British university degrees

[adams house cat]

I was speaking to a lady of about 40 the other day. She is from Buxton and took a degree in history from Aberdeen University. She was telling me that university degrees apart from a very few institutions are now worth much less than they used to be.

She said that there used to be polytechnics and universities and, while polys were good, a "proper" university degree carried more clout. She blames this degree inflation, her term, on the granting of university status to the polytechnics. According to her any half-arsed tech can now call itself a university can now call itself a university and grant degrees in paper hanging or needlework or some such.

I really don't have a dog in this fight and I don't know much about it. My university days are long behind me. But it got me curious. What y'all think?

[Lang Spoon]

I think there has to be grade inflation if you want more than 20% or so of your population to have 3rd level qualifications. Not sure my Russell Group “Ancient Scottish” (like Aberdeen) degree was any better than the Pol science qualification I could have got across town at 60s red brick former tech Strathclyde Uni but. And they have My Man Prof John Curtice on the staff.

Some of the post ‘92 institutions do seem a bit pony though, University of west of scotland seems more than a bit shit. I’ve no idea about England really.

[Lang Spoon]

For sciences and informatics DIT in Dublin would probably piss over the quality of teaching in Trinity College as well.

[Amor de Cosmos]

There's certainly grade inflation for a number of reasons, or there is here in Canada. There's also increasing homogeneity. For example in the 1950s England (not the UK) had over 200 art schools. Now most, if not all, have been either been amalgamated into universities or closed entirely. This academization of occupations that are in no sense academic serves only administrators and politicians.

[Benjm]

That sounds like standard things were better in my day stuff (the OP). The new universities still granted degrees when they were polytechnics. I'm the best part of ten years older than ahc's acquaintance and it wasn't the case when I graduated that recruiters, or people in general, fainted due to overexcitement at meeting someone with 'a university degree'.

An individual with a solid degree from an institution with a good reputation isn't going to be personally disadvantaged by the increase in numbers of people doing supposedly inferior degrees or need to feel threatened by it. If anything, alumni of better known colleges probably get a boost as recruiters resort to preconception and prejudice to make the task of assessing educational merit more manageable.

Edit: My reading of the tone of the complaint was that ahc's acquaintance felt that her own degree had been devalued by the expansion of higher education. This I am sceptical about. There are very valid concerns that some degrees offered do not provide good value for the students taking them.

[Fussbudget]

I don't have any opinion on whether degrees from British universities were better in the olden days or whatever; I do find it extremely depressing however that every time this discussion comes up, the value of a degree seems to be judged only by how much it will impress potential employers and how easy it will make it to get a job, as if that's the only point of education.

A lot of ex-polys score as highly as Russell Group unis on teaching standards, by the way.

[ursus arctos]

Brava!

[Hot Pepsi]

The last three posts, at least, are correct.

We also have a lot more institutions calling themselves universities than we used and a lot of colleges and universities that might be a bit sketchy.

But rather than worrying that the cache of my degree I’d be more concerned that students at non-competitive universities - especially for profit ones - aren’t getting a good education for their money.

Part of the problem may be that so many students are not, for lack of a better term, well-informed consumers. They frequently don’t understand what it is they’re really signing-up for when go to college and are therefore disappointed with the classes and/or their job prospects when they get out.

As somebody wise said, it’s not as important where you go to college as how you go to college. But the institutions themselves aren’t going to tell you that in the brochure.

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

I don't have any opinion on whether degrees from British universities were better in the olden days or whatever; I do find it extremely depressing however that every time this discussion comes up, the value of a degree seems to be judged only by how much it will impress potential employers and how easy it will make it to get a job, as if that's the only point of education.

A lot of ex-polys score as highly as Russell Group unis on teaching standards, by the way.

Since we've been teaching people to read, we've seen literacy inflation where employers are no longer that impressed that someone can read or write, but instead ask to see other skills. IMO the value of being able to read has gone down.

