UK: Students could be prevented from taking university courses deemed low value | Hacker News Reader

UK: Students could be prevented from taking university courses deemed low value

inews.co.uk

9 pointsintunderflow10 comments

Ignoring the specifics in this case, I'm in favour of the govt requiring that the degrees available are viable for career progression. Speaking as someone from Australia, I see too many universities offering degrees that the target industries don't actually value as a credential, or the university itself has no post-grad academic path. If the degree can't lead to anything it shouldn't exist imo.

Many industries don't actually require a degree, just that you can "do the thing", and you're much better off doing a shorter course at some private outfit (provided it's actually good), or just skilling up online.

A big example that comes to mind is game dev, which is a borderline scam at uni. You're much better off doing comp sci or software eng, and then building a port folio in your own time then taking any course with "game" in the title.

An even bigger example is game design, which should be considered a senior role and not really a position where a path exists directly from any course.

If mathematicians and other scientists throughout history had only worked on problems that have an industry use at their time, there would be no industry today.

Good thing I was very clearly only addressing degrees with target industries then, and I did mention post-grad academics.

Ah yes, that rara avis, a PhD in Coed Cooking.... You are quite correct, a degree should have an open ended ceiling. Technical competency diplomas exist among many parallel similar diplomas and quantify people to certain tasks

Game dev/design edu space is still very young, therefore full of snake oil salesmen.

Jobs famously spoke about how sitting in on a calligraphy class led to the typography innovations on the Mac.

It's hard to quantify the peripheral value of courses like those offered in the arts and humanities.

I'm very STEM-oriented, but I feel there's value in these courses that don't directly pay off in the free market.

I think about this all the time. The combining of seemingly unrelated skills brings new perspectives and it helps people go from being cogs to creators.

I don’t know what is being proposed, but admittedly the Uk is littered with awful universities offering variations on “media studies”, which at best offer a government-subsidised lifestyle to some students for a few years, and at worst are visa scams (pay to join, you’ll get a student visa).

But of course they might mean “what use is psychology to a corporate automaton anyway”.

The Government should only have a say in what someone studies if they're paying for it, and even then it's debatable.

They need to address tuition fees before anything else.

I believe the U.K. government is the guarantor on all student loans in the country.

If so, it could be argued it’s legitimate for them to only offer loans based on courses that offer the taxpayer a return on their investment.

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