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The Oxford degree that runs Britain
- StClaire 10y agoIt sounds like PPE basically does what Oxford designed it to do. Before PPE would be bureaucrats and ministers studied Greek and Latin. Then Oxford decided they may need training in something more practical. Throw in some stats and basic data analysis and I think you have a pretty good training regimen for people who want to go to Whitehall and Parliament
- revelation 10y agoJust as wet streets don't cause rain, Oxford degrees don't make politicians. It's just that all the British trust fund kids go to Oxford to study .. well, whatever.
- StClaire 10y agoYou could say that about college in general. College doesn't make people successful, successful people go to college
- digi_owl 10y agoAnd yet the (champagne) left has sold the public on the idea that education solves all ills...
- StClaire 10y agoI'm not arguing. I think I would have been better off taking some college courses instead of actually going to college
- pnathan 10y ago> College doesn't make people successful, successful people go to college That's a wonderful epigram. Did you come up with that? I'd like to remember it and properly source it.
- StClaire 10y agoYes.
- MengerSponge 10y agoYou can say lots of things that are BS. College is a prerequisite for professional degrees. Hacker News crowd notwithstanding, your career earning potential is reduced if you only have a secondary education. Note that not all college degrees are equal. Obviously. Four-ish years of dedicated study changes your mind appreciably, which is the real objective. Also, finishing a degree signals your ability to function in a somewhat opaque bureaucracy, which means you'll be able to follow dumb rules and still get stuff done in a business organization.
- MLR 10y agoI always find it odd how the Cambridge educated prime ministers seemingly dried up, one would really expect it to be closer to a 50/50 split as it had been in the past.
- cperciva 10y agoPPE isn't perfect, but as far as a preparation for government goes, it's better than any other degree I've seen. I'd like to see it include slightly more mathematics -- economics has become significantly more quantitative over the decades, and PPE hasn't kept up -- but it's still vastly ahead of a degree in law, which seem to be the most common preparation for political careers in North America. Before PPE would be bureaucrats and ministers studied Greek and Latin. Some of them, I'm sure; but I think the highest density of Greats has always been in the House of Lords.
- Silhouette 10y agoPPE isn't perfect, but as far as a preparation for government goes, it's better than any other degree I've seen. Doesn't that make the implicit assumption that any degree is good preparation for government, though?
- cperciva 10y agoWhether it is "good" preparation depends on how good something needs to be to qualify as good. All I'm saying is that it's better than the alternatives.
- Spooky23 10y agoThere's upside and downsides. A good place to look at a non-political example of this phenomenon is submarine captains. A US submarine captain is by training a nuclear engineer first and foremost. It dominates the training and career path. In the Royal Navy, captains are more rounded and while they have plenty of training in that area, they have a more liberal education. That impacts leadership style and other things. Both courses are effective, just different. Politics are similar. Your typical US politician is an attorney with a feeder degree in political science, history, etc. More MBAs too. Staffers usually have politically focused degrees as well.
- tnecniv 10y ago> but it's still vastly ahead of a degree in law, which seem to be the most common preparation for political careers in North America. Those are kind of fundamentally different things, aren't they? A PPE degree is an undergraduate degree while a US Law degree is a graduate one. Law school doesn't require any specific undergraduate degree (it's well documented that the highest STEM and philosophy majors are some of the highest scoring on the LSAT). It'd be more applicable to compare what undergraduate degrees North American politicians have to the Oxford PPE curriculum. As an anecdote, at my (US) undergrad school, people who were interested in politics majored in political science, international relations , or PPE (I don't know how the curriculum of this PPE degree compares with the Oxford one). Plenty of those people got law degrees and plenty didn't. PPE also attracted people who wanted to do something vaguely liberal arts but didn't want to specialize / commit too much.
- Theodores 10y agoOne of my school friends did PPE at Oxford (where else?). I don't like him or the world that he is in. It goes beyond 'sense of entitlement'. The other 'OxBridge' university - Cambridge - also has something to offer public life. The 'Cambridge Footlights': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footlights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footlights So every funny comedian on the BBC graduated from Cambridge going via this am-dram society. You have to choose one's parents quite carefully. Mine were not pushing me to do PPE at Oxford, my friend's parent's knew exactly what they were doing, they had their son lined up for an upper middle class wealthy life from the start.
- smacktoward 10y agoThat is really eye-opening. You look at the list of people who came and went through Footlights, and it's like reading a Who's Who of modern British comedy. On one hand, clearly Cambridge is doing something right, since British comedy has been the world's gold standard for decades. But on the other hand you can't help but wonder how much latent national talent went untapped, simply because the people holding it weren't "Oxbridge material."
