Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[garbon]

There are so many intermediate cases these days though. The BBC, recognising this, introduced a new classification system that probably makes more sense for 21st century UK. It hasn't really caught on though.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2013/newsspec_5093/index.stm

Fun little calculator for anyone who wants to see where they might fit in here.

My east London husband ultimately has called the test suss if we are both "elite" in a small one bedroom flat in our part of London.

[Sheilbh]

I'd add on the class thing it's why I'm not keen on the requirement for workers to have a degree in areas they didn't used to - like police or nursing. In part because the argument I've heard for it is that it's necessary for status and to show an appropriate level of respect for those jobs and I just hate that that is tied to degrees not just a basic thing you give all people or at least tied to (the dignity of) labour.

I think it's also basically closing off more and more avenues of a "career" for people who don't go to university and increasing the sense they will have jobs (while there's also increases in precarity and insecurity in those jobs).

[Valmy]

Especially as University in the UK is weirdly expensive...even for an American.

[Sheilbh]

Yes and no - it is but it is structures and functions very differently. And with the wider education reforms by both parties (that the current government is unpicking) there's been a huge expansion in working class attainment at high school and the number going to university (including the elite universities). The fees are a big problem - as is the wider funding model of universities - but education and access is an area where things have improved quite significantly in the last twenty five years (like pensions).

Edit: I'd add there are also slightly different schemes and costs associated with degrees that lead to public sector jobs - eg the NHS, police army etc may bear a big chunk of those costs.

[HVC]

When you say nurses didn't need degrees was nursing treated like a trade school before? I mean surely they had training.

*edit* for example, as far as I recall Ontario has 3 levels. College trained (basic), university trained and ones with masters who can diagnose and prescribe medication.

[garbon]

Especially as University in the UK is weirdly expensive...even for an American.

They do have a much better deal at top level universities though.

[HisMajestyBOB]

There are so many intermediate cases these days though. The BBC, recognising this, introduced a new classification system that probably makes more sense for 21st century UK. It hasn't really caught on though.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2013/newsspec_5093/index.stm

Fun little calculator for anyone who wants to see where they might fit in here.

Oh cool I'm in the Elite. 

[Richard Hakluyt]

There are so many intermediate cases these days though. The BBC, recognising this, introduced a new classification system that probably makes more sense for 21st century UK. It hasn't really caught on though.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2013/newsspec_5093/index.stm

Fun little calculator for anyone who wants to see where they might fit in here.

My east London husband ultimately has called the test suss if we are both "elite" in a small one bedroom flat in our part of London.

I told you it was easy to get elite 

[Sheilbh]

When you say nurses didn't need degrees was nursing treated like a trade school before? I mean surely they had training.

*edit* for example, as far as I recall Ontario has 3 levels. College trained (basic), university trained and ones with masters who can diagnose and prescribe medication.

Yeah - and to be clear it still is treated like a trade school/apprenticeship. I was speaking to a student nurse about this and there is zero academic learning in lectures or seminars or tutorials, not really in the wider academic community and from memory I don't even think there were exams. It's not like doctors where there's a few years of academic study before you enter the practical period.

The student nurses are entirely trained practically on the wards as they used to be - just they get paid less and accrue some student loans.

They do have a much better deal at top level universities though.

Yeah there are differences and a really key one is that in the UK unlike the US and I think most of Europe there are basically no private university. So Oxford and Cambridge are public universities - they've also actually (because they get so much attention) done pretty well at attracting more state school educated, more working class and more diverse cohorts. The step down from Oxbridge (the Russel Group universities) by contrast have become narrower and more private school from the people now getting rejected by Oxbridge.

This was part of the theory of top-up fees though was basically universities would sort by price so only the top level universities would charge the full amount. As it turned out basically all universities just increased their fees to the maximum level allowed.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Yeah, my wife worked at the University of Lancashire and always insists that many of their degrees were essentially vocational training. So not the impractical gender studies by people of average academic ability straw man so beloved by the right.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah - and I do wonder how many of those career options need to be tied to degrees. I think there's a self-reinforcing credentialism that I don't like and I think excludes 50$ of the country.

There's some point around "quality" of degree. But I don't think there's an easy solution. And I think that "quality" point is perhaps particularly true with vmore vocational degrees - in that well designed courses with really tight links to industry will be really valuable for people in a way that a vocational degree without those elements perhaps won't (but you get the credentialism). I think about this a lot with the much maligned "media studies" where from my understanding there are basically a handful of courses that are taken seriously by the industry - but many, many more courses and students elsewhere who I think are possibly being sold a bit of a bag of goods.

