Graduates From Uk's 10 Elite Unis Face Dead-End Jobs

[interestrateripoff]

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/923666/Top-graduates-from-UKs-10-elite-unis-face-dead-end-jobs.html

STUDENTS at Britain's leading universities are having to take jobs as shop assistants and shelf stackers when they finally get their degrees.

Super-bright graduates on more than 20 courses in elite institutions are struggling to find the professional positions they expected.

Many of these talented students achieved straight As in their A Levels and GCSEs just to get a place. Normally they could have walked into a top job on a big salary.

But the recession means many are having to take menial jobs on low wages to get by.

Our investigation looked at prospects for students on every course at the top-rated universities after Oxford and Cambridge, including Durham, Warwick, Bristol, York and St Andrews in Scotland.

We examined hundreds of pages of figures compiled by the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

Each year they ask graduates how they are doing six months after their courses finish.

We discovered 21 courses where the first or second job they were most likely to get was "Sales Assistant or Retail Cashier".

Talented graduates are spending their days stacking shelves, manning the tills and pushing trolleys as in the examples in our graphic below.

Our figures do not include students taking gap years to travel.

Shocking I mean who would have predicted this, where is our knowledge based economy?

Still at least they have the debt to go with the qualification which is racking up interest. Now they can't get jobs to pay down the debt.

Degree anyone?

[Ruffneck]

no problem , just get more students to take gap years for travel

and why stop at a year? why not 5 years , or a decade?

[fadeaway]

I wonder what they studied.

[Minos]

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/923666/Top-graduates-from-UKs-10-elite-unis-face-dead-end-jobs.html

Shocking I mean who would have predicted this, where is our knowledge based economy?

Still at least they have the debt to go with the qualification which is racking up interest. Now they can't get jobs to pay down the debt.

Degree anyone?

Obviously not the super bright graduates.

[goldilocksporridge]

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/923666/Top-graduates-from-UKs-10-elite-unis-face-dead-end-jobs.html

Shocking I mean who would have predicted this, where is our knowledge based economy?

Still at least they have the debt to go with the qualification which is racking up interest. Now they can't get jobs to pay down the debt.

Degree anyone?

Maybe the fact that they have to do menial jobs proves that they are not actually super bright - Just a good at exams, not being good at practical application.

[Errol]

If your degree isn't from a Russell Group Uni then it's hardly worth the paper it's written on, frankly.

[hilltop]

If your degree isn't from a Russell Group Uni then it's hardly worth the paper it's written on, frankly.

Who can tell the difference? It is all perception, or snobbery.

[goldilocksporridge]

I don't know how old you are,but in the last recession,it was the same ie grads taking call centre jobs.generally speaking ,those who attend the Russell group uni's have much better job prospects.so if they're stacking shelves,then the likelihood is that(absent the self starters),those from worse uni's are suffering even more.

and no i didn't attend one.

Attended an new university, one of those ones which were polytechs or college at- Worked all the way through university at jobs like call centre, security - maybe this the problem with them - no practical work experience.

Edited August 29, 2010 by goldilocksporridge

[Cicero]

Attended an new university, one of those ones which were polytechs or college at- Worked all the way through university at jobs like call centre, security - maybe this the problem with them - no practical work experience.

Or perhaps they are rubbish?

[goldilocksporridge]

Or perhaps they are rubbish?

Well I suppose if they have managed to get really good exam results - they might start in a crappy job, and then after some experience they will rise up - and be your boss one day - sadly.

[Cicero]

Well I suppose if they have managed to get really good exam results - they might start in a crappy job, and then after some experience they will rise up - and be your boss one day - sadly.

The meritocracy of stupidity enslaves us all.

[Bruce Banner]

My eldest daughter had a hard time getting a permanent staff job at a major French aerospace company, she had to work through an agency for a couple of years before getting a decent staff position.

The problem? She didn't have a good enough degree .

A first class MEng in Aeronautical Engineering from Imperial College London was not considered as good as a comperable degree from a French Uni.

