Did you go to an 'elite' university, and was it useful?

[mms]

but most are just there because they can't think of anything better to do...

most people are there cos 3 alevels is no longer the standard, you have to have a degree, for an ok job, it doesn't matter to most employers what it was, which is kind of part of the problem as there is no depth or analysis of what that person has actually done by themselves during that degree.

lets face it, most education is really poor, i was one of few people when i went to uni to who hadn't done coursework, my head of history at 6th form read from 2 books, which i could have got from a library and done myself. university for me was being able being able to break out and shape ideas that i wasn't allowed to express at that level because i was given no assistance or help to do that, but in a class of 25 with lots of targets, i can't really blame the teachers.

 

[gek-opel]

Yes mms, but ideally that would not be the case. Most jobs just require numeracy and literacy, and then various other, non-academic skills. Spending so much time and money training people in academic disciplines they neither want to do nor need to do seems, well, perverse. Surely that money could be better spent fully funding a reduced, better targeted (an impossible sticking point perhaps there, I will admit) system...?
I mean unless there is something I'm missing here? Education as a good in itself (as asides on the one hand from the intellectual curiosity of the individual, and the potential future utility of the knowledge/skills on the other) surely declines greatly in value from a high marginal starting point (ie reading and writing and arithmetic) declining to near zero for degree level academia. Of course it's now an inflationary, self-perpetuating system.

I don't think I expressed a single idea at A-level. I don't think that's the point of them, is it?