With the "gender studies" or humanities in general I think that's a bit where ultimately the reputation of the university pays. Andy Burnham did English Literature (first ever PM with that degree ) at Cambridge (first PM since Stanley Baldwin ). Doing English at a relatively "top level"/"elite" university like that will open lots of doors - doing it at a university with a less good reputation won't. But I think students are on to that and generally mae those choices. Whereas I think it's some (not all) of the vocational degrees particularly in very desirable sectors that maybe raise hopes a bit. But the economics of both for universities probably justifies it.

It's totally different because it's not university, or regulated in the same and it is a vocational post-graduate course - but I always think of this with the vocational course to become a barrister. It was something I was interested in but you look at the numbers and there's really relatively few places for the mandatory practical training in chambers and there's basically no control on the vocational course numbers. So you have thousands of young people who'll have invested a lot applying for 6-700 places each year. I think it's really unfair on those students (the solicitor route is far more balanced/aligned with needs from law firms/in house and more open and there are other routes in now. I got my training by paralegaling at a firm and doing well - chambers don't have paralegals. Where I work now we hired a paralegal and they've been great so we're going to put together the requirements to train them so they qualify as a solicitor. Similarly there are solicitor apprentices now (which I'm a really big fan of).

Edit: Incidentally think we should probably require Oxbridge about PMs - I had no idea all of the Oxbridge PMs were actualy from Oxford. I feel like Oxford has a lot more to answer for than I'd realised and Cambridge, with the exception of the traitors, rather less (Obviously Churchill, Callaghan and Major didn't go to university and Brown is Scottish.)

[Josquius]

.

I would add from that book (and so many other fantastic books on this) and those stories, that this is a bit why I slightly push back on Raz's suggestion that the working class and union movement of the 19th century weren't reading Marxists or theory - because I think in so many of those stories self-education, self-improvement, reading groups, workers' libraries plays such a huge role. Brains and interest has always been equally distributed in the working class and they need rescuing from the condescension of posterity - which I think can include the contrast between them and middle class "intellectuals", the working class has always been replete with intellectuals too. You know Tom Shaw learned German and French and was participating in international trade union meetings with German and French socialists on the correct attitude to the Bolsheviks - these are not naive rustics.

But that was a ministry that also included hereditary peers like Lord Haldane and (as is often the case with Labour and Liberal cabinets of that era) a representative of the Wedgwood family. But I think it is absurd to describe a cabinet as more working class in which everyone has a degree (often from elite universities) and often then have a professional background working for NGOs, charities, political organisations or the public sector (not in frontline roles). 50% of the country do not go to university and there are very few people with that background in Parliament - in fact, I think there's basically zero MPs with a professional background in manual labour for the first time in decades (since before universal suffrage). Even Blair's cabinets had people like Alan Johnson or John Prescott. I think it's why I (and many others) like Rayner so much is that she comes from that type of background - working in social care, then doing a part-time degree in it and getting into politics through the union movement. I think it's partly why I liked the Green candidate for Gorton and Denton as well.

The working life of more than 50% of the country is profoundly under-represented. The jobs have changed - it would be people from hospitality, retail, tradespeople, construction, railways, busdrivers, postal workers, care homes, Deliveroo riders etc - rather than the mills, the mines and the factories (though factories, oil and gas workers etc all still exist). I actually think the arguments among and between Oxbridge and Russel Group graduates over their class has a slightly unreal, slightly Four Yorkshireman quality - and slightly erases the actual existing working class, for something resembling a working caste status even when it's reached a fairly homeopathic level (my favourite was a successful Labour candidate's campaign video citing that, I think it was their great-grandfather worked in the mines in that area ). I think it's absolutely fine for them to consider that they have a working class background that is profoundly important to their identity, but their class position is not the same as the 50%+ working in those other sectors and is basically indistinguishable from very many Tory, SNP, Lib Dem MPs (which is, I think, a problem in a party of labour and the trade union movement).

Key thing there though, is go back 50+ years and if you were growing up in a working class family then no matter how talented you were university was likely closed off to you.
These days, despite some challenge and backsliding, we live in a far more meritocratic society.
Odds are if you've got a head on your shoulders then you wouldn't have stayed working on the shop floor and would have gone to uni but instead.

Maybe times will change again. The uni system is screwed up and lots of chatter if you want a decent job in the age of AI to become a plumber.

But when comparing the current crop of adults to those of a century ago we cant forget this.
Talented young people for the past few decades have been herded a certain way.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I have quizzed Oxford graduates of my acquaintance and the general opinion, from a bunch of generally quite nice people, is that the PPE embryonic politicians are a right bunch of obnoxious bellends.

I may have asked leading questions though 

Plus Monty Python are Cambridge, we will just have to gloss over the traitors.

[garbon]

Cambridge > Oxford