We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
Which leaves me fucked, not least because doing management would have me on the roof with a weapon in seconds flat.
The UK government expects that the large majority of "Plan 2" loans will not be repaid.
Plan 2 is a somewhat odd loan, in that it accrues interest at a rate that depends on your income (RPI for incomes under £28,470 pa, rising to RPI + 3% for incomes over £51,245 pa). You repay 9% of your income over £28,470 pa.
Average students graduate with £53K of debt. Anyone with that much debt needs to earn about £65K pa to reduce their loan balance, otherwise they're just paying an additional 9% tax on income over £28,470 for 30 years.
Student loan debt doesn't really count as "debt" from the point of view of people computing your credit-worthiness, and the debt evaporates if you die: your estate doesn't have to pay it.
It's more like a slightly odd-shaped graduate tax that is capped for the rich than it is a real loan.
The new loan (Plan 5) doesn't have the income-dependent interest rate, so our student with £53K of debt will start reducing their balance if they earn more than around £44K pa, but they have to wait 40 years before their loan is cancelled.
For comparison, a newly-qualified nurse or teacher earns around £32K pa.
No it is not a graduate tax. For one thing not all graduates pay it. For another it is a literal debt against your name individually.
This matters because future governments can change the game adversely impacting on you directly. They can do this by freezing the repayment thresholds, so the point where you start paying is forced downwards as inflation increases wages. They can also increase interest rates, the length of the repayment terms. All many years after the loan was taken.
It is also not 'just' an additional percentage over a floor, which is rapidly approaching minimum wage. It is an additional marginal rate for low wage earners.
In brief it is a scam cooked up to push financial responsibility for the university sector off the government books and to load it onto individual people who lacked knowledge at 17 as to what it was that they were doing and encouraged by media personalities who lacked imagination as to what future governments might do when presented with billions of £ of personalised debt ripe to be exploited.
The crazy part about this whole situation is that it does not even pay adequately for the undergraduate university education it is supposed to fund leaving tens of British universities close to bankruptcy.
Anyone who thinks that the debts of graduates will not be mercilessly ravaged many times more in the future in a futile effort to buttress funding failures has not been paying attention.
We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
There's a truism that candidates can seek to be the most attractive, best qualified or nicest.
Attractiveness can take many forms (most intelligent person in the room, most interesting, most varied CV). Best qualified is usually about credentials.
Most candidates for most graduate jobs are trying to distinguish themselves from everyone else on one or other of these and mostly fail almost by definition. You might be proud of your Computer Science degree but you are competing with the people with a Masters degree and and internships at Google and Microsoft.
Being a nice person to work with is something you can prove. You can work on changing your character.
Not every employer recognises it, but I believe many do.
I cannot say anything about fibre-optic cable laying.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
Too bloody true.
Believe you me, if a generalist who got the job done and got on with people was what people were really looking for I'd never have been out of work.
@Basketactortale I am living this right now and what you are saying is utter, utter crap.
Originally posted by Gramps49: So, student debt is not just a US problem?
Scottish students don't pay tuition fees. My two both graduated with a manageable £9,000 debt each from their student loans. My son-in-law is English and has massively more student debt than my daughter, although they both went to the same University.
It's one of the reasons that my husband and I are very happy to pay more income tax than we would if we were in England; I think we pay less than £1000 pa more than if we had the same income but lived in England, so we feel as though we have made a net gain.
The down side is that Scottish universities helped balance the books with overseas students paying full fees. My husband made several trips to India specifically to try to attract overseas students to come to Scotland. The clamp-down on visas has made Scotland less attractive and is badly affecting Scottish universities. Westminster has taken away the mechanism which helped Scottish students avoid massive student debt.
We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
There's a truism that candidates can seek to be the most attractive, best qualified or nicest.
Attractiveness can take many forms (most intelligent person in the room, most interesting, most varied CV). Best qualified is usually about credentials.
Most candidates for most graduate jobs are trying to distinguish themselves from everyone else on one or other of these and mostly fail almost by definition. You might be proud of your Computer Science degree but you are competing with the people with a Masters degree and and internships at Google and Microsoft.
Being a nice person to work with is something you can prove. You can work on changing your character.
Not every employer recognises it, but I believe many do.
