The Student Room Group

Have degrees become too common?

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Original post by Josb
Because, under the current system, universities are encouraged to increase their enrollment -- especially through cheap degrees such as media studies, since they will get more money. They don't really care whether their alumni will pay back or not since they repay their loans to the government.
If you say that universities will receive receive their alumni's repayments directly, they will drop all their useless courses.


Well, that doesn't really explain what I was questioning, which is the heightened floor salary for repayment, but taking what you've said as it is I think there are some problems.

What you are proposing, one way or another, essentially casts the universities as creditors themselves -- unless you intend for them to be paid twice. I don't see them just going along with this, and I don't think you can force them into it. They can simply refuse to take students from whom no payment is forthcoming at the time.
Reply 121
Original post by jelly1000
Oh I didn't mean people should be stopped from studying but regardless competition is a bad thing.


There are pros and cons about competition, but I think that actually doesn't really matter for this discussion on whether degrees are too common. Take your example. You say a 100 people are competing with you for an internship. That is tough and I understand that you would find it daunting. But if all those 100 are capable, well, then they all deserve to be there, competing for that internship. If some of them are not capable, well then they are not really competing anyway. They will not get the internship and are just there to make up the numbers, and unless they were misled (by universities or advisers) that is their own fault. Either way, it's not the degrees that are at fault - the students who did well obviously deserved to study for the degree, and the students who didn't do well are not really competing with you so it doesn't matter that they also studied it. The problem in this case is the number of jobs, which is a completely different topic.

For the employer, the competition is actually very good - because they can pick a very capable person with a very good personality.
(edited 7 years ago)
Reply 122
Original post by TimmonaPortella
Well, that doesn't really explain what I was questioning, which is the heightened floor salary for repayment, but taking what you've said as it is I think there are some problems.

What you are proposing, one way or another, essentially casts the universities as creditors themselves -- unless you intend for them to be paid twice. I don't see them just going along with this, and I don't think you can force them into it. They can simply refuse to take students from whom no payment is forthcoming at the time.

Because I agree with you on the repayment limit.


We could imagine a system where the Government would allocate funding according to the repayments of universities' graduates. So universities wouldn't have to bother with credit controlling, but would still have to worry a lot about the employment prospects of their graduates.
There would be a long transitional period - of at least twenty years - during which the government would allocate an increasing share of funding according to universities' performance on the job market.
Im not entirely convinced that having more people with degrees makes things worse (to anyone but individual applicants)

Lets say you cut the number of people with degrees in half. If those people cut are not good candidates for a job they still would be unemployed or in non grad roles anyway. Since the same number of jobs are there the best candidates will be competing with the best candidates, and while graduate unemployment would be lower, surely unemployment of young would be the same.

Now if some of those cutted are good, competitive people, then you've just screwed someone out of an opportunity for no reason other than to make it more likely for the other set of people to get jobs.

In that case I guess every young person who is not me that is getting a degree in a remotely related field to the one I am planning to is one person to many! :biggrin:

Or did I miss the point somewhere.

Besides I'm not inclined to agree with the OP because this would really not be great for me (from what I can tell) because I'm not rich.
:/
Original post by Josb
Because I agree with you on the repayment limit.


We could imagine a system where the Government would allocate funding according to the repayments of universities' graduates. So universities wouldn't have to bother with credit controlling, but would still have to worry a lot about the employment prospects of their graduates.
There would be a long transitional period - of at least twenty years - during which the government would allocate an increasing share of funding according to universities' performance on the job market.


We could. I wonder if that wouldn't entrench the current leading universities in their positions to an undesirable extent, since they would be constantly judged on what they did 20 years ago.

I wonder whether setting entry requirements, perhaps in terms of UCAS points, on the student loans process wouldn't achieve the same effect. I say that because, once you depart from specialised courses at top universities, it's really people's abilities that determine their chances of getting onto grad schemes etc, and you can get something of an indication of that at A level. It's a crude mechanism, but no cruder than that which most universities can feasibly employ in their admissions processes anyway.
Original post by tavtavtav
Lets say you cut the number of people with degrees in half. If those people cut are not good candidates for a job they still would be unemployed or in non grad roles anyway.


Perhaps, but at least we haven't pissed a pile of taxpayer's money up the wall in getting them there.

Now if some of those cutted are good, competitive people, then you've just screwed someone out of an opportunity for no reason other than to make it more likely for the other set of people to get jobs.


Whether you've 'screwed' anyone depends on how you do it, of course.

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