With all due respect I wouldn't see 6 weeks placement as a reason to consider one applicant over another. It's just not long enough. It is many years since I was at Uni but when I went I did a full year in industry between my 2nd and 3rd years. This was when we had Uni's and Poly's and so it was fairly unique for a Uni to want their students to work in industry. The Computer Science dpeartment still pushes this strongly.

I am concinved I got a better degree because of this year out and that it also helped me with my subsiquent employment.



Well I also work for the Open University as a tutor and Computer Science students results are determined by the lower of the assignment score or the exam score. I wasn't keen on this myself when I did some courses there but now I am on the other side of the fence I can see the reasons why.

When I was a student my course had masses of practical work to do and we even had deadlines the day before the final exams started. Some of the practical work counted for less than 1% of the final mark but still required a lot of work to complete. Some students elected not to submit some of these assignments and it counted against them later if they were marginal on a grade boudary.



My son is off to Uni tomorrow and throughout the application process I was pretty impressed with all the Uni's visited. On one visit while they said they were strict on the minimum points total (280) they understood that A level grades don't tell the whole story. They realise other factors can come into it. For example my son had no phyiscs teachers for the majority of the year as both were off on sick leave. The school didn't get supply teachers in but had the Chemistry teachers cover. This was rubbish and probably affected his grade. He also broke his hip in January in the middle of exams so missed those and quite a few lessons. He did get the points required in the end but what was said at that Uni told me if Uni's let people in on lower grades it is not always because they Uni's are rubbish. It is because they want the particular student to go and will give them a chance despite screweing up their a level exams. There is a limit though and being several grades off the requirment ought to mean it is the exception rather than the rule that you get a place.

When I was applying to university in the 80s it was common place for them to offer students who they expected to get straight As a 2E offer as a sign that they really wanted that student to come to them. These days it appears to be a means to put bums on seats and pocket the tuition fees.

Employers should not expect ready trained employees to come out of any educational institution. Schools and universities have a broad remit in terms of the education they provide and cannot pander to the needs of each and every employer. In the old days the polys provided vocational degree courses for students on day release from their employers. This would be the ideal way of paying for the highly educated workforce the powers that be tell us we need. Sadly employers do not want to spend money developing their staff in this way.

As stated in an earlier post, the well paid graduate jobs are not out there to the level they were anymore. In my own field I recently saw an ad for a chemistry graduate to work in an analytical lab for £12k a year and a couple of years back saw a similar job at £9k (both in the SE). To be fair, these were permanent jobs rather than the temporary positions that are prevalent in a lot of science/tech based companies at the moment. These are cases of exploitative employers trying to get employees on the cheap while telling the employee that they are doing them a favour as the pay is that low that they won't have to pay back their student loans. The job situation is just as bad at the PhD level. When made redundant at the back end of 2007 I had to take a £5k pay cut and the situation has only got worse since with the Big pharma companies announcing thousands of redundancies. The government and business are perpetuating the lie that if you get a degree in a tech/science subject you will end up in a well paid job. It just isn't true. All that sending 50% of the population to university achieves is to keep a few more school leavers off the dole for another 3 years. I know this sounds very cynical and somewhat depressing for some of the younger posters on this board, but in my personal experience it is also very true.

I have to say that compared to a lot of other students I had things very easy at uni. With living at home I only left with £3000 of debt, and had a really enjoyable three years. The way I did it was work hard from Monday morning to Friday evening (in the second and third years I had a 100-day placement each year, so sometimes it would be placement 9am-5pm and then private study at the library from 5pm-9pm), but then I unwound and went out over the weekend, rarely picking up a book on Saturday or Sunday. This worked for me personally - I was never the type who could be up reading until midnight on Sunday and still being refreshed and ready to go for a 9am Monday lecture. Came out with a 2:1 Social Work degree four years ago.
Since then I've been knocked for 'not using' my degree, which is somewhat true in that I'm not in a full-time social work position, but I usually do 40 hours a week, spread over three jobs (doing a night care assistant role for a disability team and sessional work for two family support teams), + my voluntary job with Samaritans which I've had for four years. So fair dues I've not climbed the career ladder like many of my fellow students on the course will have, but I enjoy what I do and the degree gave me the confidence and self-belief to do things that I never thought I would be able to. For example I supervise family contacts in places such as prisons and rehabilitation facilities. In all honesty before uni I would have found the thought of prison work very daunting (not that people should, but I'm just the type who's shy and feels easily intimidated sometimes I guess), whereas now I love doing it and find it really interesting.
Likewise with my voluntary work - there's no way in a million years that I would have though pre-uni that I could do something like that (working all types of shifts e.g. midnight-6am) but it's easily the most-rewarding thing I've ever done and I've learned / gained so much from it whilst also 'giving back' a bit.
So for me university has opened doors in different ways, and though it's a bit unconvential the way I earn a living at the moment (i.e. across 3 / sometimes 4 services) I'm enjoying what I do for the time-being, and am chipping away bit-by-bit at what is admittedly a relatively-small student loan.