I cannot say anything about fibre-optic cable laying.
You do not get as far as interview to prove what an affable fellow you are if you don't meet the technical requirements. That's the non-negotiable and in an employers' market they can afford to be very precise about it.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
Too bloody true.
Believe you me, if a generalist who got the job done and got on with people was what people were really looking for I'd never have been out of work.
@Basketactortale I am living this right now and what you are saying is utter, utter crap.
Ok. I'm sorry if you are struggling, I assure you it is not crap.
We found AstraZenica, but I think they were taking on rather small numbers. We went to an event they put on and it was pretty clear that without lab experience alongside excellent A levels you hadn't a hope. We looked for opportunities for that but there are no labs he could get to anywhere near us.
You needed an uncle who owned a chemistry research lab, basically.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
That there is the curse of employment in modern Britain.
All the employers with semi-skilled or generic skill jobs think the well qualified people will easily get a specialist job and won't take them on.
All the more specialist employers will actually only touch you if your experience and skill set exactly matches what they think you need.
There's a lot of lip-service give to the concept of transferable skills but in reality you always lose out to the person who has the specific skill they want.
It may be different in management - I have a relative who's managed to get jobs she didn't even meet the "required" criteria for, but in technical fields you absolutely need all the "required" and the "desirable" to be in with a chance.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
There's a truism that candidates can seek to be the most attractive, best qualified or nicest.
Attractiveness can take many forms (most intelligent person in the room, most interesting, most varied CV). Best qualified is usually about credentials.
Most candidates for most graduate jobs are trying to distinguish themselves from everyone else on one or other of these and mostly fail almost by definition. You might be proud of your Computer Science degree but you are competing with the people with a Masters degree and and internships at Google and Microsoft.
Being a nice person to work with is something you can prove. You can work on changing your character.
Not every employer recognises it, but I believe many do.
I cannot say anything about fibre-optic cable laying.
You do not get as far as interview to prove what an affable fellow you are if you don't meet the technical requirements. That's the non-negotiable and in an employers' market they can afford to be very precise about it.
I've explained the context of the thing I'm talking about and I have also said it does not apply to all employers.
I believe it applies to many but in no sense all graduate jobs.
You mean it only applies when it applies and doesn't when it doesn't?
Yeah, that's obviously and pointlessly true. It's no bloody use at all in STEM where it absolutely doesn't apply.
Well that's not true either, I know someone who got a job in a biochemistry lab recently based on their voluntary work experience over all the other candidates who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
But fine, if you don't want to believe it because you already know everything there is to know about graduate jobs across the massive variety of sciences and engineering, you carry on.
Ok. I'm sorry if you are struggling, I assure you it is not crap.
I've been trying to find a job since July 2024. I've heard some crappy statements in my time, but that takes the fucking biscuit.
IT IS UTTER FUCKING CRAP!!!!!!!
Read for comprehension and if you insist on continuing to feed such patronising bullshit to people who are having to live this shit then I'll see you in Hell.
Ok. I'm sorry if you are struggling, I assure you it is not crap.
I've been trying to find a job since July 2024. I've heard some crappy statements in my time, but that takes the fucking biscuit.
IT IS UTTER FUCKING CRAP!!!!!!!
Read for comprehension and if you insist on continuing to feed such patronising bullshit people who are having to live this shit then I'll see you in Hell.
I know it isn't your experience which I genuinely am sorry to hear. But it is not crap. Simply saying that someone else's knowledge and experience is crap is not a discussion.
You mean it only applies when it applies and doesn't when it doesn't?
Yeah, that's obviously and pointlessly true. It's no bloody use at all in STEM where it absolutely doesn't apply.
Well that's not true either, I know someone who got a job in a biochemistry lab recently based on their voluntary work experience over all the other candidates who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
But fine, if you don't want to believe it because you already know everything there is to know about graduate jobs across the massive variety of sciences and engineering, you carry on.
The point here is this bit: who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
Our point is that you can't, in STEM, make up for being less precisely qualified than another candidate by being affable or anything else. The technical closer fit candidate will get it. And those technical fits are very precisely defined.
You mean it only applies when it applies and doesn't when it doesn't?
Yeah, that's obviously and pointlessly true. It's no bloody use at all in STEM where it absolutely doesn't apply.
