
The Oxford degree that runs Britain - vinnyglennon
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain?CMP=fb_gu
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StClaire
It 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

~~~
cperciva
PPE 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
_PPE 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?

~~~
Spooky23
There'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.

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Theodores
One 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
That 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
I'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
I 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/...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/12170357/Half-
of-Britains-best-actors-privately-educated.html)

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.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Pop used to be one of the few ways creative and intelligent working class kids
could become millionaires.

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hd4
Entrenched 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_
I 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.

~~~
lttlrck
I graduated with a degree in electronic and computer engineering in 1996 in
the U.K.

We did minimal software: a bit of Ada, Prolog, Z and Occam, 6502 assembler.
Nothing substantial really. Tons of math, analog electronics and
microprocessor design.

I had a deep interest in electronics but went straight into software
development. The degree gave me a valuable foundation, it has been
tremendously useful at various points in my career. And in side-projects. It
gave me an understanding of what lies beneath. And a skillset that many
software dev contemporaries did not have. Some of the most interesting
software is the stuff that connects to the physical world.

Never worked in the UK. Spent a bunch of time in Germany now I'm in
California, via Massachusetts.

I wouldn't worry :-)

~~~
ue_
Thank you for your insight. My worry is more to do with fear of not being able
to make my 40% pass mark for this year. There's simply so much to know and
learn, from the analogue (which I find the hardest) to the programming (which
I find the easiest). Unfortunately the analogue stuff is the highest weighted
out of all of the modules.

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Silhouette
When 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
Trump doesn't fit that model and I'd guess if you're here you're no trump fan.
So it's not a panacea.

~~~
Silhouette
On 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
So he's an outlier in the bubble, but still in the bubble? It sounds about
right.

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contingencies
_PPE, 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...

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aj7
So 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.

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gtmtg
Is there an equivalent in the tech industry? Stanford SymSys?

[http://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-symbolic-systems-
maj...](http://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-symbolic-systems-major-
alumni-2016-1)

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timrichard
"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...

~~~
vacri
Brexit was not caused by PPE...

~~~
achamayou
It's a joke about PPI, not Brexit...

~~~
vacri
Ah, I may not get those ads...