It feels like a wildly obvious point that the expansion of higher education leads to "a degree" no longer being a passport into what you'd normally have described as "graduate jobs". That doesn't mean that the value has gone down, more that it's no longer an easy discriminant for recruiters.

Equally, what's true is that's how university education is (presumably still) sold to teenagers and that leads to a sense of failure and disappointment when people graduate and have to spend a large part of their twenties in entry-level positions, when they could have spent three years doing something they'd enjoy more and would have been more useful to them long term.

[Benjm]

The narrowing down of education's value to its effect on employability is directly linked to the levels of debt that students now have to take on. Education for education's sake thus becomes the preserve of the well off. Increased competition for graduate level jobs increases both the pressure to make a return on the investment and the risk of not doing so, even if the game were not rigged in ways that might not be readily apparent to someone before they commit to the outlay. Perversely, sections of the upper classes have traditionally had a culture of imperviousness to personal debt that would benefit any current student being told not to worry because they'll probably never have to pay it back.

Former polytechnics have almost certainly been better at teaching in a lot of cases because that is/was their main purpose. They weren't very well served by becoming universities because university rankings were considerably weighted towards research, which polys were far less involved in. Thus the great prize of becoming a university came with the drawback of being regarded as a second division one for the foreseeable future, regardless of the quality of teaching on offer. This was the case at the time; a quarter of a century of following a business model of trying to increase student numbers on limited resources will have thrown up its own set of problems.

[Paul S]

In today's news there are three universities on the brink of bankruptcy:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-new...-edge-13516261

https://inews.co.uk/news/education/u...iant-on-loans/

There is also bad news for students when they do graduate as firms aren't taking on as many graduates anymore. My organization only took on seven this year (over a hundred in previous years) but has almost 50 modern apprenticeships instead.

[Felicity, I guess so]

I'm really glad i went to a poly as I was hesitant and uncommitted about degree-level study in the 1st place and certainly couldn't have committed to a single subject, which most 'oldies' required (I had the grades, I should add).

I was also quite proud to work in a poly and even the 1st years of 'University status' still saw us teaching way more mature/non-standard students and it was a real sense of achievement for us getting someone with no, or 'poor',a-levels out the other end as a good graduate.

More recently we've stopped doing that properly, the league table mentality means we now require 'maths and english' qualifications from every entrant; A-level grades up in the Bs and Cs at least and the drive to serve the 'customer' with something they will give you good feedback on (another league table bullshit process) means 'killer modules' (ones that some students fail...) get dumped; 'skills' replace critical thinking; hardly any exams (not that they are proof of much in themselves but they do have a pedagogical role- not here any more). So I am deeply opposed to the vocationalisation and marketisation of education and our institution suffers from many of its effects, so I'm no longer proud to work here.

As Fussbudget said, we get better teaching ratings than some 'top' Unis; we were inspected (and held to national CNAA standards) as Polys long before they ever had to consider it and it turns my stomach that funds for 'widening participation' are spent and judged only on how many 'state school' entrants go to Oxbridge.

[Benjm]

Thank you, F,Igs. That is sobering reading. To hear the accounts of good people in public service who have put so much of themselves into their work is to feel anger at the long running and systematic assault that has been waged upon that ethos (Mrs Benjm has just passed 25 years in the NHS). Like a dope I used to think that governments didn't appreciate what they were losing, rather than them making a deliberate effort precisely because they did. I hope that none of my, never very well formed, thoughts have seemed to undervalue you and your colleagues, as this is the very opposite of what was intended.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Red Brick Universities and their heirs aren't devaluing Degrees. Post Graduate degrees are. When My mother attended University College Galway in the early sixties, there were 999 students, and they all knew each other. (Which is how I met our glorious president) Now there are 3,000 post graduate Students in NUIG, and the Post Graduate centre is massively bigger than the University was back then.

[Satchmo Distel]

Polytechnics widened diversity of courses and access, and were sometimes more plugged into the local economy, like community colleges in the US. Merging them with universities seemed to lessen that diversity.

The main problem when I was 16 to 18 was that we literally had nobody telling us what to aim for based on our O-Level results. We were entering a minefield blindfolded.

