Mortgage Rate Rises

GordyR said:
Out of interest, when did you complete your degree and what did you study?

I did mine 20 years ago but I've seen nothing reliable to suggest that they've genuinely become any easier since.

I do however hear a lot of sweeping statements by people without them, who love to tell me how easy they think they are.
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It really depends on what you define as "getting a degree". A person could scrape by, barely being above the 40% mark and walk away with a degree after 3 years. It would be a third class honours and potentially useless but they would have a degree.
 
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Chuk_Chuk said:
It really depends on what you define as "getting a degree". A person could scrape by, barely being above the 40% mark and walk with a degree after 3 years. It would be a third class honours and potentially useless but they would have a degree.
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My Niece has a Degree and got C's and D's at GSCE level. I do not have a degree but got 10 A's and B's with A's in Maths and Science. In reference to this thread I got a mortgage at 22 years old when most would have been saddled with a lot of debt just coming out of Uni whereas I had already been working for two years. They also ended up buying a house at a much higher price a lot later with a massive mortgage into their 60's. It is also ironic that the area I work in now I earn a lot more than them too :p.

I have two kids myself and unless they will be super smart and do a proper degree it would be far better getting them on an apprenticeship because people with degrees are ten a penny but people with actual physical skills are not. Hence the post earlier where builders are taking home 1k a week for their services. Most of the decent apprenticeships will get you on 40K by your mid twenties without the debt.
 
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GordyR said:
Out of interest, when did you complete your degree and what did you study?

I did mine 20 years ago but I've seen nothing reliable to suggest that they've genuinely become any easier since.

I do however hear a lot of sweeping statements by people without them, who love to tell me how easy they think they are.
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Personal experience but I’d go on a limb to suggest they are easier. I graduated in 2013 and if you turned up most the time, had half a clue what was going on and just put in some hours of work you could easily pass. I didn't do a "hard" STEM course though mine was only "computer networks" so maybe that’s why. I don't think I studied for any of the tests and neither did I put in the suggested work for the dissertation portion (did it in the 3 weeks prior to hand in) yet still managed joint top of 81%. For reference I decided on that course based on job prospects and the Uni's employer connections vs the actual contents of the course or difficulty.

IMO, simply put some people are more suited to academic learning style than others. Yet if you set a goal to push a certain % of young people through uni then it’s inevitable you get people that are not as good for that environment in there. So what do you do with them from a Unis perspective? You have to pass them otherwise it reflects badly on your lecturers and the Uni. Low pass rates will also affect how students view your Uni and ultimately, they are the customers funding your lecturers so there’s conflict of interest there as well. There’s a natural pressure as more students go for courses for unis to make them easier over time to maintain/improve pass rates.

I don’t agree with Uni at all in its current form, I think it’s a waste of time and money for most people (including myself, I only went because fees were £3.3k at the time, I lived at home and was able to get £2.9k in maintenance grants due to low household income. Making the choice now I wouldn’t put myself in £40k+ debt). Uni’s imo should be places of research and innovation and should attract people of that talent pool, drive and intellect rather than just be an extension of mandatory education with the simple view of passing set exam bars as it’s become now.

A story my dad once told me that stuck, he was helping one student (supervising lab work as he was a researcher in biochemistry at Sheffield Uni) who even after being told in a previous session how to do a square root in excel (lets not even go into why a student needs to be taught basic excel in the first place) didn’t remember how to do it. So he asked what other mathematical function can you do to get a square root? She didn’t know that x^0.5 is the equivalent of a square root. The catch here is she's a PhD student and really ought to know basic maths, never mind actual things like statistical methods/formulas and such. In his 6+ years there he only had one PhD that really stood out, a chinese doctor that moved to the UK, the rest in his words were very lack luster and expected everything to be fed on plate to them. Higher education should be about self teaching around a broad range of things not being baby fed like 6th form and below to just pass an exam
 
Mercenary Keyboard Warrior said:
Maybe he took advantage of the essays for cash situation. Would make it a bit easier ;)

Personally I have a semi theory based on how I have seen education since I left school. Leaving secondary late 80s and 6th form end of the 80s, and seeing how my cousins (approx 10 years younger) were 100% schooled differently highlighted to me that basically there was zero coaching on passing exams as I went through secondary into 6th form. 80s comprehensive education FTL (/ wave Liz)
IE it was down to the individual to make use of or not, study guides etc. I didn't apart from Chemistry and looking back I vastly outperformed in that (my worst subject) compared to all my other exams.
My cousins entered exam period far more prepared, which IMO means more passed and hence the "they got easier" many would quote.
I think as that generation passed through, better prepared and more versed in passing exams they appeared to make courses easier from 6th form to uni even.

