like a grown up so I then went to uni to do a degree and then a masters. I would have liked to have done a PHd but time just doesn’t allow anymore.

I did uni because I enjoyed it. There wasn’t the issue of huge fees or course costs back then. Most of the companies which were offering apprenticeships closed down.

However I see a u turn in the future with AI coming in, many uni courses will find less people wanting to study them, eg data analytics and I think the demand for apprenticeships will go up as people want to do trades again, electricians, plumbers etc. jobs which can’t be done by AI.

I know what I say doesn’t offer any answers to the current situation, but I do have sympathy for the students having to rack up huge amounts of debt just to learn speeding in college. Perhaps more on the job learning is the way to go in the future?

 

[Matt N]

Interestingly, I wonder if generative AI, while clearly a gamechanger, is perhaps overhyped in terms of job losses it will supposedly cause among white-collar professions.

In my field of specialism, for example (data science/analytics), the broad consensus from having read around a bit and listened to experts appears to be that AI will compliment data scientists rather than replace them entirely. It might remove some of the laborious grunt work from the job and potentially alter the skillset that the role requires somewhat, but a lot of the skills and decisions will still need a human.

And besides, the AI needs people to code and develop it to progress! We may eventually reach a point where AI can code and control itself for all I know, but I think that's years away if it ever happens, and if that ever happens (that's a very big if, in my opinion), I think we have far worse things to fear than data scientists being displaced from jobs!

Perhaps I'm just desperately trying to convince myself that I haven't made a terrible mistake specialising in data science and that I won't be rendered redundant by AI within a few short years and need to retrain, but from everything I've read, a common consensus among many experts seems to be that AI will complement many jobs rather than replace them entirely.

 

[John_P]

Sadly as others have said the current train of thought seems to be a degree is worthless unless it somehow improves your earning potential.

Your sort of stuck as 18-21 is probably the best time to go to university, remaining in education, less likely to have major commitments getting in your way etc.

However, much like with options at the end of year 9 for specific GCSEs, and even A-levels subjects post 16 (though this was slightly expanded after I went) your asking kids to pick a degree course they think they want to base a career around.

I'd barely given up wanting to play football as a career by then, despite the fact I wasn't even any good.

I did an English Literature degree course and really enjoyed it, however even at that point there's no obvious career path to follow without doing more training or a masters etc. I was quite happy to leave education after my degree.

But I knew loads who did the 4 year teaching degree course that seemed the most strenuous course as you'd spend your time in seminars or bussed off to schools to teach. So many people I knew either left that course, or completed it and didn't go into teaching. Again these were people who thought at 17/18 teaching was for them only to realise it wasn't within 5 years.

 

[Matt N]

Sadly as others have said the current train of thought seems to be a degree is worthless unless it somehow improves your earning potential.

Your sort of stuck as 18-21 is probably the best time to go to university, remaining in education, less likely to have major commitments getting in your way etc.

However, much like with options at the end of year 9 for specific GCSEs, and even A-levels subjects post 16 (though this was slightly expanded after I went) your asking kids to pick a degree course they think they want to base a career around.

I'd barely given up wanting to play football as a career by then, despite the fact I wasn't even any good.

I did an English Literature degree course and really enjoyed it, however even at that point there's no obvious career path to follow without doing more training or a masters etc. I was quite happy to leave education after my degree.

But I knew loads who did the 4 year teaching degree course that seemed the most strenuous course as you'd spend your time in seminars or bussed off to schools to teach. So many people I knew either left that course, or completed it and didn't go into teaching. Again these were people who thought at 17/18 teaching was for them only to realise it wasn't within 5 years.

This is an interesting point. We repeatedly pigeon-hole teenagers and young adults into specialising at a very young age… but perhaps that’s not the best way?

When I was 14 and picking my GCSE options, I still wanted to be a rollercoaster designer! I’d hardly given that dream up when picking my A Levels, and even when picking post-18 options, I had no real idea of what I wanted to do with my life, if we’re being completely honest. When I was at the start of Year 13, I had practically no clue beyond a few very vague ideas, and my plans for after A Levels fell into place quite rapidly in October/November of Year 13, if I’m remembering rightly.

