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For the record, i've got a 2.2 in accounting (one of the ones you only do cos you either love money or you're actually quite good at it!) from a top 20 uni... and i got onto a graduate placement. Unless companies are milk-rounding, they DO look at the other things on your CV and try and find out a bit more about you before rejecting you out of hand.
For degrees, I think that the university's reputation has got more to do with whether it'll be a brownie point or not. What kind of degree also matters depending on the job you're applying for.
And it's bullshit to be making random statements about so and so course being harder than another. It's all relative. I have a friend doing a degree in Danish that works 10x harder on it than I did with mine, yet she keeps saying she has no idea what she'll get to do once she's finished so she's already planning on taking courses from other subjects to beef it up.
I do think that it's absurd to be boosting university attendance for the hell of it. I think it should be made POSSIBLE for everybody to find a way to attend uni if they want to, but if they don't belong there that should be fine and proper. I'm sure we all know people that are at uni just because they feel they ought to be at this point in life. I know somebody who's changed her mind every term since we graduated!
Both my brothers decided not to pursuit a degree at uni after finishing college, one attempting engineering for a semester but didn't belong there. A few years later both have now returned to universities and both of them have been acing their degrees pretty much from day one. Both of them have now found out what they want to do and because of it they're ten times more commited!
For people that are doing a degree because they're dedicated to it, a degree will be worth a lot. For those that don't care and aren't adding to their CVs the same can't be said. More people = more competition which leads to employers being able to wait around for people they really like to show up for a job interview.
I changed to vocational studies this year. If I pass I'm guaranteed a job the day after I get my qualifications. :thumb:
I don't think the government has the right idea, trying to get 50% of people into university. It's better for some people to start working at 18, rather than getting into working life with thousands of pounds of debt behind them.
Having said that, it's not easy to get a job with only A Levels, I tried and didn't have much luck. But having a degree and lots of relavent work experience opened doors for me.
Oi, you, that's what my sister's gonna be studying
I don't think it's fair to look down on any kind of degree, really. Different people find different things difficult (I could never do Thunderstruck's degree, for example), so saying "my degree is better because it's harder" is just ridiculous. Events Management may be a crap degree to YOU, but my sister chose to do it because that's what she wants to go into, so an Events Management degree will probably be useful to her.
I have nothing else to say really that hasn't already been said. Except for that I'm beginning to wish I'd worked a bit harder (or done A-Levels :razz: ) so that I could have maybe got into a better university. I don't like thinking like that, because (despite what some people may think) I have actually worked really hard on this course, harder than some people who are probably going to get better grades than me, and so when I get to uni I'm gonna work hard there as well. I don't care if my degree won't be worth as much as it would be had I gone to Cambridge or whatever, because I know I'll have worked hard for it.
Plus, my friend that goes to Cambridge says it's full of the really academic types who have no social life and won't be able to make it in the real world, anyway.
Your friend needs to look around a bit more, there are plenty of normal people there too as well as the ones who are doomed to a life of academia.
Few can
It's what makes me awesome.
I think you need to be more careful about how you word something if you don't want to cause offense. Simply putting a no offense disclaimer after an offensive statement does not make it any less offensive.
Fair enough if you're only talking about people at your university but your wording doesn't reflect this. It just seems like a sweeping remark to me. I do psychology at a prestigous university. I needed better A-Level requirements than your Law course, and I've been working like a bastard this year to keep myself on a 2:1. I have hard exams which aren't all just essay based either, lengthy experimental projects, literature reviews and seminars. Not just A-Level standard essays :rolleyes: . I don't want to sound like I'm having a go but you should be a bit more tactful when making those kind of statements and at least clarify that you're only talking about your friends, if that's what you intended to do.
Different degrees will always suit different people. For example I couldn't do a degree in any foreign language. We all have our strengths and weaknesses and a degree has to be suited to that person. It is ludicrous to think you can compare degrees and say this degree is easier than that. I think there will always be people who can get away with doing pretty much nothing and still get their degree, but that doesn't mean that they are doing an easy degree either.
As for exams getting easier, it's a difficult one to judge. There's becoming more things that need to be taught, new techniques etc. Thus meaning that stuff that wasn't taught and perhaps is needed later on in a career isn't now taught at A-Level making degrees have to either teach more or become less advanced. I know when I went to do maths at uni, I'd done further maths A-Level as well and we were told that most of our 1st year at uni used to be taught at A-Level so we were effectively a year behind, but whether that means we were taught less and easier stuff at A-Level who knows.
Things like accredited law, engineering, medical, struggling to think of other professional type degrees now, will have minimum standards set by the professional bodies, whereas other subject based degrees are subject to much greater variation between different institutions.
:yes:
For law, there are some essential modules you have to study set by the Law Society and the markers are realllllyy harsh with the marking compared to the optional modules.
Yeah, my accounting degree was one of the most accredited in the country - and as such we were doing things like degree level maths in it (which was totally not what i'd signed up to do :banghead: )
Haivng said that, because noone wants to be an accountant (and it is much easier to get into via other routes than law, medicine, etc) they only asked for BBB entry grades.
Was one of my options before I quit uni as well as investment valuations but I'm now doing something slightly different.
for the course or job?