To my annoyance I never got the "pass the exam" as opposed to the thoroughly know your subject twist until very close to the end of my professional exams. It suddenly twigged why the pretty poor knowledge individuals who went on lots of revisions courses etc could pass the exams and yet in the real world demonstrate a distinct lack of knowledge.
It was then I really switched my views to everything should be open book, you need to know the subject widely in order to be able to go and pickup the specific details in order to answer more detailed questions this way, rather than being able to rote learn a load of bullet points which you could tweak to answer a question.
I know degrees aren't at this level towards the end, but many exams still are as they cant make them last a week.
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Yeah, this is definitely a problem with how the modern education system is geared. There's very much a focus on teaching kids to pass exams rather than learning the subject
 
kevman said:
Just did a wiki on this, others include

Geoff Hurst - first
Attila the hun - 2:1
Desmond - as mentiined
Douglas Hurd - third
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I've never heard any of these terms. What wikipedia page is this?

Side note: I know someone/worked with someone called Geoff Hurst, he the chief design engineer for the company.
 
I have a degree. It wasn't hard.
Expensive, yes!
Waste of time, yes!

Hard? No

Some of the laziest people I know have degrees. They just excel at acedemia. One gifted guy didn't even get out of bed for his 2nd year exam. Very intelligent. But no drive. Indeed, I think it's actually a thing where by very intelligent people can be very "lazy".

I won't go into where lazy j mental health. Because there's clearly a link and difficulty separating the two in those cases.
 
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GordyR said:
I did mine 20 years ago but I've seen nothing reliable to suggest that they've genuinely become any easier since.
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Did you actively look for anything though or do you just mean you've not happened to read any press stories about this?

I've just had a look myself and it does seem from just looking at the past 10 years the data suggests that standards have shifted a bit, more degrees awarded and the classifications are mostly 1st or 2:1.

10 years ago 33% of students would have a classification below a 2:1, now it's only 15%. I've not checked what it was like 20 years ago but I presume it has shifted over time since then too.

Graduate attainment rates continue to increase. Between 2010-11 and 2020-21, the proportion of UK-domiciled, full-time first degree graduates attaining a first class honours degree from an English higher education provider has more than doubled, from 15.7 per cent in 2010-11 to 37.9 per cent in 2020-21. Expanding this population shows that in 2020-21 84.4 per cent of students achieved a first or upper second class degree, up from 67.0 per cent in 2010-11.
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Mason- said:
They’re not particularly hard to obtain anymore.
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Is perhaps correct just looking at classifications alone, though if he's talking about post-conversion of polytechnics into Universities then I don't think we even need to look at the classification data, degree classifications could stay in the same proportions but the presence of many new degrees offered by institutions with perhaps lower standards is sufficient for Mason's statement to hold true.

If you're going to offer, for example, a mathematics degree at a low-ranking university attended by people with very poor A-Levels then you'd inherently have to start at a lower level and cover the bare minimum required by external examiners else the course couldn't function.
 
dowie said:
Did you actively look for anything though or do you just mean you've not happened to read any press stories about this?

I've just had a look myself and it does seem from just looking at the past 10 years the data suggests that standards have shifted a bit, more degrees awarded and the classifications are mostly 1st or 2:1.

10 years ago 33% of students would have a classification below a 2:1, now it's only 15%. I've not checked what it was like 20 years ago but I presume it has shifted over time since then too.



zvMrCCy.png



Is perhaps correct just looking at classifications alone, though if he's talking about post-conversion of polytechnics into Universities then I don't think we even need to look at the classification data, degree classifications could stay in the same proportions but the presence of many new degrees offered by institutions with perhaps lower standards is sufficient for Mason's statement to hold true.

If you're going to offer, for example, a mathematics degree at a low-ranking university attended by people with very poor A-Levels then you'd inherently have to start at a lower level and cover the bare minimum required by external examiners else the course couldn't function.
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I was going on intuition but seems there's evidence. I'm sure you could use the argument of the Flynn effect to say the IQ of the population has gone up over time, but I think it's showed in recent years that actually western nations have had IQs regress. Less intelligent population + more higher class degrees = easier degrees.

Also I suspect there's an entitlement element now where students have some thinking like "I've spent £9000 a year for 3 years so I'm entitled to my degree!!!". So to save a bunch of angry students they just make getting a 2:1/first easier.
Uni's are businesses now anyway they just care about bums on seats and getting that sweet sweet £9k per year off students. It's an industry.

Also I studied CompSci from 2011-2014.
 
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Chuk_Chuk said:
It really depends on what you define as "getting a degree". A person could scrape by, barely being above the 40% mark and walk away with a degree after 3 years. It would be a third class honours and potentially useless but they would have a degree.
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Even a 3rd is quite useful, especially in the current climate when being able to emigrate is a major plus. For many countries, having a university level education (regardless of grade) goes a long way to getting a work visa, if it isn't a hard requirement.
 
I can't even imagine how you'd get a 3rd! I don't think I knew anyone who did!

That's off a good 20 people
 
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Mason- said:
I'm sure you could use the argument of the Flynn effect to say the IQ of the population has gone up over time, but I think it's showed in recent years that actually western nations have had IQs regress.
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Yup, we're going a bit off-topic but I wouldn't be surprised if it had and if it continues that way for a bit. It's partly a heritable trait and lower IQ types will have more kids + at a younger age. Also, we're probably importing, on average, lower-IQ people.

We could have course shift this by encouraging high-skilled immigration and cracking down more on illegals + better sex education, promotion of birth control, easy access to abortion etc.
 
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