Your parents’ wealth is more important than your degree
Uni doesn’t give social status anymore
Jack CummingsThe bank of mum and dad is more important than your degree, according to a top academic.
Going to uni will no longer set us up with top social status warns Simon Marginson, professor of international higher education at UCL.
It’s now our family background and parents’ wealth which will put us ahead – not a 2:1 or a first.
He told The Times Higher Education: “We should set aside the hubris that higher education is the principal maker of social relations.
Uni won’t boost your social mobility, but your parent’s bank balance will
“In aggregate, what happens to income of wealth, labour markets, taxation, government spending, social programmes and urban development is much more important.”
Prof Simon also said that our parents’ “super-managers’ salaries” are set to become our inheritances in the future.
He explained how this will cause inequality and an unfair society, meaning family wealth will apparently become more crucial than education to those at the bottom of society.
Simon said: “If, for the foreseeable future, we are doomed to educate a society lorded over by a new aristocracy of money in a political economy becoming even more intelligent, more informed and more confident society in which agency is more broadly distributed than now.”
But some unis are more divided than others.
Not all students take out a maintenance loan
Prince William clearly went there for a reason, and now it looks like St. Andrews has the richest students in the country.
A staggering 58 per cent of last year’s freshers didn’t need to take out a maintenance loan.
And despite living in the expensive capital, 52 per cent of first years at LSE were self-financed too.
On the other end of the scale, just 18 per cent or 7,220 of Leeds freshers turned up without a loan.
This comes after the reassuring news that grad job opportunities have shot up by 16 per cent this year.
There are now nearly 16,000 advertised vacancies waiting for the class of 2015.
But on the other hand, a horde of 350,000 grads are about to flood the market and are set to battle it out as roughly four applicants apply to every entry-level position.