It's going to be the norm for all but the best or most well-connected graduates.
We're on the road to nowhere.
Let's have a class thread! It'll be fun!
- Thread starter ymu
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It's going to be the norm for all but the best or most well-connected graduates.
We're on the road to nowhere.
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
Someone else I knew at uni was able to get a first in his dissertation because his dad knew the head of NATO in Britain and he was able to interview him. It made me feel sick. Another mate who also got a first in her dissertation and did a masters following that is now working as a fitness instructor.
I've always found that a complete lack of ambition or sense of direction can help in all this.
I'm badly paid in a pointless job and couldn't give a fuck.
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
yeah. she's not at all unhappy with work - out of all of us she's probably the one with the most secure and well paid job.
i'm also in a really shit badly paid job.
_angel_
.
Most "lower middle class" parents don't have a spare £27k tucked away, else I think they'd be more "middle/upper middle class". How many teachers can stick their hands on about £30k up front?
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
working class, carer's sell labour. unemployed are 'the reserve army of labour, so wc.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
Educationlly I've done well better than my parents ever did. I'm still a CNC operator (happy with it) though. Pass the tin opener, fray bentos is here.
MellySingsDoom
Decimated by the shrapnel of his rhetoric
I know him! He was that bloke wot took over Cuba, innie?
Also: My stepdad (spawn of NALGO bigwigs in Croydonland) always swore by Vesta curries. (Boring "family" point - grandma of Stepdad Melly hoofed around in pre-Independence India, and could whip up a mean curry herself)
TremulousTetra
prismatic universe
Why? What do want, a painting, or an understanding? [honest question]
The marxist definition is meant to be a tool, to understand societies evolution from hunter gatherer to capitalism. IF that's what you wan't, there is none better imo.
http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/th...ll-be-fun!?p=11747777&viewfull=1#post11747777
They'll go deeper into debt. Don't forget that we're a debt economy now. And others will only partly help their kids out and the kids will have to get part-time jobs etc. But middle class kids won't stop going to university for the reasons I've already given.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
I had a fucking stonking post on this precise issue, taking us on a rambling yet pertinent journey through some heroes and villains of British history, the NHS, Bevan, Thatcher and Blair, through to Picasso and Athena and bringing it all together with a kabbes/southshine contrast analysis of class.
I'm too whacked to spit it out again tonight, but I think I may have come to the conclusion that class is not about money + power at all. It's just power. Like a current has to flow if the difference in volts at the terminals forces them to 'race to the bottom'. Power is to money as volts are to amps. Trivial counter-examples need not apply, they are irrelevant. I have a tabloid lotto story to back it up too.
This is a place-marker and memory jogger for a post that I'm no longer seeing straight enough to rewrite or judge the quality of (yeah, like I do QA on my posts!). I will do so when the enthusiasm takes me, but if anyone wants to pre-empt ... go go go go go.
_angel_
.
You're talking to one who would have stopped, I don't think more debt was an option for my parents either.
It's different now. The effects of the disappearance of the country's mass industrial employment are more obvious, particualrly to school leavers. There are fewer well-paid jobs around and a lot of people make up for that by taking on more debt to maintain the illusion of ever-rising living standards. Even the middle class.
I'm not saying some won't decide not to go to university, but I think most will still find a way of paying the inflated fees.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
How is it gained, held and inherited? It is no good writing off money, money is tied with power. It's bust to look at either in isolation but they have to be seen as operating together. Currencies of breeding or connection are well and good but they are second to an inheritance that includes land and titles
Winot
I wholeheartedley agree with your viewpoint
The student fees aren't payable upfront though. They are paid back after graduation once you are earning over £21K.
stethoscope
Well-Known Member
That brings back memories of graduate fairs on campus - Arcadia, Mott, Accenture, Lloyds et al all pushing glossy brochures and shit merchandise in your face whilst offering the promise of 'great packages and careers for dynamic individuals'. Ugh.
audiotech
wav, aiff, mp3, ogg, flac
Talking Heads?
audiotech
wav, aiff, mp3, ogg, flac
A close relative of mine was cheering last week that she'd got an interview for part-time bar work. I've been told it's an "open interview" and lasts for almost half a day ffs. In the not too distant past these sort of jobs were advertised on a postcard, in the local newsagents and anyone walking in off the streets would be given the job. We're really screwed with young people being grateful for this nonsense. Wonder if they'll be silly hats to wear and dancing in between serving customers, or even during for that matter?
For what values of "better"?
