All unis should be closed except Oxbridge, Imperial, LSE, UCL, St Andrews, Durham +8

Agree, more importantly Universities should be reserved for professionals, vocational careers and those going into research.

Lol, even from LSE, Warwick et al.
Accountancy also has a few sponsored degree programs such as PwC flying start and a KPMG which I cant quite remember the name.

I doubt those above are a 'joke'

I don't think we're on the same page really. Universities should be academic and offer academic courses - what graduates do after is really on how well employers perceive the skills/life experience graduates pick up by way of doing their degrees.

There should be universities offering degrees (Maths, History, English, CS, Engineering, Medicine etc), specialist schools (offering design, media, photography, art courses for e.g.) and vocational institutions (e.g. providing travel and tourism, business studies, etc courses).

That way employers can tap into the raw horse power of people from the academic institutions and take on kids who may have not had the chops for academia but went to a specialist or vocational institute instead. Would make far more sense than just having a bunch of universities.



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Always find these threads depressing because they are always about gaining more funding for courses and institutions the supporter happen to attend at the expense of the rest of the population. Intellectual snobbery and elitism.

That really wouldn't work. Most people don't choose their career path before they have started studying. Such an approach basically means people need to determine their career by the time they are filling in their UCAS form.

I don't see the point if you want to be a chartered accountant is what I meant, joke was somewhat harsh. Sure some people might want the university experience, or maybe there are some excellent placement opportunities available to students from LSE. That said a grad from LSE or Warwick, if they want to be a chartered accountant, still has to do their ACA exams. Why go to university for 3 years THEN start working for your ACAs. Why not start working on your ACAs at 18. I don't get it but then I never wanted to be an accountant lol.

Ideally people shouldn't go to University unless it serves a purpose, going just for the sake of it is stupid.

People go with the purpose of knowing it will develop their skills and help them secure graduate level employment, should that be something they want to do. Many jobs need a level 6 or above qualification, so there is a reason someone goes. The vast majority just don’t know what that graduate level employment they will go into, or whether they could go into something completely different.

University opens far more many doors both in the U.K. and abroad. Restricting access to university to those who make career decisions at the age of 17 would destroy graduate recruitment for most industries and would severely impact the countries productivity.

Then what should people with AAB and not AAA do, an aprenticeship 🤔. Also, I have heard Manchester is in the same league as Glasgow.

I went to university for the intellectual challenge. I chose the hardest degree (from what other people said) and I just wanted to prove myself. No harm in that.

I come from a low HE participation area -- no one went to uni, so to be competitive in the job market did not require a degree, and most everyone who did go to uni went to the local ex-poly/New unis. I had a job and I knew I could excel without a degree, but it just wasn't my concern. And I wanted to go an "elite" uni (from my peers' POV), so I did.

I don't quite understand why reading Cicero and appreciating highly abstract arguments should be only related to employment and squarely unrelated to pleasure, enjoyment and personal satisfaction. Lastly now I have graduated I am in fact more employable in the industry I was previously in; got decent job offers which were only open to grads. Haha, turned them down to do another degree! Again, this degree is solely because I find it interesting and if it helps me out in the future, well I'll be a happy camper. But it's not my concern.

Most people with AAB get into Russell groups...

i Got AAB i go to Nottingham

is where you to go practice Marxism

All unis should banned from teaching non-vocational deegres on the taxypayer, except Oxbridge, Imperial, LSE, UCL, St Andrews, Durham, Warwick, Bath, Bristol, Exeter, KCL, Edinburgh, Manchester and Nottingham.

I think university is a joke really. So, so, so many people i meet say things like "I got an apprenticeship at IBM and now I'm earning 30k".

Somewhere down the line, university (where you learn about the academic world of research and theses rather than employability-skills like client management) have managed to trick students into thinking that they have something to do with vocation.

James Dyson leads the way. Either apprenticeships or vocational degrees at specialist colleges like his which lead directly into a job should be for most people.

Let's not shut down 200+ universities, but lets privatise their inefficient schemes (non-vocational Undergraduate courses) and keep them as purely seats of academia.

We should only entirely fund our the top 15 unis as they are 'national treasures'.

This is the most ridiculous theory I have ever seen. We would screw our economy in many different ways if we took this really narrow view.

As a recruiter, I wouldn’t be able to recruit for my graduate programmes if I was only able to recruit people 14 different unis. Having worked at a Big 4 accountancy firm, a major FMCG company, international law firms, a telecoms company, for consultancy, finance, investment and the public sector, all of those companies/organisations would be screwed if they couldn’t recruit graduates from outside of those 14 unis (most of their roles never required a vocational degree). Saying they should all switch to apprenticeships is completely unrealistic. It’s bad enough not having enough grads that are ready for the work place and many of the jobs here roles are for are not appropriate for someone who hasn’t completed a level 6 qualification.

They’d all have to recruit from abroad if such a restriction was put in place.

The numbers just don’t add up. How many people do you think are graduating from these 14 universities a year?

The U.K. HE sector is a vital part of this economy. It creates about 400,000 jobs directly, and about 650,000 indirectly. It generates £95 billion to the U.K. economy. Such a crazy restriction would be damaging to the sector and the wider economy.