Empty Nest Syndrome

It's not some weird self-pity or a first-world problem, it's a very real thing.

You don't want to talk about it because there is absolutely nothing interesting to say about it, but it feels a bit like this:

"University to be turned into student housing"

OK, The Daily Mash is exaggerating, but there is a lot of truth in this.

The student's landlord makes a lot more profit than the universities they attend, who, taken as a whole together with Student Loans Company and the taxpayer, probably make a cash loss (which is fine, as long as higher education benefits society as a whole).

The Lad is now in halls on campus (two minute walk from front door to lecture theatre or laboratory block), cost £5,000 a year rent plus £9,250 tuition fees, and I'd rather the university makes the profit (or taxpayer takes a smaller loss) than some slumlord cashing in on owning something near a university.

But the university might as well just charge an all-in-price of £14,250, like at boarding school, where the fees cover education and accommodation, and have done with it.

First day at university

The Lad moved into student halls of residence at the weekend. (Rather ironically, his uni is within half an hour of our home, but he dug his heels in and insisted he was moving out, whole 'nother story.)

Mrs W had offered to drive him and his stuff down there. I assumed that kids would want to appear cool and independent, and ask their parents to park discreetly round the corner so that they could rock up with a rucksack and a couple of heavy bags, so I was going to leave them to it, but Mrs W said I should at least offer to accompany them. So I did and to my surprise, The Lad accepted and The Lass tagged along as well for good measure.

It appears he called it correctly - the car park was full of shiny 4x4s and SUVs, most students had turned up with both parents and even younger siblings.

Trolleys were provided to get stuff from the car park to the halls, and many of them had managed to fill them to the brim. One lass had six large matching suitcases and a brand new flat screen TV on hers. And I don't mean shopping trolleys, I mean the big industrial 'roll cages' that supermarkets shelf stackers use, as depicted here.

Mrs W was channelling her inner Beverley Goldberg and brought some cleaning wipes and started wiping his shelves. I did my best to be Murray Goldberg, but funnily enough it was a bit of a wrench. Even bombing round in the Toyota MR2 for forty minutes couldn't cheer me up.

University Open Days

Funnily enough, we've been doing some of this, so interesting to see an article:-

"It's important to talk about the cost of going to open days," says Rachel, a sixth-former from Plymouth, in Devon, who is looking at university choices.

"Not everyone can afford to go out of their area. Train tickets are expensive and there's most likely accommodation as well."

This is peak season for university open days, when tens of thousands of teenagers and their families are criss-crossing the country viewing places where they might study.

A return trip by train from north to south can cost £200 or even £300. And even with railcard discounts, when there might be four or five universities to visit, the open-day season can soon become an unaffordable closed door.

"Can". Yeah. Plymouth to Manchester, maybe.

There is no charge to attend these events. But Rachel says the travel costs mean she has effectively ruled out universities in the North of England.

"I wouldn't want to apply to a city I hadn't been to before, in case I'd regret it," she says.

Why does someone from Plymouth need to study in the North of England? I'm not saying there aren't sometimes specific courses in certain places (like Southampton excels at marine biology), but I doubt most people in Plymouth can't find something close to what they want at Bristol, Exeter, Bath, Southampton, Cardiff, Reading, UCL, Imperial, Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham and Warwick (plus all the ex-polys).

"It is unfair. We all know rail fares are phenomenal in this country, particularly if they're choosing to go at the last minute. Planning an open day in advance isn't always easy," she says."

Actually, rail fares aren't "phenomenal" in this country, unless you go to certain places at certain times. Mostly into London at peak hours. Travelling from Swindon to Cardiff is about £30-35 by train. Exeter is about £50, which I don't think is any more than most places in Europe.

It's usually left to parents to provide the money and organisation for their teenagers, so they can meet tutors, find out about applying for courses and check out the accommodation.

And when thousands of families are descending on a university town at the same time, the trains are not going to be cheap.

That's actually bollocks. None of the fares rise on university open days. Mostly because they're on Fridays and weekends when demand is lower on trains, anyway.

Sadie, from Hastings, in East Sussex, says her friends are working out which universities they can afford to reach.

She won't look any further north than Nottingham, which means ruling out places she might otherwise have considered, such as Newcastle and Durham.