[sw2borshch]

ahc, was the lady you spoke with concerned that as the universities were effectively fishing in a smaller pool of applicants in her day and so fewer able people were getting the opportunity to get a degree there was then an increased chance that a degree holder may have been thicker then on average than now?

[blameless]

"University of the West of Scotland" is just Paisley Uni with a couple of small colleges glued on. It's more name inflation than degree inflation.

It's more than 20 years since I left university, but my alma mater was a Polytechnic when I started, and then became a University two-thirds of the way through my 1st year. The only difference that we could see was that the organisation could now publish its own degrees rather than have to ask the red-brick Uni two streets away to do it on our behalf.

Red Brick Universities and their heirs aren't devaluing Degrees. Post Graduate degrees are. When My mother attended University College Galway in the early sixties, there were 999 students, and they all knew each other. (Which is how I met our glorious president) Now there are 3,000 post graduate Students in NUIG, and the Post Graduate centre is massively bigger than the University was back then.

This, absolutely - my highest academic qualification is a 2:2 at BSc level, which wouldn't even get me a rejection letter from my current employer (let alone an interview or a job) if I were starting my career today.

This caused some embarrassment recently when I was hiring my deputy - our HR rep loudly declaring that "nobody with less than a Masters could do this deputy's job, and the successful candidate would ideally have a PhD", only to be gently informed by my boss that this would technically mean I wasn't even qualified to do my deputy's job, let alone mine... in the end, the person I hired does have a PhD, but it was their previous experience that swung the deal rather than which letters they have after their name.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Correction, there's 4,000 post graduates, (2/3 rds taught, 1/3 research) The thing is that there's 14,000 undergraduates. When you had a degree back in the sixties in Rural Ireland, you were basically trotting around town like Gandalf, some expert in some arcane knowledge (basically either a secondary school teacher, or maybe the odd civil engineer the vet, the doctor, and the solicitor or accountant, if your town stretched that far. Now a third level qualification is basically the old equivalent of the leaving cert.

The proportion of students in England that go on to third level is 50% and there are people complaining that it is too many. The proportion here is 60% and the consensus is that it is too low. It would be interesting to see how this issue is viewed across europe. There definitely isn't the attitude that the substantial increase in the number of people going to University, has reduced the absolute value of the degree. That rests on the assumption that in a country where a small group of people go to college, that those people are the intellectual elite, winnowed out by a process of strict intellectual meritocracy rather than simply the people who can afford to go to college. You're expanding the pool of people who can do a degree, not changing the composition.

The other thing is that you're going to struggle to convince anyone that a degree done before the widespread adoption of computers in the mid nineties, was better than one done afterwards. Because they're not remotely comparable. The mad thing is that the person making the point at the beginning is only 40, and things have changed relatively little in the UK since that person was in college in terms of numbers of people accessing third level.

[Hot Pepsi]

The narrowing down of education's value to its effect on employability is directly linked to the levels of debt that students now have to take on. Education for education's sake thus becomes the preserve of the well off. Increased competition for graduate level jobs increases both the pressure to make a return on the investment and the risk of not doing so, even if the game were not rigged in ways that might not be readily apparent to someone before they commit to the outlay. Perversely, sections of the upper classes have traditionally had a culture of imperviousness to personal debt that would benefit any current student being told not to worry because they'll probably never have to pay it back.

Former polytechnics have almost certainly been better at teaching in a lot of cases because that is/was their main purpose. They weren't very well served by becoming universities because university rankings were considerably weighted towards research, which polys were far less involved in. Thus the great prize of becoming a university came with the drawback of being regarded as a second division one for the foreseeable future, regardless of the quality of teaching on offer. This was the case at the time; a quarter of a century of following a business model of trying to increase student numbers on limited resources will have thrown up its own set of problems.

This is all true here too, I think.*

My parents taught at the university level and I have a number of friends who do and they all say they encounter a lot of students - though certainly these are all or maybe even the majority - who simply don't understand how education is supposed work. They think that once they've paid their money, they should be automatically entitled to the credential and that asking for any kind of effort is tantamount to an expensive restaurant asking you to wash your own dishes.