I pretty much fell into a Computer Science degree by virtue of it being my best A Level subject, and at the time, I had incredibly vague ideas of maybe wanting to go into cybersecurity. I unsuccessfully applied for a degree apprenticeship in this field, in fact, and some of the degrees I looked at were in Cyber Security instead of Computer Science. But when I ultimately started my CS degree, I thanked my lucky stars that I went for a broader degree instead of pigeon holing myself into cybersecurity, because I realised that I definitely didn’t want to do cybersecurity when I started my degree! I eventually stumbled upon data analytics and AI modules, found them really interesting, and I now find myself doing an MSc in Data Science and Analytics, which I definitely wouldn’t have expected at 18…

Before I ramble on, my point is that I think few actually know what they want to do at 18, and perhaps we do push teenagers and young adults to heavily specialise too early. Maybe the way forward would be to encourage young people to do a gap year or a couple and “find themselves” a little through working and/or travel and then maybe head back to uni when they have a better idea of what they actually want to do with their life?

 

[Bert2theSpark]

I think with University, way more people need to take a combination of a gap year, placement year, international year and/or getting involved with clubs and societies. The main question when going to University needs to be what sort of lifestyle do you want to live, and what it will take to get there. Not schools going “Here you go, you should do this next” and then having the added pressure from family and friend groups.

University is all about critical thinking, but it’s become so culturally ingrained, there is a clear lack of critical thinking from students. Mostly because their brains are still developing.

Looking at University, getting the degree alone is not worth it, you need to develop holistically. Then you will really make the most of University.

 

[Mick]

A bit more on me, I was naturally very good at school & college and it was seen as inevitable that I attended university - I remember one careers meeting when I said I was unsure if it was right for me (none of my family had been and I was never the most outgoing of people) and was almost told ‘are you crazy, you have to go’.

I went there, took maths as I had no idea what I wanted to do as career but thought it would involve numbers as it was my strongest subject, but by about halfway through year two I’d completely hit my learning ceiling and coasted my way to a 2:2.

Ended up getting a job in accounting, got a professional qualification etc and until now have had a good career path that has allowed me to buy a house as a single man, go on holidays etc so I can’t complain. But my brother chose not to go to university, did an accounting apprenticeship after leaving college and now has a very similar sort of job (and life) to me. It shows there’s different ways of getting through life, and looking back on it now I think his route would’ve suited me more, but I was never really told it was an option by people, and when you’re 16-18 you rely a lot on the advice of others.

 

[Matt.GC]

I'm regrettably going to have to disagree with you on this one. I think you've got completely the wrong approach.

University isn't, and shouldn't be, about future employment prospects. It can be an additional benefit, but it was never the original intention of these institutions to give you better employment options. In the history of Universities this is a fairly recent and novel idea, pushed to the forefront when every single polytechnic training college could call itself a University and had to compete against the others for applicants.

University is about the expansion of knowledge, learning and research. It is about giving you the time and resources to discover new things, and attempt to progress humanity, purely for the love of doing so.

What it should be and what it currently is are too entirely different things.

I bet you the vast majority of people don't pursue further study for the joy of knowledge expansion like you and I. I understand that I'm likely to still be stuck in the same dead end job at the end of it as the mortgage still needs to be paid somehow. I do it because I bloody love it.

I'd wager that most do it because they're told that that's where the big bucks are. And now it's reaching a stage where even poorly paid entry level jobs require a degree. And if the employee does too well, they'll be punished by having to pay back their loan.

While I agree that you don’t necessarily need a degree to be these things, I disagree with your notion that creativity, critical thinking and similar are entirely innate skills that can’t be taught at all.

