Today's discussion about the news
Comments
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Not enough! Why does everyone in the UK aspire to have low skill low pay jobs? Is it some sort of innate desire to keep the povos from earning a proper living or something?
You will never hear an economist suggest an over educated workforce is bad. It is just a symptom of poor productivity and economic conditions, not of a poor education system.
But the solution, apparently, is to make it more elitist?! So we exclude more people the chance of being more productive (aka earning more for the same hours worked, or to be more BR about it, earn the same for fewer hours worked!)
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What's not a good idea, looking first to Oxbridge and it's baked in privilege, or looking to graduates of more competitive and demanding somewhat relevant degree courses?
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If you want a debate about de-skilling in the UK construction industry I may need to book out some time. I don't think the problem is universities stealing potential tradespeople.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition1 -
What makes you think that the only possible route to having a skilled job is through a degree? Plenty of skilled trades people earn a very good living. They didn't need a degree to achieve that.
Having a skilled job does not always need a degree. you fail to grasp that.
There really is more to life (and a balanced economy) than your little earn as much money as possible by working in the most expensive part of the country bubble.
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I appreciate you struggle with generalisations, as they don't pertain to exactly everything, but in general, higher educated people is always better, especially at a national level.
I'll give you an example. Back in the day, most people were not literate. Why would you need to be literate? Most of us were peasants or working menial factory jobs. Why would we need to learn to read and write? What a waste of everyone's time and money. People can live very fulfilling lives as illterate peasents or factory workers. Are you now saying they're lesser people, Mr Chasey? There's more to life, you know!
This is basically your logic.
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same here - still irks me a bit as I got the top average mark out of 60 odd of us 68% - dragged down by my first year when my eldest brother died and I wasn't really in a state of mind to study. If I'd got 69% they'd have given me a viva apparently.
[Castle Donington Ladies FC - going up in '22]0 -
No Rick, higher skilled is gerally better. There is a difference.
However, you still need people to do menial and manual work, and other service type roles that can be fulfilling and are beneficial and essential to the economy. Those roles do not need a degree and the quality of the job performed will not be enhanced by a graduate doing it.
Do you really think the economy would be better if everyone had a degree?
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In some unis I applied for, there were 1-3 awarded each year. In the somewhat well regarded one I went to there were about 35. I think no matter how competitive the field, it was easier to get one of the 35, because wherever you go there's a couple of smart arses.
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I think (at least in some cases) that can also partly be seen as a failure of the graduates to articulate the benefits of their degree.
OTOH, I did a vocational degree so it's easy for me to justify the value.
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If there's such a need for people educated to university standard why are graduates having to take jobs in unskilled jobs like call centres?
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So that's what I'm saying. The problem is not the generations being the most educated ever.
It's the fact the economy in its current state can't capitalise on it, so you get tonnes of "under-utilisation".
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We seem to be arguing as though almost everyone is taking a degree, which is obviously not the case. Two years ago we had reached 37.5% of 18 year olds, leaving slightly less than 2 in every 3 choosing not to go to university. So can we stop this strawman argument that higher education is starving the economy of labour and people are wasting their time going?
BTW, Poland has about 80% of it's workforce educated to degree standard. UK is about 40%.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Some graduates do explain what they have got out it. Mine is a personal view - I had a great time at university and got a good degree, but I'm not convinced it involved many transferable skills.
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I went to Uni and the country definitely wasn't deprived of a tradesman. Although 3 years of blowing stuff up in chemistry labs wasn't totally relevant to my career in tax and treasury.
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
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Don't worry, you might just manage to avoid those two roads in Brixham if you do come down in this direction.
Joking aside, the water industry and Ofwat are two other things the Tories have broken (or allowed to break, for a more charitable interpretation).
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Why is it that every major European fintech is grossly mismanaged and overvalued.
Wefox, the latest casualty.
https://news.sky.com/story/insurance-unicorn-wefox-warns-investors-of-insolvency-risk-13137125
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Better or worse than Twitter?
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How much of it is caused by running before you can walk, because investors are shooting at your feet?
Not that I take a dim view of VCs or anything, but they can discard long term thinking in favour of a 3 year profitable exit plan.
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The spread here seems pretty wide, geographically.
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/biggest-startup-failures/
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That's true.
It's just the nature of the industry though. People bet on start-ups achieving world domination, but sometimes the business models don't really work and sometimes the risk taking entrepreneurs looking for world domination take too many risks.
Many years ago, I listened to a well known professor laughing at people who invested in the dot com bubble. His argument was that to have justified the share price of Amazon at the time, they would have needed to sell every book on the plant, and given that this clearly wasn't possible, no one should have invested. He just didn't consider that Amazon would end up selling everything on the planet and that they were actually undervalued.
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I think it is even simpler, a lot of people who consider themselves entrepreneurs or that they know how to run a business succesfully, actually have very little clue how to.
There is a wide gap between being a start up that gets good initial investment and then actually developing and delivering a sustainable long term business model.
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I'm not so much talking about the invesors - VC is just throwing enough shit at the wall and hoping some of it sticks, but more the gross negligence at the helm of the businesses that do get big.
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I am completely agreeing with you, I think a lot of these businesses suffer from exactly that, the people in charge just have little to no idea of how to run a large business. I think it is a lot of the Dunning-Kruger effect at play.
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More that some tech firms succeed despite the people running them, because the idea is good.
Can we go back to my query on whether investors sometimes induce catastrophic failure by forcing the company to move too fast?
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That's on management to run it properly no? I know everyone likes to hate on finance bros but giving access to capital is not inherently problematic.
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Might be silly question but who is it that does the valuing/overvaluing before a company gets listed?
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0