[Cicero]

My eldest daughter had a hard time getting a permanent staff job at a major French aerospace company, she had to work through an agency for a couple of years before getting a decent staff position.

The problem? She didn't have a good enough degree .

A first class MEng in Aeronautical Engineering from Imperial College London was not considered as good as a comperable degree from a French Uni.

Interesting and worrying at the same time.

[interestrateripoff]

A first class MEng in Aeronautical Engineering from Imperial College London was not considered as good as a comperable degree from a French Uni.

Is there any reason why a UK degree is not considered the same as a French one? Is the UK course inferior or is it more the French ensuring that there jobs go to French nationals (I'm assuming that you nor your daughter are French). This would appear a very good way to side step EU employment laws, sorry your degree is crap you should have got a French one.

[Bruce Banner]

Is there any reason why a UK degree is not considered the same as a French one? Is the UK course inferior or is it more the French ensuring that there jobs go to French nationals (I'm assuming that you nor your daughter are French). This would appear a very good way to side step EU employment laws, sorry your degree is crap you should have got a French one.

I don't know the answer to that, but Imperial's Aeronautical Engineering Department is highly regarded in this country.

[Cicero]

I don't know the answer to that, but Imperial's Aeronautical Engineering Department is highly regarded in this country.

French protectionism in action: "French jobs for French people".

[mijas99]

Is there any reason why a UK degree is not considered the same as a French one? Is the UK course inferior or is it more the French ensuring that there jobs go to French nationals (I'm assuming that you nor your daughter are French). This would appear a very good way to side step EU employment laws, sorry your degree is crap you should have got a French one.

In Spain a lot of companies will ask that your degree gets certified that it is as good as a Spanish equivalent. Unfortunately most of the time the UK degree fails because the Spanish regulators have strict measures that mean you need to have done specific modules that may not have been covered in the UK degree. So a student with a UK degree must go to a Spanish uni to top up on the modules that their degree didnt contain (a Spanish degree is 5 years, compared to 3 years in the UK).

For anyone who wants to get a graduate job in Spain with a UK degree the best option is to work for 3-4 yeards in the UK first, then to appy to Spanish jobs, then they will take your experience as the main qualification rather than the degree.

Of course, there are no such problems for a Spanish graduate who wants to get a job in the UK.

[porca misèria]

I don't know the answer to that, but Imperial's Aeronautical Engineering Department is highly regarded in this country.

Might've been the same story as a company in the UK requiring a Masters degree? Or of course, equivalent experience, which she had after those two years with them.

[xux42]

If your degree isn't from a Russell Group Uni then it's hardly worth the paper it's written on, frankly.

Cobblers.

Its definitely worth more than the paper its written on.

How much is a sheet of heavy paper and 0.2 ml of ink again?

[Kyoto]

Yawn - this anecdotal of graduates stacking supermarket shelves has been around for as long as I can remember.

Getting a degree is probably the best thing you can do for your life and employment prospects.

And 99 times of 100, going to a top tier University over a mediocre one will pay off in the long run.

Even if I was stacking shelves now I wouldn't regret doing my degree. (As it happened it helped me increase my salary 18 times over, but ho hum.)

Edited August 29, 2010 by Kyoto

[Tiger Woods?]

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/923666/Top-graduates-from-UKs-10-elite-unis-face-dead-end-jobs.html

Shocking I mean who would have predicted this, where is our knowledge based economy?

Still at least they have the debt to go with the qualification which is racking up interest. Now they can't get jobs to pay down the debt.

Degree anyone?

Clearly retail pays very high wages, otherwise graduates wouldn't be earning the extra 400k during their lifetime over and above that earned by people without a degrees? Otherwise student fees wouldn't be justifiable now would they...

[Kyoto]

If your degree isn't from a Russell Group Uni then it's hardly worth the paper it's written on, frankly.