While these skills may be innate to a point (someone who isn’t inherently creative is unlikely to become so as a result of, say, a fine art degree), what I think a university education can do is help people to develop the smaller nuggets of these qualities and help them expand upon and exploit the qualities they have. Someone might have glimmers of creativity at a lower educational level, and their art degree might help them to unlock and exploit this and grow their creativity even further. Someone might have glimmers of critical thinking skill that their history or English degree might help them develop. I agree that these skills can be developed without a degree, but I do think the degree might be one of the easier ways to help people develop them.

I do believe that a university education teaches valuable transferable skills, and I feel that the different learning style compared to GCSEs and A Levels is a benefit. Where you’re made to be a bit of a regurgitating sheep at lower levels of education (GCSE in particular relies heavily on memorisation over application and nuanced perspectives, I would argue, even in ostensibly open-ended subjects like English), university teaches you that there is more than one perspective, and that one solution might not work in every context. It teaches you that there is a lot of grey rather than everything being black and white, and that what might work in one case doesn’t necessarily work in another. I will bang the drum for universities teaching critical thinking and the ability to develop a nuanced perspective, as I feel that my university education has personally taught me these things in a way that I hadn’t learnt them before. Rightly or wrongly, I do legitimately feel that my university education has been the making of me as a critical thinker, and has strongly enhanced my ability to weigh up pros and cons and come to a nuanced perspective.

And as @GooseOnTheLoose has said, I feel that going to university for the pure love of an academic subject has been lost as a perspective. Academia is a legitimate career path in itself, and I ascertain that it can be quite a rewarding one if you have the right mindset!

I'm not at all saying that they are entirely innate skills. Just that they mostly are, and university nurtures and develops them.

You're good at maths Matt. I never ever will be. You can't teach me because my brain doesn't work that way. Point proven when I limped over the line to achieve level 2 maths last year to stay on my apprenticeship with my teenage boys laughing over my shoulder that they're more advanced than their old man. I'm likely in the minority on this forum that couldn't pass GCSE maths tomorrow.

But I have loads of (mainly useless and redundant) skills and knowledge that others don't have. And studying for a degree is bringing that out. And that's what it should be about. Proof that I'm not the idiot the system has always pigeon holed me to be.

We were told at the beginning of this year that all this "critical thinking" malarkey was "hard". I have the greatest respect for others in my cohort, but as an argumentative bastard I find it bloody easy. No qualifications. Never heard of a probability tree until 2 years ago. My grammar and spelling are terrible. But I get loads of marks for researching and making the case. Others struggle and that's fine. Some have some things, some don't.

There are things in life that education cannot teach you. There are things in academia that life can't teach you. Neither are a silver bullet, and that's what worries me so much about that whole debate.

This brings us back to apprenticeships. They always worked before, and should work now. For the life of me I don't understand why it has to be leave school and get a Joe job Vs go to uni and a slightly better paying Joe job.

University should be about conceptualisation and broadening knowledge through research. It's almost mandating it, forcing an unsustainable volume of youngsters through skint establishments that I have a problem with. We're keeping young people in university to avoid having to give them jobs and prospects we've taken away from them. They leave without the skills the economy needs, universities are bankrupting themselves educating them all, and no one seems to win out of all this?

 

[Matt N]

A bit more on me, I was naturally very good at school & college and it was seen as inevitable that I attended university - I remember one careers meeting when I said I was unsure if it was right for me (none of my family had been and I was never the most outgoing of people) and was almost told ‘are you crazy, you have to go’.

I went there, took maths as I had no idea what I wanted to do as career but thought it would involve numbers as it was my strongest subject, but by about halfway through year two I’d completely hit my learning ceiling and coasted my way to a 2:2.

Ended up getting a job in accounting, got a professional qualification etc and until now have had a good career path that has allowed me to buy a house as a single man, go on holidays etc so I can’t complain. But my brother chose not to go to university, did an accounting apprenticeship after leaving college and now has a very similar sort of job (and life) to me. It shows there’s different ways of getting through life, and looking back on it now I think his route would’ve suited me more, but I was never really told it was an option by people, and when you’re 16-18 you rely a lot on the advice of others.