Well that's not true either, I know someone who got a job in a biochemistry lab recently based on their voluntary work experience over all the other candidates who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
But fine, if you don't want to believe it because you already know everything there is to know about graduate jobs across the massive variety of sciences and engineering, you carry on.
The point here is this bit: who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
Our point is that you can't, in STEM, make up for being less precisely qualified than another candidate by being affable or anything else. The technical closer fit candidate will get it. And those technical fits are very precisely defined.
How do you know this? If a job is advertised as needing a degree, there is no guarantee that a person with a doctorate will get it. For lots of good reasons. For example there is a very great fear that the candidate will quickly leave for a better opportunity.
I can think of several situations where people with doctorates did not actually get jobs which went to people with degrees.
I have sat on interview panels and there's a scoring system. So it has been determined that the essential characteristics of the candidate are weighed in one way and the desirables in another.
A doctorate, for example, if it is neither a desirable or an essential might be scored but might be weighted differently to other parts of the application. That's entirely normal.
A lot depends on the type of employer, I suspect. Larger and public organisations, with more than half an eye on the Equalities Act, tend to be very careful and rely on fairly mechanistic processes - meet the essential job criteria to get the interview; score the most points at interview to get the job. Everyone gets the same questions.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
I feel like sometimes employers have someone special in mind and if you're not that person, then they'll make any excuse they wish to not-hire you.
If you have experience, they'll say "lack of education." If you have education, they'll say "Lack of experience." Real truth is there was an inside hire but they're not allowed to admit that, or they're ashamed, or it was a crapshoot of inscrutable personality traits and "gut feelings." There are a surplus of perfectly qualified hires, so the actual hiring decision is arbitrary and capricious. I've learned not to take it personally, especially since it's personal.
That's my sense of it, acknowledging I'm American.
Yep, because no-one will take you on without experience because they can't afford/be arsed to train you.
Then you spend years getting that experience & suddenly you are over-qualified for everything.
I feel like sometimes employers have someone special in mind and if you're not that person, then they'll make any excuse they wish to not-hire you.
I've observed this happening on both sides of the pond - situations where a job has to be openly advertised, but the particular department already knows who they want in the role.
I've observed this happening on both sides of the pond - situations where a job has to be openly advertised, but the particular department already knows who they want in the role.
And most of the talk around why you got the job or didn't is absolute bullshit. You might as well treat it like a roulette game, even if you're qualified, which for a job seeker is profoundly discouraging.
My daughter is applying to colleges, got into a few and got turned down by a few. And I remembered a chat I had with one of my college friends who I bumped into at our old undergrad. She works in admissions and she told me point blank [paraphrased] "I wish that people got rid of the delusion that college admission are meritocratic. They aren't. That's not how it works."
For people raised on "work hard and earn your place" that is enraging.
The down side is that Scottish universities helped balance the books with overseas students paying full fees. My husband made several trips to India specifically to try to attract overseas students to come to Scotland. The clamp-down on visas has made Scotland less attractive and is badly affecting Scottish universities. Westminster has taken away the mechanism which helped Scottish students avoid massive student debt.
My daughter is applying to colleges, got into a few and got turned down by a few. And I remembered a chat I had with one of my college friends who I bumped into at our old undergrad. She works in admissions and she told me point blank [paraphrased] "I wish that people got rid of the delusion that college admission are meritocratic. They aren't. That's not how it works."
For people raised on "work hard and earn your place" that is enraging.
The truth is that "merit" is hard to assess. There are outstanding people that are easy to identify, and there are obvious no-hopers, and then there's - well - everyone else. Figuring out which of these similar-looking people will be a good student, or a good employee, and which will be a disappointment, is very much not an exact science.
As it happens, I'm involved in trying to hire someone at the moment. I won't give details, for obvious reasons, but the number of applicants we have with the expertise we really want is zero. It's a pretty niche job. So we are left trying to figure out which of the applicants we do have is going to most effectively acquire the desired expertise, and become useful in the fastest time.
I know a number of people will say their applications were turned down, but not my kids. Of course, they started in state schools. One transferred to a private school after his first year. No problem there. Another transferred to an out of state public school, but they were part of the regional consortium, so again, no problem. When those two went on for their respective masters, they had no problem either.