- n4r9 10y agoI'm not sure that's as true as it used to be. A lot of great modern British comedians weren't members (though may have been Oxbridge): Chris Morris, Stewart Lee, Charlie Brooker, Armando Iannucci, Bill Bailey, Simon Pegg, Steve Coogan, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais. There is an argument that Footlights continues to dominate a particular strain of "awkward Englishness" style comedy, i.e. Fry & Webb, Hugh Laurie, and to a lesser extent Richard Ayoade. But I don't see these as the defining characters of British comedy at the moment.
- redsummer 10y agoI don't know if it's as true or not now, but the entertainers have become much posher recently: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/12170357/Half-of-Britains-best-actors-privately-educated.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/12170357/... When actors and pop stars come from such elevated heights, I always get the impression that they are slick and professional - but much blander. For instance, the music of the 60s and 70s - when classes were mixing more - had more dynamism.
- timrichard 10y ago"To its proliferating critics, PPE is not a solution to Britain’s problems; it is a cause of them." Have you been mis-sold PPE? Time's running out to do something about it...
- Silhouette 10y agoWhen people say that success depends "not on what you know, but on who you know", Oxford PPE is the textbook example. It's the degree for people who don't want to have a career doing anything other than working in the politics/economics/media bubble. It is also perhaps the strongest argument ever made that no-one should be allowed to hold high political office without having spent a significant amount of time doing something outside that bubble.
- robk 10y agoTrump doesn't fit that model and I'd guess if you're here you're no trump fan. So it's not a panacea.
- grzm 10y agoI'd guess if you're here you're no trump fan Would you elaborate? If you're referring to the HN community, a few minutes' reading through the comments will show you that there's a wide range of political views, including Trump supporters.
- Silhouette 10y agoOn the contrary, Trump is just about the perfect example of the dangers of PPE: he's a man who enjoyed advantages early on that most people will never have, who has consequently spent his entire career in an artificial bubble almost totally unrelated to the experience of most normal people, who has learned to speak confidently about almost any subject regardless of whether he actually knows or understands very much about that subject, and who as result of those attributes has now risen to a level of power he is utterly unqualified to wield.
- DogPawHat 10y agoSo he's an outlier in the bubble, but still in the bubble? It sounds about right.
- oh_sigh 10y agoNot everyone likes to shut themselves into an echo chamber. Yes, this site is largely anti-Trump, but that doesn't mean that everyone is. For example, my account here is >2000 days old(and I was lurking for a while before I made this), and I find myself generally agreeing with a lot of Trumps policies.
- hd4 10y agoEntrenched thinking in the UK is why certain degrees seem to be the 'correct' or desirable ones for any given field or why the route in life seems to be cut out for people who take a certain degree. In countries other than the UK, I've heard of many people entering the programming field through a non-CompSci degree, but here if you don't have some kind of related degree you wouldn't get considered for a job in that particular field. This goes for many other fields, not just programming. But not here (UK). Out-of-box thinking just isn't the way industry operates here and that's never a good thing, to always operate in a very predictable way to create a weakness in the system.
- ue_ 10y agoI wanted to do Compsci at university (I'm in my second term of my first year now), but I missed out by a few marks. I was offered Electronic and Computer Engineering (which is what I'm doing now at a UK uni), though the kind of jobs I want to do are almost entirely programming, and not necessarily embedded programming. I don't know what my job prospects are like; hell, I don't even know what electronic engineers do.
- timthorn 10y agoEE & CE are very good courses for programmers, as they give a really strong understanding of the underlying platform. However, if you're doing ECE and don't know what electronic engineers do, something is wrong.
- rfrey 10y agoTo be fair, engineering students in any discipline not knowing what engineers actually do is not uncommon, and might even be the majority case.
- femto 10y agoAn explanation for the lay person of why this is. Engineering degrees typically start off with a couple of years of general science education, with minimal contact with the engineering faculty. It's often not until halfway though the degree that the engineers branch off from the science students, into engineering specific courses, and find out what makes an engineer different to a scientist.
- aj7 10y agoSo there it's PPE's, here it's Harvard and Stanford MBA's and law graduates and military officers. All with a slight stench of illegitimacy. Most being ignored by those pushing society forward.
- gtmtg 10y agoIs there an equivalent in the tech industry? Stanford SymSys? http://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-symbolic-systems-major-alumni-2016-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-symbolic-systems-maj...
- contingencies 10y agoPPE, he wrote, “gives no training in scholarship, only refining to a high degree of perfection the ability to write short dilettantish essays on the basis of very little knowledge: ideal training for the social engineer”. A degree in dinner parties! Sounds like fun, and not altogether unlike HN sometimes...