And again tell that to my girlfriend who went from waiting to tables, to a former polytecnic uni, to earning £40k within the space of about 4 years.

Education is the best thing a person can do, even if the only choice is available is the university of butt****** ohio.

There will always be enough examples floating around to feed stories such as these, but education must held uptold billions the world over improve their prospects every day.

Edited August 29, 2010 by Kyoto

[Bruce Banner]

Might've been the same story as a company in the UK requiring a Masters degree? Or of course, equivalent experience, which she had after those two years with them.

She has a Masters degree with three years completed at Imperial plus a year exchange at a French Uni, which helped a lot. She returned speaking fluent French. Her current job involves liason with customers' engineers and she sometimes gets complimented on her English .

[homeless]

In Spain a lot of companies will ask that your degree gets certified that it is as good as a Spanish equivalent. Unfortunately most of the time the UK degree fails because the Spanish regulators have strict measures that mean you need to have done specific modules that may not have been covered in the UK degree. So a student with a UK degree must go to a Spanish uni to top up on the modules that their degree didnt contain (a Spanish degree is 5 years, compared to 3 years in the UK).

For anyone who wants to get a graduate job in Spain with a UK degree the best option is to work for 3-4 yeards in the UK first, then to appy to Spanish jobs, then they will take your experience as the main qualification rather than the degree.

Of course, there are no such problems for a Spanish graduate who wants to get a job in the UK.

its 4 years in scotland, its england where they hand out first class honours after 3 years.

anyhow its pretty much obvious to anyone now that a degree is no guarrantee of a good job, it was for any baby boomers that got paid to go through uni and came out the other end debt free, but for kids today its just a way to keep them off the dole queues a bit longer and make the unemployment figures look better.

There will never need to be full employment ever again, society needs to adjust to this instead of depressing half the nation because they apply for 500 jobs and dont even get an interview.

Employees cherry pick the very best candidates when filling the positions simply because they can, so if your not the super brain of your course then your best just getting out now and go get a job and try climbing the ranks that way.

half a dozen people can sit in a factory now and make say every plasterboard nail the world ever needs now, compound this for everything and a couple of million people can create everything. The rest of the workers just fight each other to the bottom trying to sell it.

go out enjoy you life and thank your god you dont have to spend 10 hours a day working anymore, just accept you will consume less.

[The Ayatollah Buggeri]

Isn't it interesting how the contributors to this thread have accepted the assertions in this argument as gospel?

If the OP's posting had been of a story in The Guardian complaining that Government spending cuts would hurt the poor, then the responses would have been along the lines of 'they would say that, wouldn't they'. But whenever it's an assertion that higher education is useless, the usual 'graduate of the university of hard knocks' suspects all come piling in with cheerleading replies. I think it's worth bearing in mind that the News of the World is a paper whose readership consists overwhelmingly of people who didn't go to university, many of whom didn't go because they didn't have the academic aptitude to do so. Therefore, a 'university is useless' message is exactly what you'd expect to find in that paper: it's no more surprising than a Telegraph editorial calling for tax cuts for the middle classes. Newspapers say what their core audience wants to hear.

My eldest daughter had a hard time getting a permanent staff job at a major French aerospace company, she had to work through an agency for a couple of years before getting a decent staff position.

Entirely par for the course. First degree graduates who walk into a professional or managerial job - even graduates from a Russell Group university (I teach in one, and keep tabs on where our graduates end up) - are the exception rather than the rule. I had to work in a cinema for a year after completing a PhD before getting a job that made use of the qualification. Look at what those graduates are doing five years after finishing rather than six months and I suspect that you'll find very few in shelf-stacking jobs.

And as for the News of the Screws finding 21 courses in which a majority of graduates were in non-graduate jobs six months after graduating among the 'top' (by which I presume they mean the Russell Group) universities, that's 21 out of about 8,000 first degree programmes offered in the 20 institutions, a fact that the story conveniently omits to mention.

Edited August 29, 2010 by The Ayatollah Buggeri