I've observed this happening on both sides of the pond - situations where a job has to be openly advertised, but the particular department already knows who they want in the role.
And most of the talk around why you got the job or didn't is absolute bullshit. You might as well treat it like a roulette game, even if you're qualified, which for a job seeker is profoundly discouraging.
I have occasionally irritated people by running this line the other way; especially when in a group that had a hard time recruiting for a particular role, because in reality the job tends to become shaped to the individual over time, rather than the other way around.
At some point, what I've read about in some places is employers realizing that if they want highly specialized employees, they need to invest in highly specialized training.
And this gets into the conversation that university education is a lot more and a lot less than professional training. But it does - to an extent - demonstrate a will to learn.
I think that the traditional liberal arts education is something that helps everyone just in terms of being a well-rounded and basically educated person but the way that things are nowadays, everything is expected to get you a better income and train you for a job.
As a side note, my first college was New College in Sarasota, Florida (named after the one in Oxford) and we now have a documentary about what has sadly happened to it over the last few years with the right wing takeover called “first they came for my college.“
I think that the traditional liberal arts education is something that helps everyone just in terms of being a well-rounded and basically educated person but the way that things are nowadays, everything is expected to get you a better income and train you for a job.
A problem with "traditional liberal arts" can be that it produces in some people an illusion of omni-competence that elides the fact that they're undertrained in STEM, and a tendency to be "jack of all trades and master of none". We get the same issue over here with Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) grads, who are massively overrepresented in politics.
I think that the traditional liberal arts education is something that helps everyone just in terms of being a well-rounded and basically educated person but the way that things are nowadays, everything is expected to get you a better income and train you for a job.
A problem with "traditional liberal arts" can be that it produces in some people an illusion of omni-competence that elides the fact that they're undertrained in STEM, and a tendency to be "jack of all trades and master of none". We get the same issue over here with Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) grads, who are massively overrepresented in politics.
Quite.
Mrs LB got a degree in Biology with Ecology. She was badly advised, although I shouldn't complain as had she gone elsewhere she wouldn't have met me.
She had to take another degree, a vocational one, a few years later to actually get a graduate job. No-one wants to employ a graduate with a degree as broad as Biology and Ecology. Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Genetics - something specific, and you might be in with a chance.
My academic background falls into the traditional liberal arts. I did a BA in history, an MA in history, went ABD in doctoral studies and finished up with an education degree. I broke in to working in post-secondary education because of my transferable skills. My first job was working in the Writing Centre on campus, a service that provided one-on-one writing assistance in a writing across the curriculum philosophy. Despite its WAC philosophy, I was the first person that they hired who did not have a degree in English. From there I took my transferable skills to building a 30+ (and still going )career in pse students services. I have been an academic and career counsellor, a student development coordinator, employment counsellor, and I am ending my career managing a student accessibility centre. None of these roles are/were directly related to my field of study (although my education degree came the closest). I find the hardest part of finding employment at a university is the initial job. After that, if you do not blot your copybook, there is a fair degree of mobility.
I think that the traditional liberal arts education is something that helps everyone just in terms of being a well-rounded and basically educated person but the way that things are nowadays, everything is expected to get you a better income and train you for a job.
Financially, one dirty secret of undergraduate institutions in America is that a lot of the advantage is in the social networking. I am an example. In crude terms, one of my best financial outcomes from college was meeting @Gwai .
That said, college also gave me a tremendous amount of worldly understanding, a massive pack of friends, etc. All of this is priceless and arguably worth the thousands of dollars my family (self included) paid for it. My other observation is that undergraduate opens a lot of doors, but it is on the student to convey their ass through them.
A lot of us grew up thinking it was a conveyor belt to success, and that it is not.
I also have a friend, a few years older, who posted to bsky that he became a professor and felt that he got his PhD like an action hero, running across a bridge as it collapsed underneath him.
The world that I grew up in has been in a constant state of flux and this is my generation's continual gripe. We were told there would be rules. There have not been.
I think liberal arts college degrees without grad school are--or were when I graduated in 2000 at least--still useful if one wants to go into a arts type field. My English degree has served me well in multiple fields. I have definitely had some issues for a lack of a graduate degree. But when people won't promote me or hire me because of a lack of specialization, it's the lack of a graduate degree that gets me rejected not the lack of a specialized bachelors.