Well, that seems like a good thing.

Sarah, from Plymouth, says she probably wouldn't go any further than London.

Which is a long sodding way from Plymouth and actually, an expensive train route. Birmingham is quicker and a similar price.

And if you think travel is expensive, wait until you find out how much more accommodation is in London.

Things which everybody already knew but are presented as news.

From the BBC:

Mothers in part-time jobs are being hit by a "pay penalty" and are often not given pay rises linked to experience, a new study has suggested.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies report found by the time a couple's first child is aged 20, many mothers earn nearly a third less than the fathers. A key factor was women working part-time in motherhood, the report said.

A gender pay gap between graduates has not improved since 1993, despite gaps narrowing for non-graduates, it added.

The original headline and article was much less nuanced and just wailed on about the 'gender pay gap' and highlighted that the 'gender pay gap' was larger for graduates than non-graduates.

Happily enough, somebody then sat down and actually read the report and did a more accurate write up to explain it's a 'mothers pay gap' and how it arises. The point about graduates is that their salaries tend to increase with seniority much more steeply than for non-graduate jobs, so hitting the pause button on pay rises by going part-time will lead to a bigger gap between mothers and everybody else.

Conversely, seeing as so few jobs require much physical strength*, any natural advantage that men used to have is being eroded. (*Call me a chauvinist, but how many female rubbish collectors do you see?) So we'd expect the 'gender pay gap' at the lower end to flatten of its own accord.

On the subject of graduates, also from the BBC:

Many graduates receive "paltry returns" for their degrees despite racking up £50,000 in debt, says the chairman of the Education Select Committee.

Robert Halfon will say in a speech on Monday, that between a fifth and a third of graduates take non-graduate jobs, and that any extra returns for having a degree "vary wildly". He will also suggest that too many people are studying academic degrees.

University leaders maintain that a degree remains an excellent investment.

Well duh. There are only so many jobs that really need graduates (precious few, if you ask me). If more people are doing degrees than there are graduate jobs, clearly, for the excess, the whole exercise is pointless, purely in career terms (good fun though). People were saying this twenty years ago when Tony Blair went mad and decided half of school leavers 'should' go to university.

And university leaders would say that, wouldn't they?

Tory MP nails it.

From The Daily Mail:

Tory MP brands British universities 'self-serving cartels' as he quits Bath over vice-chancellor's £450,000-a-year paycheck

"Tory and UKIP voters are all thick" vs "Universities are hot-beds of leftie brainwashing"

Click picture for full article:



Another goodie from the BBC:

We know that almost three million extra people turned out to vote in the EU referendum [compared to the General Election in the previous year]. Saying who they are - and what happens if they reappear - is where it gets difficult...

The real mystery is whether those additional voters in 2016 will come out again to vote in the 2017 general election - and what difference they could make... Are they people who are totally dissatisfied with the political system and became serial non-voters but were unable to resist the chance to give the establishment a thoroughly good kicking at the referendum?

I suspect that's correct. Although I have only missed voting in one election in twenty four years (it was a local election and I simply forgot), I voted 'Leave' largely for the fun of stirring up the hornets' nest.

New-builds blamed for blighting air quality ...

So BBC Scotland reports the findings of an interesting academic study into domestic air pollution:

Specialists at the school's Mackintosh Environmental Research Unit (MEARU) said modern homes were being built to be airtight. 

This causes a build-up of harmful chemicals and moisture if householders do not open windows or vents. 

The unit has made a series of recommendations to reduce pollutants. Prof Tim Sharpe, head of the MEARU, said: "Poor indoor air quality, particularly in bedrooms, is hard for people to detect. 

"There are clear links between poor ventilation and ill-health so people need to be aware of the build up of CO2 and other pollutants in their homes and their potential impact on health." 

The MEARU conducted a survey of 200 homes which were constructed to modern, airtight standards. It found that most householders kept trickle vents closed, and bedroom windows closed at night.

But a cursory glance at the Energy Saving Trust website suggests one man's 'ventilation' is another man's 'draught':

Unless your home is very new, you will lose some heat through draughts around doors and windows, gaps around the floor, or through the chimney. 

Professional draught-proofing of windows, doors and blocking cracks in floors and skirting boards can cost around £200, but can save up to £25 to £35 a year on energy bills. DIY draught proofing can be much cheaper. Installing a chimney draught excluder could save between £20 and £25 a year as well.

