The Oxford degree that runs Britain | Hacker News Reader

The Oxford degree that runs Britain

theguardian.com

85 pointsvinnyglennon57 comments

It sounds like PPE basically does what Oxford designed it to do. Before PPE would be bureaucrats and ministers studied Greek and Latin. Then Oxford decided they may need training in something more practical.

Throw in some stats and basic data analysis and I think you have a pretty good training regimen for people who want to go to Whitehall and Parliament

Just as wet streets don't cause rain, Oxford degrees don't make politicians. It's just that all the British trust fund kids go to Oxford to study .. well, whatever.

You could say that about college in general. College doesn't make people successful, successful people go to college

And yet the (champagne) left has sold the public on the idea that education solves all ills...

I'm not arguing. I think I would have been better off taking some college courses instead of actually going to college

> College doesn't make people successful, successful people go to college

That's a wonderful epigram. Did you come up with that? I'd like to remember it and properly source it.

Yes.

You can say lots of things that are BS.

College is a prerequisite for professional degrees. Hacker News crowd notwithstanding, your career earning potential is reduced if you only have a secondary education.

Note that not all college degrees are equal. Obviously. Four-ish years of dedicated study changes your mind appreciably, which is the real objective. Also, finishing a degree signals your ability to function in a somewhat opaque bureaucracy, which means you'll be able to follow dumb rules and still get stuff done in a business organization.

I always find it odd how the Cambridge educated prime ministers seemingly dried up, one would really expect it to be closer to a 50/50 split as it had been in the past.

We got caught up doing science of it all.

Oxford:27 Cambridge:14

Since 1945 Oxford:10 Cambridge:0

PPE isn't perfect, but as far as a preparation for government goes, it's better than any other degree I've seen. I'd like to see it include slightly more mathematics -- economics has become significantly more quantitative over the decades, and PPE hasn't kept up -- but it's still vastly ahead of a degree in law, which seem to be the most common preparation for political careers in North America.

Before PPE would be bureaucrats and ministers studied Greek and Latin.

Some of them, I'm sure; but I think the highest density of Greats has always been in the House of Lords.

PPE isn't perfect, but as far as a preparation for government goes, it's better than any other degree I've seen.

Doesn't that make the implicit assumption that any degree is good preparation for government, though?

Whether it is "good" preparation depends on how good something needs to be to qualify as good. All I'm saying is that it's better than the alternatives.

There's upside and downsides.

A good place to look at a non-political example of this phenomenon is submarine captains. A US submarine captain is by training a nuclear engineer first and foremost. It dominates the training and career path. In the Royal Navy, captains are more rounded and while they have plenty of training in that area, they have a more liberal education. That impacts leadership style and other things. Both courses are effective, just different.

Politics are similar. Your typical US politician is an attorney with a feeder degree in political science, history, etc. More MBAs too. Staffers usually have politically focused degrees as well.

> but it's still vastly ahead of a degree in law, which seem to be the most common preparation for political careers in North America.

Those are kind of fundamentally different things, aren't they? A PPE degree is an undergraduate degree while a US Law degree is a graduate one. Law school doesn't require any specific undergraduate degree (it's well documented that the highest STEM and philosophy majors are some of the highest scoring on the LSAT). It'd be more applicable to compare what undergraduate degrees North American politicians have to the Oxford PPE curriculum.

As an anecdote, at my (US) undergrad school, people who were interested in politics majored in political science, international relations , or PPE (I don't know how the curriculum of this PPE degree compares with the Oxford one). Plenty of those people got law degrees and plenty didn't. PPE also attracted people who wanted to do something vaguely liberal arts but didn't want to specialize / commit too much.

FWIW, an England and Wales law degree (or Scottish law degree) is usually an undergraduate qualification.

But iirc, and IANAL, you do have to do a post grad course and then a training contract in the UK to be a lawyer

One of my school friends did PPE at Oxford (where else?). I don't like him or the world that he is in. It goes beyond 'sense of entitlement'.

The other 'OxBridge' university - Cambridge - also has something to offer public life. The 'Cambridge Footlights':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footlights

So every funny comedian on the BBC graduated from Cambridge going via this am-dram society.

You have to choose one's parents quite carefully. Mine were not pushing me to do PPE at Oxford, my friend's parent's knew exactly what they were doing, they had their son lined up for an upper middle class wealthy life from the start.

