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Services. 2026-07-13 12:03:32 - Paul D. Foy - GoingToUniversity I thought I'd do a talk about going to university. This is a stream-of-consciousness post. I haven't prepared it. I haven't even thought about it before today when I was prompted by an article that I saw on LinkedIn. I like expressing my opinion and I hope I'm putting my brain into action before saying these things. I don't think they're too contentious anyway. Anyway the post that provoked this concerned the value of going to university and it was in monetary terms particularly that the debts are too high. I think nowadays it is quite expensive for the student. The situation in my time is that tuition fees were paid for for me but because my parents were relatively well off I had to pay for my own accommodation so I got no grants. I think the like-for-like comparison is that students are now paying £10,000 tuition fees a year. With a typical degree cost that's a debt of perhaps £30,000 at the end of the course for the student if there are no other ways of finding that kind of money. Is it worth it and what should you consider when going to university? Do you need to go? You can study many things online now and get a grip of all sorts of subjects and techniques and knowledge online and it's readily available. Is there any point in going away from home if necessary and studying at university? First of all I think you should consider firm, concrete, practical things as much as anything. You should think: - Does this institution provide me with good accommodation and good meals? - If you're interested in sports, does it have a good athletics track, for example? - As I was interested in it, is it near to where you're staying? - Is it offering things which you are actually interested in and want to do and feel as though it's important? - Does the course structure look as though you'll pick up something concrete and relevant? I was studying mathematics at university and that's not a very expensive course to provide for a student. It's very much like an arts course. They didn't seem to have much equipment in the mathematics department. At least none of it was on show, certainly not in the lecture theatres, which were incredibly uncomfortable. I remember my father saying to me, "If you study mathematics you'll have to move away from it because there are not really many mathematicians in industry or the real world. The only mathematicians are those in universities. " I actually thought that's a reasonable reason for going to the university in the first place as well. I can be near where the people doing mathematics are, where the mathematicians are, so I was interested in mathematics. I quite liked it at the time. I enjoyed it once I loved it. I thought it was quite a useful skill to have so I thought about studying mathematics at university. That was perhaps my reason. When one is thinking about this these days, of course it's the £30,000 to think about so you've got to think carefully. Is the cost provided a good one? Are you not going to be humiliated by some people saying, "Well I'm the best mathematician. All the best mathematicians go here and we don't want poor struggling mathematicians here"? You've got to have all this kind of thing. Is there a bit of support perhaps in the institution? Education is all about developing skills and technique but it's also for developing thinking critically and thinking about situations and having the knowledge to cope with life. Particularly I don't view education as indoctrination as I've come across. It's not like that at all. It's empowering and the good institution should be empowering their students and perhaps helping them a bit, guiding them a bit, that kind of thing. They're young people on the whole so you can't be leaned on too heavily. I think about the concrete things. I think about what you want to do. I think it is a good course, of course, to go along to. I think universities have got to try a bit harder. Actually I think I've got to be a bit more flexible. We've got to be offering different types of courses that cost less than some kind of fixed amount, start at different prices for courses, different lengths for courses, specific objectives for courses. For example my mathematics course was very broadly based and covered very, very large areas and set you up for all sorts of things in life but that kind of course is not always appropriate. Perhaps what happens at the red brick universities, I don't know. Perhaps Cambridge is what it is. It's a sort of generalist course for academics, mathematicians who wanted to keep their options open. I'd say encourage people to go to university. It's like developing yourself. You can't frown on developing yourself, learning things, developing techniques, meeting other people. I think it is quite an important thing as well. 2026-07-13 20:45:47 - Paul D. Foy - I thought I'd put this one in here. As I've mentioned previously, I went to sit an entrance exam. I think it's called the Eleven Plus for the local grammar school, which was a scholarship so I didn't pay any fees to go there. I managed to pass that. It wasn't particularly difficult as I remember. I decided not to go. I know what the reasons were. There were two main reasons: 1. I think the main reason is that I just didn't see a big need to go to another school or couldn't see what was wrong with the current school. I had heard scare stories of the local comprehensive but I didn't know what to think about those. I wasn't too concerned about those. 