With the north winds blowing blizzards well into the back end of April this seemed quite topical.

Fun with student numbers

From the BBC:

More than a million young people will be enrolling in universities in England and Germany this autumn. But in financial terms their experience couldn't be more different.

In Germany tuition fees have been abolished, while England has the most expensive fees in Europe, with every indication that they are likely to be allowed to nudge even higher...

In Germany, about 27% of young people gain higher education qualifications. In the UK, the comparable figure is 48%. The expansion in university entry in the UK has been one of those changes that has been so big that no one really notices.[wot?]

A report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development last month claimed that more than half of graduates were overqualified for their jobs. In contrast, the institute said that only 10% of German graduates were in non-graduate jobs.

Same old, same old.

In either country, about one-quarter of jobs are "graduate jobs". So nearly all of the one-quarter of Germans who go to uni get graduate jobs; and about half of the one-half of Brits who go to uni get graduate jobs.
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If you ask me, the German system makes more sense. The cost to the taxpayer ends up much the same whether you send one-quarter to uni for "free" or whether you send one-half to uni and impose a graduate tax aka tuition fees, and this was YPP policy anyway (there is nothing new under the sun).

The article does make the point that has been made here before (probably by The Stigler) that it might still be worthwhile going to uni, because it gives you the edge when applying for a non-graduate job, but this just pushes the problem onto somebody else (the non-graduates looking for non-graduate jobs).

I suppose the Germans can get away with it because their secondary education system is much more egalitarian, so everybody has a fairly equal chance of ending up at uni. If the UK did it, there would be squealing that the reduction in the number of student places disproportionately hits people from state schools.

The counter-argument to that is: so what? Some people get twelve years "free" state primary and secondary education; other people pay for those twelve years out of their own pockets and then get three years' "free" higher education. The former group probably still gets better value for money.

And also because German unemployment is lower, so there is less pressure to mask unemployment figure by getting a million or two young people off the books for three years.

Nick Clegg belatedly calls a spade a spade.

From The Tab:

A vote-hungry Labour party would scrap tuition fees and replace them with a graduate tax.

Ed Miliband’s party plan to cap fees at a maximum £6,000 a year and place an annual levy on wages.

Almost seven million students finish uni with up to £40,000 of debt with less than half will land a graduate level job. According to the Sunday Times, student loans are never paid off in full by 45 per cent of students, leaving a £90 billion black hole by 2042.

From The Metro:

Meanwhile, Mr Clegg admitted he ‘regretted massively’ the furore caused by his tuition fees U-turn.

‘What we have introduced is a graduate tax and I really wish we had called it a graduate tax at the time,’ he claimed.

That's the whole point, which most people missed at the time.

If the amount of the loan repayments are based on a graduate's income, with the unpaid balance written off after a few decades, then that is to all intents and purposes like a 'graduate tax'.

The Tories only changed the system to discredit the Lib Dems because of the AV referendum, keen eyed observers would have noticed that the new system is actually 'progressive', in that graduates on low incomes would pay little or nothing, i.e. less than the previous system, and graduates on good incomes would pay a lot more.

It seems like a shit way of doing things, but that's how it is.

So assuming that Labour write off the nominal amount of loans, and just have a graduate tax of 9% on annual income above £16,910 (as at present), the amount which graduates have to pay will be no different; it's purely a psychological thing and bookkeeping entries.

So fair play to Labour, tactical genius.
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@ Mombers. The Universal Credit withdrawal rate is officially 65%, but that applies to income net of PAYE.

If you earn less than the NIC thresholds, the rate is indeed 65%. If you earn more enough to trgger NIC but no income tax, the rate = 1 - (0.35*0.88)/1.138) = 73%. If you earn more than £10,000, the effective taper rate = 1 - ((0.68*0.35)/1.138) = 79%.

UC is supposed to replace Housing Benefit but not Council Tax Benefit. But Council Tax Benefit doesn't exist any more, each local council just invents their own Council Tax Reduction scheme (which is a lot less generous than Council Tax Benefit, rightly or wrongly), whatever the withdrawal rate is, this will nudge the rates mentioned above that much closer to 100%.