At the university, employees without a graduate degree quickly hit a glass ceiling. It often does not matter whether or not the graduate degree has a direct relationship to available position.
I think that the traditional liberal arts education is something that helps everyone just in terms of being a well-rounded and basically educated person but the way that things are nowadays, everything is expected to get you a better income and train you for a job.
A problem with "traditional liberal arts" can be that it produces in some people an illusion of omni-competence that elides the fact that they're undertrained in STEM, and a tendency to be "jack of all trades and master of none". We get the same issue over here with Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) grads, who are massively overrepresented in politics.
Even so, with the absence of STEM, I believe that learning the classics, history, and such are critical to basic education. Just the whole matter of “those who do not know history are likely to repeat it” alone. If I had to choose between the general humanities, and STEM for what would be the most vital for people to learn before learning other stuff, I would absolutely go for the general humanities. I believe that that ties more into basic humanity (no pun intended), and into learning a lot of basic things about life, than the current technological situation, which changes very rapidly.
If I had to choose between the general humanities, and STEM for what would be the most vital for people to learn before learning other stuff, I would absolutely go for the general humanities. I believe that that ties more into basic humanity (no pun intended), and into learning a lot of basic things about life, than the current technological situation, which changes very rapidly.
That's comparing the absolute best case of the humanities with a parody of STEM. I'm pretty sure if you go back a couple of centuries all wars in the Western World were being fought by kings and generals who had variants on 'classical education'
If I had to choose between the general humanities, and STEM for what would be the most vital for people to learn before learning other stuff, I would absolutely go for the general humanities. I believe that that ties more into basic humanity (no pun intended), and into learning a lot of basic things about life, than the current technological situation, which changes very rapidly.
That's comparing the absolute best case of the humanities with a parody of STEM. I'm pretty sure if you go back a couple of centuries all wars in the Western World were being fought by kings and generals who had variants on 'classical education'
I don’t believe it’s a parody, no. I’m talking about the basic principle of anything to do with the latest technology or advances in the sciences. And I’m tempted to say that for all we know, though as Aslan says no one knows “what would have happened,” things could have been worse and less honorable without that classical education. I really believe that we should have more of it rather than less. This also includes things like logic and what have you. And yes, the sciences matter absolutely but I’m thinking if we had to pick something to start off people with or make sure it was absolutely included, if we had to pick one or the other, then I believe the humanities would be the most vital thing. If we had to rebuild civilization after an apocalypse or something, then I really believe that, yes, the works of Shakespeare or Ancient Greek works or what have you would be more vital than many other things.
Very few British STEM students learn anything other than STEM subjects at university. Most study for three or four years, most courses are modular and mostly the modules are going to be science/engineering/mathematics modules.
It is unusual for a British STEM student to study even a module of humanities. It is a bit more common to study a bit of a foreign language, but it is unusual to find one that has studied philosophy or history or art history.
It can be quite amusing to hear British university professors talking about scientific and/or research ethics when they have never actually had any classes in ethics.
Medical ethics I think are a part of medical degrees but I am not familiar with how those are taught.
A great many of the ills of modern society can be attributed to people (especially journalists and politicians) not understanding statistics, mathematical modelling and probability, not to mention basic physical laws. Very few can be attributed to inadequate study of the Roman Empire under Justinian.
We had a classicist as PM during a global pandemic. It did not go well.
Besides which, anyone can pick up an annotated translation of Plato's Republic if they want to; it's much harder to teach yourself maths without someone to explain.
Also British medical degrees are for undergraduates. I think in North America it is possible to do an art degree and then later become a medical doctor.
I do not think that is really possible in the UK, or if it is it would be very rare.
Very few British STEM students learn anything other than STEM subjects at university. Most study for three or four years, most courses are modular and mostly the modules are going to be science/engineering/mathematics modules.
This is equally true of the humanities students (and there's also a tendency in the UK of otherwise educated people taking great pride in saying that they don't understand maths/science).
Also British medical degrees are for undergraduates. I think in North America it is possible to do an art degree and then later become a medical doctor.
It’s possible, but the person with an art degree* is going to have to take and do well in lots of extra classes in biology, chemistry, etc., before they’re going to be admitted to a med school.