Reportedly, this sort of attitude shows up, with slight variations, at institutions all along the spectrum, from two-year community colleges to the Ivy League.

And it's often hard for the faculty to push-back. A lot of the faculty, especially at the not-so-prestigious end of things, are underpaid adjuncts or graduate assistants who might not get hired again if they get bad student evaluations, so they just take the path of least resistance with their students. At the other end, assistant professors at research universities know their chances of getting tenure are probably a lot more dependent on their research output than their teaching, so they don't want to put in the time and effort of pushing the students or putting up with the calls from their obnoxious helicopter parents.

And, of course, some tenured faculty think that teaching undergrads is completely beneath their dignity and don't want to deal with it all, so if they do somehow get roped into actually teaching an undergrad class, they don't as much, just give out As and B's and get on with their research.

That's not always true, of course. As with a lot of not-very-well-paid-for-what-it-requires jobs - art, firefighting, wildlife conservation, etc. - a lot of people in teaching, at any level, are in it because they're passionate about it and nothing else would make them happy and they will risk their job - Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society-style - and their sanity to "get through" to their students.


What Bruno said is largely right that we'd be better off if we dramatically upgraded the quality of education, especially in terms of critical thinking and horizon-broadening and all that - at the junior high and high school level instead of waiting until college/university to try to do that. Because by that point, the economic imperative is going to push most students into doing whatever is most likely to get them a job the day they graduate. They're no doubt ready to serve the interests of capital and, perhaps, pay their own rent, but their horizons are going to be pretty narrow.

I do know a lot of people - myself included - who managed to get into a decent career without ever getting a degree in something practical or especially relevant to their job, but it was dicey for a while there and I had a lot of luck in a few areas that many people can't count on. Besides, it appears to be getting harder and harder to do that. Usually it requires some further expenditure on another degree - law, business, journalism, medicine (of course), nursing - or at least some more certifications/qualifications, and a lot of people simply can't afford to do that when they're still paying off debt for their bachelor's degree.

My idea would be to have something maybe more like the O-level/A-level thing where students who absolutely didn't want to do university would start doing some kind of other training at 16, but that the university/college-bound people would spend three, rather than two, more years learning how to read, write, and think properly and then do a more specific degree at university/college which could take between three and six years depending on what it is.


* Although we also have something called a "liberal arts college" - institutions that only award four-year bachelors degrees or, at most, only offer a few graduate degrees. The US is lousy with them, actually - some are very prestigious and well-funded like Williams, Swarthmore, and Reed and others can barely keep the lights on. But my understanding is that these don't exist very much outside the US. I don't have a point to make about that other than that this is a major difference between US higher education and HE outside the US.

[tee rex]

"University of the West of Scotland" is just Paisley Uni with a couple of small colleges glued on. It's more name inflation than degree inflation.

As an ex-Brit I quite like the "who are you really?" guessing game when I come across tertiary institutions I hadn't previously heard of. The University of Stonehenge*, previously Swindon Tech, that kind of thing. We've just had a local example, Vic renaming itself University of Wellington, to distinguish it from dozens of other Victorias around the world. Australia's University of New England is a personal favourite: no need to clarify that one, at least not until after the international applicant's cash has been banked.

(*may not exist ... yet.)

[NickSTFU]

Since we've been teaching people to read, we've seen literacy inflation where employers are no longer that impressed that someone can read or write, but instead ask to see other skills. IMO the value of being able to read has gone down.

This is not strictly true. Most employers place great value on functional skills in English and maths.

In fact I went for a job a few years ago, but I didn't get an interview. I didn't have a GSCE grade C in English, despite having 2 degrees.

Also, in my current role, I get a lot of referrals from employers who want to develop their employees by getting them to take functional in skills English and maths.

Of course, functional skills are an integral part of apprenticeships. The new standards for functional skills are driven by employers. I haven't seen them yet, but by all accounts, spell check is out.