Well, duh.

From City AM:

Graduates earn £9,000 a year more than non-graduates, research released yesterday by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills shows. That figure covers the entire working-age population – ages 16 to 64. Young graduates, aged between 21 and 30, earn £6,000 more on average than their non-graduate counterparts...

“These figures show that going to university is a great investment,” said Greg Clark, the universities, science and cities minister.

Is everybody else thinking what I'm thinking..?

A common criticism made by economists is that the link is not necessarily a causal one. Students who get a degree tend to be smarter on average before they go to university. The figures do not control for that effect.

Further hilarity at gov.uk:

Born in Middlesbrough, Greg studied economics at Cambridge before earning his PhD from the London School of Economics.
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UPDATE: Mombers says "Would love to see the figures once doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, engineers and any other professions that require a degree for entry are stripped out."

That's the sad thing, there is no real requirement for accountants to have a degree, but over the past twenty or thirty years, nearly all Chartered Accountants have made it a pre-condition, even if your degree is completely irrelevant. I've had younger colleagues with degrees in glaciology and ancient history, FFS.

Readers' letters of the day

From today's Metro:

When Alex Salmond first went to Downing Street to discuss the questions on the ballot paper with David Cameron, he wanted Yes/No and devo max tick boxes but Mr Cameron and the other two parties only wanted Yes/No.

Now, suddenly, Gordon Brown comes to Scotland offering the people of Scotland devo max if they vote No. To me, this is what Mr Salmond wanted. Now devo max might be given without the people voting for it.

Andrew Nutt, South Wales.
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As I understand it, at the momembet Scottish and other EU students, with the exception of those from the remainder of Britain, do not pay university tuition fees. After independence, the rest of the UK will have to be treated as any other EU country.

It follows that a Scottish government will have to choose between allowing UK students to study without these fees, or introducing fees for all. A hard choice to be made between allowing a flood of English, Welsh and Northern Irish applicatns, or imposing fees on Scottish students.

David Moss, Lancashire.
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So health secretary Jeremy Hunt wants to fine people for visiting A&E. What about people who do extreme sports? What about the person who crosses the road in the wrong place?

I don't get drunk but this suggestion is stupid.

Jean Prior, Hertfordshire.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

From the BBC:

The UK is "deeply elitist" according to an analysis of the backgrounds of more than 4,000 business, political, media and public sector leaders. Small elites, educated at independent schools and Oxbridge, still dominate top roles, suggests the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission study...

It found that those who had attended fee-paying schools included 71% of senior judges, 62% of senior armed forces officers, 55% of permanent secretaries (the most senior civil servants) and 53% of senior diplomats...

Figures for top people who went to Oxford and Cambridge paint a similar picture. Some 75% of senior judges, 59% of the Cabinet, 57% of permanent secretaries, 50% of diplomats, 47% of newspaper columnists, 38% of the House of Lords, 33% of the shadow cabinet and 24% of MPs hold Oxbridge degrees.

Yes, the top level of the public sector is a bunch of self-serving, self-selected, inbred, clueless twats, we knew this.

But I think that Oxford and Cambridge are between a rock and a hard place here.

Oxford says that 56.8% of its intake is from state schools; for Cambridge it's 63.3%. So they're still skewed towards private school pupils, but it's not out of all proportion.

Now, those top two universities want to get the cleverest students, with a reasonable smattering of children of supremely wealthy parents to make large donations. Fair enough. And if those top two universities have the cleverest students, whether from state school or private school, we would expect their alumni to be at the top of many professions.

So ultimately their dilemma is this: if we take the most able state school pupils in preference to some private school also-rans, then we are doing out bit for equality and social mobility. But if we do that, then even more of our alumni will get into the top jobs and we end up being slammed for being elitist again.

And quite possibly, the equality campaigners are confusing cause and effect.

It's not so much that the self-selected people get to the top because they went to Oxford or Cambridge; they probably got into Oxford or Cambridge for the same reason that they get top civil service jobs. The same applies to those who went to private school.

"Half of meddling Higher Education quangocrats could be sacked, say students"

Via MBK, from The Telegraph:

Half of the so-called great and good who head up one quango after another should be sacked as part of sweeping reforms to Britain’s “messy, muddled” system for running higher education system, according to leading students.