2. A very big one is that it was an all-male school, an all-boys school grammar school. At the time, as an eleven-year-old, I think I was, I seemed to make the precocious decision that it was perhaps not a good thing, not a healthy thing, to be segregating the two sexes whilst undertaking education. I thought it was a I thought, but girls and boys, men and women, they're all part of life. It's all part of living together. You've got to get used to them and you've got to live with them. You've got to study with them and you've got to work with them and, yes, work with them and be entertained by them and entertain them and all these kinds of things. That was quite a big reason. To tell the truth I'm not sure it did me any good being so precocious but I can't tell that. Apparently many people told my parents that this was a stupid thing to have let your child do. You should have gone to the local prestigious grammar school, that kind of thing. I don't think my parents were all that concerned about it either. My father had commented to me that it doesn't make any difference which school you go to. It's up to you how you get on really and he wasn't too concerned about it. I think my mother was of a rather phlegmatic opinion about it all as well. 2026-07-13 15:07:28 - Paul D. Foy - I think I'll add here a few strange conversations I had with the headmaster of the secondary school at which I went before going to university. He has died now so hopefully I can say these things without offending a living person too much. He said some things which I found very odd for a person in his position. On the fact of me choosing to go to a college at university because it had self-contained bathrooms as part of the accommodation offered, he thought it was a stupid reason to choose a place to study. Well I didn't see it like that at all. There was an even more bizarre conversation I had with him. I think it was whilst we were in the cafeteria and he was standing next to the burgers and chips, which had become the standard fare for offering to students in the school's restaurant or perhaps it was the sixth form restaurant. Oh yes I remember this. It was after I'd come back for a year and come to see him for some reason, some kind of prize given or something. He was commenting, "So you're doing lots of networking now and making those connections in life. " I don't know quite what he meant by this. Perhaps it was the lords and ladies that go to those places, according to my grandfather, who are not like us as he put it. Well yes I'm sort of going to the odd Archimedean Society that is the University' mathematical society and chatting with people there. I met the odd mathematician there, Professor Conway comes to mind, and he didn't think this, again, was of any importance at all. I shan't mention the even more strange things he said to me, the advice prior to applying to Cambridge, because it's just too unflattering to myself. This was the headmaster of a comprehensive school. Now I'm not on this particular comment going to get into the debate between comprehensive state education and private education. I do have opinions on this but they're not quite as some people might think. Anyway his attitude was bizarre as revealed to my parents one open evening when he told them that I shouldn't have gone here. I should have gone to the local grammar school, at which I passed a scholarship for. Presumably this was so I could escape the riff-raff which he was serving burgers and chips to in his school. 2026-07-13 13:14:09 - Paul D. Foy - I don't know a lot about American culture or American society, what it's really like to tell the truth. I've got limited experience of Americans and they tend to be quite different people, many of them a mixed bag. I suspect their society might be like that but I think the way education is going and going to university is mirroring the situation that seems to prevail in America. I don't think that aspect of society is too bad. I don't like the ruthlessness that it seems to be in America: the dog-eat-dog world, the survival of the fittest, the lots of homeless people. I don't quite know that and I don't know how that really develops to tell the truth. On this university front it is looking very much like the American model. That is, horses for courses: universities doing all sorts of things, people paid according to how important their courses are and things like that. It's looking very American to tell the truth. Of course it has been a bit more practical. Think obviously we should perhaps guard against that or there'll be no more mathematicians left, according to the perception, which is not the reality. Yes I think it's looking more American. Then there is the American Collegiate Way for sponsoring sport and sports development. It's absolutely amazing how some of the top athletes, the world's best athletes, come out of the American collegiate system. I find that very impressive and I think that's a natural development. Course is linked to sport, sport facilities at universities. This is sport and being young and developing your body as well as your mind is part and parcel of being a young person, I think. 2026-07-13 13:02:23 - Paul D. Foy - Most people like to think of themselves as educated, that they've had an education. I think it's important that everybody can feel educated and equal to everybody else so that there aren't classes in society which are differentiated by how educated they are. I have suggested, why shouldn't there be courses for plumbers and builders that are called degrees or something? Perhaps not even three years long, perhaps one year long at something. I don't think these courses are not useful. For example I went to a plumbers' taster course two hours in the evening for about six weeks and it was useful. It was practical and I picked up skills. I could do plumbing operations after this course. This was a genuine course and I learned things on this course. It wasn't actually much good for me because I just went home for another six months or a year. I never needed to do any plumbing so I just forgot the skills, forgot the confidence, and it was useless for me. If I was a plumber and had done a course like that, if I was a potential plumber and had done a course like that, I could have approached someone to take me on as an apprentice as being able to do useful things. I could have repaired people's toilets and things like that. That's perfectly okay as far as I'm concerned. Nothing wrong with that course. 2026-07-13 12:55:39 - Paul D. Foy - I'm going to give a post on my time at Robinson but I'm going to think a bit more about that first so that I don't say something indiscreet. Post a comment: |