Interesting Links for 25-11-2014

[andrewducker]

• Probably my favourite "Unknown Pleasures" T-shirt
  (tags: t-shirts art space funny music )
• Alert: New Anti-Porn Censorship Law to Arrive 1st December
  (tags: porn censorship UK )
• The 3-Word Tweet That Cost a Politician Her Job
  (tags: Twitter politics class Labour UK )
• Are nurses getting 1% pay rises or 4% pay rises?
  (tags: nhs pay UK )
• NASA Will

Comments

[andrewducker]

The previous student loan system it replaced. The one that this comparison is with:


(Or point 8 here.)

I can't instantly find figures for the 1970s, but I did find some for the 1950s:
"In 1950 17,300 students were awarded first degrees and 2,400 were awarded higher degrees at UK universities"

"In 2010/11 331,000 full-time students were awarded first degrees at UK universities and 182,600(all modes) were awarded higher degrees."

So that's an increase of 20x the number of people going to university (90x for higher degrees - but we can ignore those for these purposes). I can understand that paying for that is going to cost rather more. I think that it's a worthwhile investment in the future - but it still needs to be paid for in some way.

(The cost of Trident is estimated at around £2.4Billion. 331,000 students * £9,000 is around £3billion, so scrapping trident would cover a large chunk of that. I could happily support that.)

[cartesiandaemon]

that's an increase of 20x the number of people going to university... I think that it's a worthwhile investment in the future

I'm really not sure how to think of university. I think it's some combination of "good for us as people to socialise with a variety of people and learn things that might be useful in some way" (good) and "an expensive system of patronage that ensures that middle-class jobs tend to go to middle-class people" (bad).

I'm not sure how many people actually _use_ the knowledge in their degree in their job outside academia or related work -- I think that's getting more common with more vocational courses, but I don't assume that more university education makes us actually makes a more productive economy.

[skington]

I work in IT and my politics and philosophy degree doesn't help me intrinsically, but getting better at thinking about stuff analytically is something that has definitely helped me at work.

[cartesiandaemon]

Yeah, likewise with maths. But I'm not sure if it helped *more* than four years of software engeineering experience.

[steepholm]

The expansion of student numbers under Labour was far too great, in my opinion, and that certainly didn't help. (I remember banging on about that on LJ at the time.)

Another possibility would be to introduce a graduate tax that applied to all graduates (since we all presumably continue to benefit from our graduate status), and not just the new ones. The fact that this was not even considered is just another instance of the way that the young are screwed over by the old (or more specifically the middle-aged) in this country.

[andrewducker]

I agree about student numbers. Knowing what I do now, I'd say that in an ideal world I wouldn't have done a Comp-Sci degree, I'd have done an industrial training course of some kind - lasting a couple of years, and teaching good programming practices and computer knowledge, but bypassing the theoretical bits that aren't needed for most jobs.

Of course, that would mean an education system that actually thought about what the country needed, and the best way of delivering it.

A graduate tax that affected people who already had student loans would be tricky, and probably unfair. To be honest, it should probably be a tax on everyone, along with less places at university, and better vocational education/training. In an ideal world.