Similarly to you @Mick, I too had lots of conversations with teachers and such about university, and it was always treated as the default that I would go. When I expressed any hint of potentially doing something like an apprenticeship, I always got the “Come on, now. You’re a clever boy; don’t sell yourself short!” spiel read to me. I got similar spiels read to me when I chose to go to a not overly prestigious ex-polytechnic university instead of an RG, but I did ultimately end up not listening to these ones as I felt that I needed a smaller, more palatable step up in terms of environment change that a bigger uni wouldn’t have offered (I did ultimately end up moving to an RG for postgrad, but that’s besides the point).

Unlike you, though, I am thoroughly glad I went for the university path. While it definitely took me some mistakes and a considerable learning curve to settle into the uni way (I failed and resat my first Year 1 assignment), I ultimately graduated with a first class degree and thoroughly enjoyed my undergraduate experience, all things considered, so much so that I voluntarily chose to put myself through another year doing postgrad at a different institution (which I’m also thoroughly enjoying so far)!

But I saw so many people for whom university definitely wasn’t for them, and and I’d argue that this is a worse problem at the less academically “prestigious” universities. In the likes of Oxbridge and the more prestigious RG unis (e.g. the London cluster of Imperial/LSE/UCL/KCL), you have to have a damn high desire to be there to get in, what with the universal As and A*s required for entry and the internal entry tests and interviews often conducted. Even some of the “less prestigious” RG unis still have fairly high entry tariffs, interviews and such to get in. But at the ex-polytechnic universities, these often don’t exist; my undergraduate university, University of Gloucestershire, required BBC to get onto Computer Science and gave me an unconditional offer without any kind of interview (this tariff has since decreased further to BCC), and I know that some other unis I looked at like Cardiff Met only required something like CC at A Level and also gave me an unconditional offer without any interview. This, I feel, means that the less academically prestigious universities like these ex-polytechnics will attract people for whom uni perhaps isn’t really the best option, those who shrug their shoulders and go to uni as the default “next step” without really knowing what they want to do with their degree.

This leads to another issue, I feel; uni has also developed somewhat of a reputation among UK students for being a massive party, and people go wanting to seek a 3 year long party lifestyle without really caring about the academics or long-term picture. Rightly or wrongly, I personally largely steered clear of the alcohol and debauchery end of undergraduate university, being the sort to largely keep my head down and study rather than go wild, but I know I was in the minority. At undergrad, I knew many, many people in first year who effectively treated the University of Gloucestershire like a 3 year pub crawl and/or orgy with constant drinking and casual sex and were largely ambivalent at best about academics. In first year, there was lots of chat about “getting p***ed” and “sh*gging tons of girls” (as this was CS, the student base was largely male!), but not too much interest in academics outside of the smaller crowd of more academic individuals who I socialised with. By second year, these individuals largely disappeared, and it was only our smaller crowd of more academic individuals left. By the end, there were only about 10-15 of us from across all three computing courses (Computer Science, Cyber Security and Cyber Forensics) who actually graduated when there were possibly nearly 100 people at the start.

I was told a rather eye-opening stat by a lecturer at the uni towards the end of my time there; in the department, something like 51% of people who joined in first year dropped out before second year. I can’t remember if 51% was the retention rate or the dropout rate, but either way, it paints a sordid picture of around half of students who join in first year not making it to second year. This, in my opinion, definitely alludes to a big wider problem with sending people to uni who really aren’t suited to it.

 

[rob666]

Schools have always used university acceptances as the benchmark for success, they need to change the measure...maybe employment levels after five/ten years.
One third (or more) of all undergraduates are mature students, outside the 18 to 21 range.
You can always return to education later, and not do it all in one chunk.
And you can do it for a minimum cost through modular systems, distance learning, or even the good old Open University, for about a tenth of the overall cost of traditional methods, while still earning.

That's what I did for my teaching certificate.
...then lasted half a term in real teaching.
The old job was less effort and hours for more money, with 90% less needless administration.
And I was the only one with a degree in that job!

I'm now an overqualified part time gardener, with no relevant qualifications.

I do Spearman's rank correlation coefficients to work out why the weeds are coming up early.