[BallochSonsFan]

I was speaking to a lady of about 40 the other day. She is from Buxton and took a degree in history from Aberdeen University. She was telling me that university degrees apart from a very few institutions are now worth much less than they used to be.

She said that there used to be polytechnics and universities and, while polys were good, a "proper" university degree carried more clout. She blames this degree inflation, her term, on the granting of university status to the polytechnics. According to her any half-arsed tech can now call itself a university can now call itself a university and grant degrees in paper hanging or needlework or some such.

I really don't have a dog in this fight and I don't know much about it. My university days are long behind me. But it got me curious. What y'all think?

Degrees have been devalued over the past 25 years.

I've got a BA in consumer protection law. My uni was an old polytechnic that had become a university to meet the political game of increasing access to degree education. It wasnt a great course. It's still a pretty poor uni and that's 17 years since I graduated. It's given me skills that I use in my job (not in the field I studied for) but the number of graduates who are in similar jobs to me suggests that my experience isnt an unusual one.

More graduates are going through university. The abundance of graduates with less than stellar degrees has devalued the graduate jobs market. We've invested time and money into the myth that university education should be accessible to everybody. From a financial and social viewpoint that's entirely right but from an academic I do wonder if we'd be better moving some of the more general arts degrees towards technical college courses? We've devalued colleges for years and it's no wonder that countries with strong technical colleges produce workers who have the skills and application that the workplace needs.

[Satchmo Distel]

Arts degrees are devalued by the number of people taking them without a clear idea of what they want to get out of them.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Arts degrees are devalued by the number of people taking them without a clear idea of what they want to get out of them.

But how does that differ from the past?

[Bored Of Education]

As someone who got their degree 6 years ago, can I just emphatically point out that degrees have not devalued at all? Having said this, there is an issue with degrees presently and that is that everything needs to be a degree. For instance, I went to college with a lot of people who were going off to do a midwifery and nursing degrees at normal universities. I want to study this a bit more but I think that there may be better value in having more vocational courses and qualifications at dedicated "Schools of...". I had a friend of mine who went to Uni with me who was doing nutritional science and there didn't seem much point in her being there as the cause was so structurally different and cross-over with any other courses was so minimal. Having said that, we were both mature students so maybe there is some benefit for students socially to be with others from other courses. Even though, mine is fairly 'soft' degree, there was a vocational element to it. As my Uni is an amalgam of the old Bath Teacher Training College, Bath College of Domestic Science (where Mary Berry studied, fact fans) and Bath Academy of Art. To be honest, it makes some sort of loose sense for those institutions to be on the same - much smaller than now - campus offering specialised courses of whatever length of time is needed or for the campus to house some sort of National School of Education (or be one of a regional network of Schools of Education if places demanded it). Of course, what has happened is that it has grown to become the second University in town offering more and more degrees, expanding the campus massively and attracting thousands more students.

I also don't believe that degrees should be judged as to whether they add some sort of economic potential value to the country's GDP (or whatever) or not. Personally, I would prefer to have the sort of vocational "Schools of...." whatever - Nursing, Midwifery, Teaching etc. - I mention above and then a separate strand where people take degrees where they partake in the softer disciplines of, for instance, History, Philosophy, Politics etc. The "Schools Of..." would still offer degree courses (or, perhaps, extensions of their vocational course where students can further develop the sort of reflective, critical, reviewing, researching and studying disciplines that you get at degree level) but the basis would be the vocational courses. I would also, obviously, make everything free. I think we should pay people to become the nurses, doctors, teachers of the future and, I also think that we should pay people to just think ( as in philosophy, history etc) with no concrete economic worth at the end of it. Indeed, I actually think it is a good bar of a society that we pay for people to think, create and advance that society beyond the economic or scientific. Obviously, all this may still bring calls of degrees being devalued or that the vocational courses (or the Schools of... that administer them) are second rate but I think that, rather than accepting such judgements and limiting academia accordingly, they should be challenged and a wide field of academia should be defended for the sake of all society.