*I’m assuming here that you mean the person in question majored in art, art history or the like, not that they have a Bachelor of Arts. A BA in the US can cover a wider area than just “art.” That said, additional coursework might be required to get into med school. Ditto for someone with a Bachelor of Science, depending on the actual coursework completed.
I’m not saying people should study nothing else but the humanities – I’m saying that that should be an essential and intrinsic part of a good education. And it doesn’t have to involve, let’s say, a deep dive into details about the Emperor Justinian, any more than STEM requires intimate knowledge of string theory.
(I also think that it would be good for people to be getting an education in some really basic life skills that I’m not sure people are getting at home, like how to deal with making a budget and things like that… But this should be before college/university level.)
I’m not saying people should study nothing else but the humanities – I’m saying that that should be an essential and intrinsic part of a good education. And it doesn’t have to involve, let’s say, a deep dive into details about the Emperor Justinian, any more than STEM requires intimate knowledge of string theory.
You did specify, however, Shakespeare and Ancient Greek works as being more important than STEM.
The essentials of a good education should be part of the school curriculum and available to all. Saying things are essential but then hiving them off into higher education is contradictory. Of course, I was required to study Shakespeare at school and did not find the process particularly worthwhile, and did indeed touch on Greek mythology and read versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. It's not clear what benefit I'd have gained from sacrificing parts of my degree to replace them with more dull Tudor plays (or trying to cram more into my already overstuffed course).
I’m not saying people should study nothing else but the humanities – I’m saying that that should be an essential and intrinsic part of a good education. And it doesn’t have to involve, let’s say, a deep dive into details about the Emperor Justinian, any more than STEM requires intimate knowledge of string theory.
You did specify, however, Shakespeare and Ancient Greek works as being more important than STEM.
The essentials of a good education should be part of the school curriculum and available to all. Saying things are essential but then hiving them off into higher education is contradictory. Of course, I was required to study Shakespeare at school and did not find the process particularly worthwhile, and did indeed touch on Greek mythology and read versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. It's not clear what benefit I'd have gained from sacrificing parts of my degree to replace them with more dull Tudor plays (or trying to cram more into my already overstuffed course).
If you were already required to study those then that’s a good thing, in my view. And I don’t believe they should be hived off into higher education.
Arguably here in the US we’ve had a lot of extra problems in education because of “no child left behind” and the kind of standardized tests, and approach to standardized tests, that we’ve wound up with ever since the early 2000s. I’m genuinely astonished at the lack of basic writing skills and knowledge of basic sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation issues that I’m seeing out of college students now. I don’t know how it applies over in the math department…
C P Snow (of whom I originally heard from Flanders and Swann) said
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
Besides which, anyone can pick up an annotated translation of Plato's Republic if they want to; it's much harder to teach yourself maths without someone to explain.
If your translation of the Republic is annotated then you had better at least compare it to picking up a math book. Because the original Republic doesn't come with tons of notes of scholars explaining things to moderns.
In my experience, a lot of what people get from Literature classes is being a good reader and writer. We tend to hugely underestimate how useful that is. A couple examples:
Most of what I have done in my career is taking mediocre or terrible writing and make it good or excellent. And you know who writes really really terribly? Business/STEM people who think that reading and writing is easy and something anyone can do. I will admit that business folk are worse that way than STEM folk, if we're generalizing, but generally people who think they could do my job if they just tried write badly. It's not just that though, they generally read badly. They skim and miss the point, fail to read for comprehension, and so forth.
Also, take a couple of friends of mine, one literature professor X who is married to science professor Y. Both are well-published and skilled teachers. In person Y is quite charismatic because he holds forth well and listens closely. He adapts his words to his listeners and when approached he tailors his teaching or reteaching based on the students' abilities and interests. Until you get into the written word. There he is a skilled writer compared to his department, but he's not nearly the reader X is. Because those two are married, they would discuss their departmental politics. When Y showed X some of his emails, she told him about a bunch of subtle political implications he had missed. "She says she wants this, but if you read between the lines here, here, and here, she really wants that. She's saying you aren't cooperative because you gave her what she asked for not what she wants," that sort of thing. In my written communication with him I see the same thing.