That is really eye-opening. You look at the list of people who came and went through Footlights, and it's like reading a Who's Who of modern British comedy.

On one hand, clearly Cambridge is doing something right, since British comedy has been the world's gold standard for decades. But on the other hand you can't help but wonder how much latent national talent went untapped, simply because the people holding it weren't "Oxbridge material."

I'm not sure that's as true as it used to be. A lot of great modern British comedians weren't members (though may have been Oxbridge): Chris Morris, Stewart Lee, Charlie Brooker, Armando Iannucci, Bill Bailey, Simon Pegg, Steve Coogan, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais. There is an argument that Footlights continues to dominate a particular strain of "awkward Englishness" style comedy, i.e. Fry & Webb, Hugh Laurie, and to a lesser extent Richard Ayoade. But I don't see these as the defining characters of British comedy at the moment.

I don't know if it's as true or not now, but the entertainers have become much posher recently: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/12170357/...

When actors and pop stars come from such elevated heights, I always get the impression that they are slick and professional - but much blander. For instance, the music of the 60s and 70s - when classes were mixing more - had more dynamism.

Pop used to be one of the few ways creative and intelligent working class kids could become millionaires.

> clearly Cambridge is doing something right

I suspect one factor (there are probably many, not least the network effects of recommendation) is the number of large scale events with numerous student performers (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Ball ).

If you're in Cambridge at Christmastime, the Footlights Panto is not to be missed - but book very early.

I'm currently reading John Cleese's autobiography (So Anyway...), which talks a lot about how he and Graham Chapman - two of the members of Monty Python - got their start in comedy in the Footlights at Cambridge. (Cleese was preparing for a career in law and Chapman was going into medicine.)

Entrenched thinking in the UK is why certain degrees seem to be the 'correct' or desirable ones for any given field or why the route in life seems to be cut out for people who take a certain degree.

In countries other than the UK, I've heard of many people entering the programming field through a non-CompSci degree, but here if you don't have some kind of related degree you wouldn't get considered for a job in that particular field. This goes for many other fields, not just programming. But not here (UK). Out-of-box thinking just isn't the way industry operates here and that's never a good thing, to always operate in a very predictable way to create a weakness in the system.

I wanted to do Compsci at university (I'm in my second term of my first year now), but I missed out by a few marks. I was offered Electronic and Computer Engineering (which is what I'm doing now at a UK uni), though the kind of jobs I want to do are almost entirely programming, and not necessarily embedded programming.

I don't know what my job prospects are like; hell, I don't even know what electronic engineers do.

EE & CE are very good courses for programmers, as they give a really strong understanding of the underlying platform.

However, if you're doing ECE and don't know what electronic engineers do, something is wrong.

To be fair, engineering students in any discipline not knowing what engineers actually do is not uncommon, and might even be the majority case.

An explanation for the lay person of why this is.

Engineering degrees typically start off with a couple of years of general science education, with minimal contact with the engineering faculty. It's often not until halfway though the degree that the engineers branch off from the science students, into engineering specific courses, and find out what makes an engineer different to a scientist.

Not entirely true - at least from my experience studying in Australia. The first year of my degree was about a 50/50 split between the Engineering faculty and other faculties subsequent years were almost entirely (95%+) engineering faculty.

Year 1 was courses like: Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statistics, Physics, Chemistry, intro to comp sci (non eng faculty) Statics/Dynamics, intro to Electrical eng., intro to Materials, Engineering Management (eng faculty)

Years 2-4 were devoted to your specific engineering major there was some cross major subjects. I.e I majored in materials engineering I Studied fluid Dynamics and Welding alongside mech eng students, studied Benefication alongside mining engineers. Solid mechanics was with civil engineers.

The course was pretty tightly proscribed we got very little choice in terms of electives. I took one elective outside of the engineering faculty and that was in my fourth year (particle physics).

Many of the engineers I've worked with in the UK carry EE degrees (I'm unsure how different this is to electronic and computer engineering). It's certainly not seen as a bad thing or a reason to not get interviews compared to a pure CS degree from my experience.

Plenty of developers come out of non CS degrees, enjoy your degree, it will give you a more in depth understanding on computational substrates (electronics) which is a good advantage. On the other hand... you should do your self a favour and take some Algo courses in coursera or elsewhere if you really want to pursue a purer developer career. It will leave you better positioned when you graduate.