Froderick Loud, the former president of the Students Union, said Britain had “too many Vice Chancellors, Provosts and quangos”, and think tanks in cities such as London, London, Cambridge and Oxford should be closed or merged.

The existing system of meddling in higher education was “unnecessary and inefficient” because large numbers of overpaid ex-lecturers and failed politicians are “trying to do too many things at once”, he said.

A fellow student also suggested that elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge should focus on research and stop pandering to do-gooders and busybodies altogether – affecting well over 6,000 civil servants a year who are currently enrolled at the two competing government departments, the Department for Education and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

The comments were made just after last orders at a student pub near Gresham College, London, by somebody on the second year of his BSc in Sports Studies who had been propping up the bar for the last six hours.

Woman to be disciplined by Exeter University after being named 'Britain’s most uptight student' by dating website

From the Independent

A student is set to be disciplined by her university after she was crowned “Britain’s Most Uptight Student” by a dating website – even though it is now reported that her "claim to fame" had been made up as a joke.

Elina Desaine, a Latvian-born student at Exeter University, won £500 in cash for her favourite charity and a year’s supply of communion wafers for her supposedly puritan habits – which, it was claimed, included keeping a “friendship list” of her “little old ladies” and praying with “up to three men a week”.

But now Desaine is being punished because her win “may cause reputational damage to the university”, according to a spokesperson for the University of Exeter.

"Half of graduates are working in jobs which do not need a degree"

Says the Daily Mail's headline, and the first bullet point it this:

* 38% of over-21s are now graduates, up from 17% just two decades ago

Hardly surprising is it?

Assuming that there is a clear definition of "graduate job" and society hasn't changed that much since, twenty years ago 17% of people were graduates and there were enough graduate jobs for all of them.

We have doubled the number of graduates overall without increasing the number of graduate jobs, so clearly half of graduates will end up working in non-graduate jobs. It does not really matter whether they do "hard" degrees (medicine, engineering) required to be able to do the sort of jobs which will always require a degree or "Mickey Mouse" degrees, the number of jobs in (medicine, engineering) does not change much.

The figures aren't quite as stark as this - rather unsurprisingly, the longer ago you graduated, the less likely you are to still be in a non-graduate job - but that's the general trend.

Sucker Bets

I'm a bit of a math geek, and especially a probability geek, so this sort of story interests me:-

I was going to say that nothing is left to chance. But chance is now contemplated, considered and factored. You might be aware of Peter Edwards of Denbighshire, who proudly watched his grandson, Harry Wilson, come on to play for Wales against Belgium in the 87th minute on Tuesday night, thereby winning Edwards £125,000 on the £50 bet he placed when Harry was 18 months old. Finely romantic; old-fashioned, almost. But there are other, increasingly popular parental bets that are more calculating, principally betting on children to do well at A-levels or university.

Graham Sharpe, of William Hill, who paid out on Wilson, says it is now taking around a dozen or so bets like these every week. Ladbrokes says hundreds of parents have bet with it. Algorithms are involved. Odds, for example, on a student with three Bs at A-level getting a first in media studies at Leeds University are 5-1. Be warned, though: Sharpe will want to know some history, following the first bet he ever took, when the boy's headmaster rang up the next day and asked if could put a bet on, too.

I could understand placing a couple of quid on a grandson. Something where the bet is a bit of fun to have with your son. But £50?

Let's break it down: the population of Wales is 3m. So, 1.5m of those are boys. Of those, you'll get maybe 10 new players in a squad each year. So, over the possible playing career, say 150 people will get picked. So, the realistic odds are 10,000/1, and he got 2,500/1. It's already a bad bet, if you're doing it for money. The bookie is already taking 75% of that money. Plus, he tied up £50 for over a decade.

But it gets worse when you consider how many Englishmen who aren't good enough to play for England will fly the daffodil of convenience when it suits them so they can play international football.

"Betting on your kids degree" is even worse. If someone's got to look at your kids A-level results, that actuarial work is going to get factored into the bookie's costs, and therefore your odds.

You really can't beat the bookies. They work out the risk, then factor a margin on for costs and profit. The sports pundit Angus Loughran, aka Statto was declared bankrupt a few years ago, owing debts to a bookie. And he knew far more than most of the population about football betting.