Comments
Which leaves me fucked, not least because doing management would have me on the roof with a weapon in seconds flat.
No it is not a graduate tax. For one thing not all graduates pay it. For another it is a literal debt against your name individually.
This matters because future governments can change the game adversely impacting on you directly. They can do this by freezing the repayment thresholds, so the point where you start paying is forced downwards as inflation increases wages. They can also increase interest rates, the length of the repayment terms. All many years after the loan was taken.
It is also not 'just' an additional percentage over a floor, which is rapidly approaching minimum wage. It is an additional marginal rate for low wage earners.
In brief it is a scam cooked up to push financial responsibility for the university sector off the government books and to load it onto individual people who lacked knowledge at 17 as to what it was that they were doing and encouraged by media personalities who lacked imagination as to what future governments might do when presented with billions of £ of personalised debt ripe to be exploited.
The crazy part about this whole situation is that it does not even pay adequately for the undergraduate university education it is supposed to fund leaving tens of British universities close to bankruptcy.
Anyone who thinks that the debts of graduates will not be mercilessly ravaged many times more in the future in a futile effort to buttress funding failures has not been paying attention.
I would contrast this with knowledge of someone I know who works in a government admin role.
I am not saying all roles are like this but I suspect many actually are.
As is well-known in many government jobs, promotion within your team is near impossible. So people regularly move within teams, within departments or even between governments. I know someone else who has had a career spent between the Office of National Statistics, the business department (I forget the acronym) and the Welsh government in very similar roles.
The job this person I am describing applied for was very specific with a very specific title and specific roles. However they were actually looking for a generalist, someone who would work well in a team who could learn quickly what needed to be done and get on with it. In a few years this person might be doing something with a completely different title and different responsibilities in a different team. So the application process is essentially about gatekeeping.
The conclusion is that one of the most important things a young graduate can do to get one of these types of roles is the "good guy" test. Which means being able to show the future employer not that you are the perfect fit for this particular role but that you fit the ethos of the organisation, that you will fit in and that you will do what needs to be done without causing everyone a headache.
Which is not to say that there are not roles which demand very specific skills, but I think a surprising number are really looking for generalists who others can work with.
Not in technical fields they're not. There it's very much "sorry, but we're looking for someone to oversee fibre optic cable laying at 200m below sea level so your experience of copper cable laying at 250m really isn't quite what we need"
There's a truism that candidates can seek to be the most attractive, best qualified or nicest.
Attractiveness can take many forms (most intelligent person in the room, most interesting, most varied CV). Best qualified is usually about credentials.
Most candidates for most graduate jobs are trying to distinguish themselves from everyone else on one or other of these and mostly fail almost by definition. You might be proud of your Computer Science degree but you are competing with the people with a Masters degree and and internships at Google and Microsoft.
Being a nice person to work with is something you can prove. You can work on changing your character.
Not every employer recognises it, but I believe many do.
I cannot say anything about fibre-optic cable laying.
Too bloody true.
Believe you me, if a generalist who got the job done and got on with people was what people were really looking for I'd never have been out of work.
@Basketactortale I am living this right now and what you are saying is utter, utter crap.
So, student debt is not just a US problem?
Scottish students don't pay tuition fees. My two both graduated with a manageable £9,000 debt each from their student loans. My son-in-law is English and has massively more student debt than my daughter, although they both went to the same University.
It's one of the reasons that my husband and I are very happy to pay more income tax than we would if we were in England; I think we pay less than £1000 pa more than if we had the same income but lived in England, so we feel as though we have made a net gain.
The down side is that Scottish universities helped balance the books with overseas students paying full fees. My husband made several trips to India specifically to try to attract overseas students to come to Scotland. The clamp-down on visas has made Scotland less attractive and is badly affecting Scottish universities. Westminster has taken away the mechanism which helped Scottish students avoid massive student debt.
You do not get as far as interview to prove what an affable fellow you are if you don't meet the technical requirements. That's the non-negotiable and in an employers' market they can afford to be very precise about it.
Ok. I'm sorry if you are struggling, I assure you it is not crap.
I've explained the context of the thing I'm talking about and I have also said it does not apply to all employers.
I believe it applies to many but in no sense all graduate jobs.