You'll be just fine.

I graduated with a degree in electronic and computer engineering in 1996 in the U.K.

We did minimal software: a bit of Ada, Prolog, Z and Occam, 6502 assembler. Nothing substantial really. Tons of math, analog electronics and microprocessor design.

I had a deep interest in electronics but went straight into software development. The degree gave me a valuable foundation, it has been tremendously useful at various points in my career. And in side-projects. It gave me an understanding of what lies beneath. And a skillset that many software dev contemporaries did not have. Some of the most interesting software is the stuff that connects to the physical world.

Never worked in the UK. Spent a bunch of time in Germany now I'm in California, via Massachusetts.

I wouldn't worry :-)

Thank you for your insight. My worry is more to do with fear of not being able to make my 40% pass mark for this year. There's simply so much to know and learn, from the analogue (which I find the hardest) to the programming (which I find the easiest). Unfortunately the analogue stuff is the highest weighted out of all of the modules.

Unless you were applying for Oxbridge I'd consider EE/CE a harder degree than plain CompSci. You'll probably do a lot more maths and modelling, and less CS essentials like standard algos and compiler design.

IMO anyone who can master control theory, data compression, RF design, and/or analog filter design should have no problem picking up algos and compiler theory relatively quickly.

I'm not sure that's entirely fair. Very few of the professional programmers I've worked with during my career had Computer Science or other directly "computery" degrees. Most did have a degree and most were in one technical subject or another, but that doesn't seem particularly surprising.

I disagree. I have worked in software teams that employed people with non-CompSi degrees, such as maths, physics and mechanical engineering.

How about people without degrees?

I haven't worked with any, they probably don't make it past the HR/recruiter filter.

As an engineer who has had to assess other engineers as part of the hiring process, I wouldn't turn down someone if they didn't have a degree.

Err, there are loads of (employed) programmers without CS degrees in the UK. I myself managed to get a (full time) Web development job without a degree at all, and I am by no means the only one. I'd say roughly 1/3 of the developers I've worked with have done a CS degree. Another chunk have done a degree in a related subject like maths or engineering. But there are many others who have done completely unrelated degrees, or none at all.

In Web development maybe. But I've seen very few programmers in deeper areas (backend, system engineers etc.) without some kind of formal CS education.

When people say that success depends "not on what you know, but on who you know", Oxford PPE is the textbook example.

It's the degree for people who don't want to have a career doing anything other than working in the politics/economics/media bubble.

It is also perhaps the strongest argument ever made that no-one should be allowed to hold high political office without having spent a significant amount of time doing something outside that bubble.

Trump doesn't fit that model and I'd guess if you're here you're no trump fan. So it's not a panacea.

I'd guess if you're here you're no trump fan

Would you elaborate? If you're referring to the HN community, a few minutes' reading through the comments will show you that there's a wide range of political views, including Trump supporters.

On the contrary, Trump is just about the perfect example of the dangers of PPE: he's a man who enjoyed advantages early on that most people will never have, who has consequently spent his entire career in an artificial bubble almost totally unrelated to the experience of most normal people, who has learned to speak confidently about almost any subject regardless of whether he actually knows or understands very much about that subject, and who as result of those attributes has now risen to a level of power he is utterly unqualified to wield.

So he's an outlier in the bubble, but still in the bubble? It sounds about right.

Not everyone likes to shut themselves into an echo chamber. Yes, this site is largely anti-Trump, but that doesn't mean that everyone is. For example, my account here is >2000 days old(and I was lurking for a while before I made this), and I find myself generally agreeing with a lot of Trumps policies.

PPE, he wrote, “gives no training in scholarship, only refining to a high degree of perfection the ability to write short dilettantish essays on the basis of very little knowledge: ideal training for the social engineer”.

A degree in dinner parties! Sounds like fun, and not altogether unlike HN sometimes...

So there it's PPE's, here it's Harvard and Stanford MBA's and law graduates and military officers. All with a slight stench of illegitimacy. Most being ignored by those pushing society forward.

Is there an equivalent in the tech industry? Stanford SymSys?

http://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-symbolic-systems-maj...

"To its proliferating critics, PPE is not a solution to Britain’s problems; it is a cause of them."

Have you been mis-sold PPE? Time's running out to do something about it...

Brexit was not caused by PPE...

It's a joke about PPI, not Brexit...

Ah, I may not get those ads...

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