What did your childhood self dream of becoming—and how close are you to living that dream today?

@KatyO83 Working for a university may not be a childhood dream, but it's much better than being an actress 👍🏼

@helenS hmm. About the same career security about now. I'm looking to get out the sector if I can as its just awful right now and getting worse.

@KatyO83 Yes, university jobs aren't safe 😕

@helenS every week another contact somewhere is getting made redundant.

Soon we'll have to see multiple unis closing.

@KatyO83 Some UK universities are still famous world-wide.

@helenS that doesn't help. There's not enough funding for domestic students and the current visa situation discourages foreign students on the money earning postgraduate positions.

I work in admissions. And our numbers fall every year. Even top Russell Group unis find it harder to get good foreign postgraduates in. Smaller unis it's becoming existential. I left a small uni last year to go to a London Russell group one which is better and domestically we have no problem hitting numbers but postgraduate is much harder work which the acedemics don't understand lol

@KatyO83 Is that a side-effect of Brexit? The lack of foreign students/postdocs?

@helenS direct effect of immigration policies.

Students have been a target for this and previous government to reduce immigration numbers.

@KatyO83 Probably because we don't need non UK students as a country. Obviously as a university you'd have a different view.

Example of that. Mate runs recruitment in London for a well known investment bank. They look to hire ~50 fresh grads every year and train them up, the nature of the business means hiring at the entry level is vital. Todays grad is tomorrow's top performer. Because of the money on offer the bar is very high, chances of getting hired are about 0.5%.

No problem sponsoring EU people to come to London, end of free movement just means a bit more paperwork.

There's 7 universities that will get your CV considered. Only one of them is in the EU, other 6 in the UK.

This suggests there's too many UK universities that aren't adding value. If you're smart and can leverage a serious degree into a high paying career then great. But lots of people would be better leaving school at 18 and getting 3 years work experience under their belt.

Bad news if you work for a university and are concerned about your job. Better news for the country if we stop people taking degrees they won't leverage into a job. Worst thing is to hear some guy say I've got a degree so I deserve a graduate job.

@JonUK41 the simple point is - student fees are £4k to £5k under what it actually costs to provide that education. So universities were told to find a way to backfill that. We did by charging overseas students, especially postgraduate ones a lot.

But then they have the Visa clamp down and unis are suddenly millions in debt.

So if student fees were £12 to 13k a year it'd be OK.

I just feel in 10 years time they'll be a conversation about lack of uni places and it's far harder to open unis than to close them.

@KatyO83 My bet is 10 years time we'll be saying good thing fewer kids go to uni, worst thing we did was expand the number of kids going to uni. We need unis to close and restrict uni to people who can leverage it..

Obviously understand you've got skin in the game so might have a different view.

@JonUK41 but if we want a high value, high skilled economy AI, green engineering etc don't we need the graduates?

We're not going to be building old style factories or going fishing again. Even agriculture will be all robotics in the future

@KatyO83 We need the right graduates. Maybe 20% of school leavers would benefit from a university education. We've got the universities to accommodate that. Compare ours with the EU. We're better at the top end but we've got too much second rate crap giving 2nd rate degrees to kids who'll never pay back their loans. Not sustainable.

The future is certainly high skill for some people but not everyone. Answer is teaching trades, teaching how to create a business and how to sell. For 80% of people that's going to make more money than wasting 3 years at some second rate uni.