Can I just say, you sound like a a really great person and the sort of invaluable asset to society that most of the millionaire "celebrities" should look up to.



THAT is the most important thing you wrote, if you enjoy your work then you can't put a price on that.

You used to be able to do that in yesteryear, but professions like law and medicine are now so competitive you are highly unlike to get on with those sorts of grades nowadays. I know legions of people who have graduated with law degrees and cannot get anywhere in the profession beyond some low-paid paralegal type job.

Is she a practising barrister, i.e. did she do pupillage and get taken on as a tenant? Pretty much anyone who is willing to pay £10K to do a year long course can get called to the Bar. Actually making some money out of it as a day job is a lot harder, and full respect to her if she has achieved that.

I got into the Hull School of Architecture with no A levels (and completed the course)

There were 24 started my course and a few took this attitude towards studies, all those that did never made the 2nd year. I think you are generalising and in fact the majority (from what I saw) do not behave in this manner.

The Video Ref isn't far wrong in my eyes. Of course people can offer examples of when friends and family members work hard and never fit in with that stereotype but try walking around a University town or city midweek at night and consider whether the generalisation is far wrong.

Even if Johnny has told his parents that he is skint and too busy with his 5 year Mechanical Engineering course, you will probably find him out and about getting smashed on a Tuesday night, dressed as a smurf after drinking a bottle of Malibu in his flat beforehand, before throwing up in the 24 hour student library and walking home with a selection of road signs for the morning.

Of course its wrong! You would have to be pretty stupid to believe it were true! Why? Well take the University my son has gone to which is where I went, Aberystwyth. Term time the population of the town swells by about 8000 these days (it was half that when I was there).

Are there going to be 8000 students out on the town midweek? Nope. Will [isome[/i of them be out on the town midweek? Yes. How many will you see out on the town midweek? A few hundred if that. Will it be the same people out on the town every week? Nope.

What I am getting at here is that in a student population of 8000 you will always be able to find some of them out on the town just as you will always find some of them in the library or working in the labs or whatever.

It stands to reason in cities with even larger student populations that students part of these populations will exhibit different behavior at different times.

All you are doing is seeing a group of friends or say the students rugby club (or whatever) out for night out and concluding that all students spend their time doing this. It's a ridiculous position to take. It's like me seeing you in a pub and concluding you are an alcoholic.



I am absolutely certain students, just like other young people, will go out and have a bender every now and again. They are not going to a monastery and they have as much right to blow off steam as anyone else but this generalization of yours is ridiculous.

If this doesn't convince people who think that degrees are useless unless they are vocational that this isn't the case, nothing will.

There is so much more to university education than the study of the degree subject. It is the kind of personal development you mention above that adds so much value to it. Pretty much like yourself doing the degree was something that for me made a huge difference on a personal level. I did do a vocational degree and have worked in the field ever since but I was totally unfazed at being sent to Switzerland by my first employer after a matter of weeks in the job. The thought of me doing this four years earlier would have never entered my or anyone else's head who knew me then.

It is very heartening to read that someone who has graduated recently has got the same sort of benefit from their degree outside of the subject studied as I did over 30 years ago. It is this kind of personal development that always led to employers looking for graduates as opposed to just clever people.

So such personal development is only available via a degree course?

I must say I find it so sad that many of today's job's require a degree to merely get a foot in the door. Long gone are the day's of people starting at the very bottom and working their way up. It's such a shame for those who don't excel academically, but do so in a working environment, and I include myself in that category. Now don't have the chance to follow their dreams, because employers stipulate a degree to be necessary.

I know that myself and many of my older colleagues, wouldn't be where we are now without having had the chance to start at the very bottom. That's of course no longer an optional path. A degree in Marine engineering is a must. But for me we exclude so many viable candidates purely because they didn't excel in an educational environment that may not have suited them in the first place, and it's wrong.

This is going to sound terribly biased but many of our recent recruits from university. Don't wish to get their hands dirty. Don't understand the very basics of the job, because they've never been exposed to it. Yet act as if they know it all. On the job training should be the way to go in in many cases, depending on the job of course. Unfortunately the opposite to that has happened in nearly every case, and we are far worse off for it. Certainly in my sector.

Ha. Ace. So your whole theory is based on the fact that your son is currently studying at Aberystwyth? Well my 3 years at the University of Sheffield painted a very different picture but you probably won't believe it so I won't go down that path.

However, note how The Video Ref mentions that it is very much prevalent in the first year, a key point as to why I agreed with him. In most cases, the first year counts for nothing and the pass mark is ridiculously low. Hence students are out on the lash a hell of a more frequently while being a student than they would be as a "normal" member of society.

I have seen people who come across during the day as extremely sensible and respectable descend into situations that you wouldn't believe at night. I go back to Sheffield occasionally and its a completely different atmosphere during the week when students are out compared to that at the weekend when it is mainly "locals".

I think you are pretty out of touch with the reality of the situation to be honest.

And my 7 years at the University of Bradford painted a completely different picture to yours. Maybe you just keep bad company? Or maybe you're just on a wind up. Again.