Working-class, sink school kids who get to Oxford are, by definition than almost all of their peers (and probably none - Oxford had no free school meal kids in the last intake - and I'm betting the increase in state school intake is due to rich kids reduced to state school by the recession - they fraudulated the black student statistics so badly that Cameron accidentally outed them by quoting them verbatiim and causing confuddlement on Twitter that just had to be explained by some folk who have been watching this saga unfold for a while).
So yeah. "Why are they automatically better?!" I hear you screech. Because with those levels of discrimination, you have to be a fucking freak of brain-cell design to get anywhere near the place. Send your kid to Eton, and it has a default 33% chance of getting a place beforeintelligenceacademic diligence (aka nerdiness/ambition) even need be ranked to determine which third get the gig.
In any given context where discrimination can be overcome by sheer blinding merit, those that make it inside the walls are going to be the very best of the very best because they are the best of the 50,000 kids who are better than every single one of your classmates (barring the occasional throwback toff with a functioning brain and genuinely talented working- and middle-class kids who had no real special help or hindrance, they just set a goal that interested them and earned the opportunity of a lifetime.
(I'm none of these, I don't count, I have the luck of the devil - my school loved Oxbridge candidates, but laughed at me when I said I was going to apply. I think I got in because the elderly economics dude fell asleep in my interview and when they woke him up to ask me a question he said there was no point because I clearly wasn't interested in economics. I gave him a brief lecture on the illogicality of this assumption when I had applied for economics at the only other university in the country that offered PPE but otherwise could not fill out the rest of the form without making one of my three interviewers think I wasn't interested in their subject before they'd even met me (or limit my chances of university bv foregoing three other opportunities). I was an all sciences A Level student who could not get in any other way than via an interview, with no way of knowing what I will choose to study the most because I am applying to do three brand new subjects to me, and I was being blocked because only one other university offers the course I want to do? How does that work then?I don't know whether they sought legal advice before giving me an offer, but I think it was because the economics dude was a vacant old fascist whose underqualified wife got the first year politics gig and the guy was universally hated. Or economics dude had a thing for being told off by big bolshy women. I can't fathom it. My predicted A Level grades were really, really bad (given that I was applying for Oxford), and this was at a time when the standard offer for my course was ABB, not three A*. Told you I had the luck of the devil).
Interesting post. But I'm a bit lost how it related to what I'd said in the one you quoted. I was asking why working class is bettet. Anyway I don't want to spark that one up again...
Re what you say about Oxford uni. I remember my sister having an interview there. She could have gone with the A Level grades she got but was put off by the stuffy atmosphere. The sense that this place isn't for the likes of you. She's also a wheel chair user and one of the interview panel openly said to her regarding the carers she needed. They'd have to vet them as they couldn't just have anyone going there. They didn't mean from a CRB point of view, since that was taken ccare of by the procedures she uses to get care assistance anyway.
weepiper
I fix the machines that fight climate change
I got pressured by my school and my parents to apply for Oxford or Cambridge but I didn't want to because I knew I wasn't like them and I'd have been miserable there. So I went to Edinburgh instead and was surrounded by the same type of people that couldn't get into Oxford or Cambridge 
weltweit
Well-Known Member
I have a graduate job, my degree makes me very employable in my sector. However my sector is quite small where I am at the moment. Shame.
A friend who has a good graduate job, was told by a colleague that he was really impressed he could do the job with just a degree as almost everyone else had a Phd at least. (prat)
I think in good times a generic academic degree could get you a good job but that said I know there were a lot of people with academic degree's doing MBAs just so they could get your standard business studies type jobs just a few years ago. When times are tougher I think a vocational degree is of more value.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
Not sure so many of those exist. I started on 12k pretty much doing the photocopying. Well it was a bit more involved than that, there was some responsibility, but I was definately the office junior.
Oh and .. Happy Birthday frogowoman
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
I have no problem with Marxist terms! I was responding to your ill-judged troll attempt on the 'urban is such a cliche' lines. You must surely be aware of the bodies ploughed into that inanely deep furrow?
I'd love more Marxist terms here. I know what they mean. I just don't know how to fit it with:
1. Bob Crow's: What do you mean 'middle-class'
There's no such thing. If you work for a living, you are working-class.2. Modern self-employment patterns (self-employment as a tax avoidance scheme to benefit your employer, and eg desperate people who have been abandoned by the welfare state starting up an ebay 'business' to basically sell off everything they own or can gannet, just to survive.
I'd love to see an urban Trot/(A) debate about how to fit it all together in language that anyone would find accessible.
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