Yeah, that's obviously and pointlessly true. It's no bloody use at all in STEM where it absolutely doesn't apply.
Well that's not true either, I know someone who got a job in a biochemistry lab recently based on their voluntary work experience over all the other candidates who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
But fine, if you don't want to believe it because you already know everything there is to know about graduate jobs across the massive variety of sciences and engineering, you carry on.
I've been trying to find a job since July 2024. I've heard some crappy statements in my time, but that takes the fucking biscuit.
IT IS UTTER FUCKING CRAP!!!!!!!
Read for comprehension and if you insist on continuing to feed such patronising bullshit to people who are having to live this shit then I'll see you in Hell.
I know it isn't your experience which I genuinely am sorry to hear. But it is not crap. Simply saying that someone else's knowledge and experience is crap is not a discussion.
The point here is this bit: who had almost exactly the same qualifications.
Our point is that you can't, in STEM, make up for being less precisely qualified than another candidate by being affable or anything else. The technical closer fit candidate will get it. And those technical fits are very precisely defined.
How do you know this? If a job is advertised as needing a degree, there is no guarantee that a person with a doctorate will get it. For lots of good reasons. For example there is a very great fear that the candidate will quickly leave for a better opportunity.
I can think of several situations where people with doctorates did not actually get jobs which went to people with degrees.
A doctorate, for example, if it is neither a desirable or an essential might be scored but might be weighted differently to other parts of the application. That's entirely normal.
I feel like sometimes employers have someone special in mind and if you're not that person, then they'll make any excuse they wish to not-hire you.
If you have experience, they'll say "lack of education." If you have education, they'll say "Lack of experience." Real truth is there was an inside hire but they're not allowed to admit that, or they're ashamed, or it was a crapshoot of inscrutable personality traits and "gut feelings." There are a surplus of perfectly qualified hires, so the actual hiring decision is arbitrary and capricious. I've learned not to take it personally, especially since it's personal.
That's my sense of it, acknowledging I'm American.
I've observed this happening on both sides of the pond - situations where a job has to be openly advertised, but the particular department already knows who they want in the role.
And most of the talk around why you got the job or didn't is absolute bullshit. You might as well treat it like a roulette game, even if you're qualified, which for a job seeker is profoundly discouraging.
My daughter is applying to colleges, got into a few and got turned down by a few. And I remembered a chat I had with one of my college friends who I bumped into at our old undergrad. She works in admissions and she told me point blank [paraphrased] "I wish that people got rid of the delusion that college admission are meritocratic. They aren't. That's not how it works."
For people raised on "work hard and earn your place" that is enraging.
True in England as well.
The truth is that "merit" is hard to assess. There are outstanding people that are easy to identify, and there are obvious no-hopers, and then there's - well - everyone else. Figuring out which of these similar-looking people will be a good student, or a good employee, and which will be a disappointment, is very much not an exact science.
As it happens, I'm involved in trying to hire someone at the moment. I won't give details, for obvious reasons, but the number of applicants we have with the expertise we really want is zero. It's a pretty niche job. So we are left trying to figure out which of the applicants we do have is going to most effectively acquire the desired expertise, and become useful in the fastest time.
I have occasionally irritated people by running this line the other way; especially when in a group that had a hard time recruiting for a particular role, because in reality the job tends to become shaped to the individual over time, rather than the other way around.
And this gets into the conversation that university education is a lot more and a lot less than professional training. But it does - to an extent - demonstrate a will to learn.
A problem with "traditional liberal arts" can be that it produces in some people an illusion of omni-competence that elides the fact that they're undertrained in STEM, and a tendency to be "jack of all trades and master of none". We get the same issue over here with Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) grads, who are massively overrepresented in politics.
Quite.
Mrs LB got a degree in Biology with Ecology. She was badly advised, although I shouldn't complain as had she gone elsewhere she wouldn't have met me.
She had to take another degree, a vocational one, a few years later to actually get a graduate job. No-one wants to employ a graduate with a degree as broad as Biology and Ecology. Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Genetics - something specific, and you might be in with a chance.
And that's just *within STEM*.
The age of the polymath is long gone.
Financially, one dirty secret of undergraduate institutions in America is that a lot of the advantage is in the social networking. I am an example. In crude terms, one of my best financial outcomes from college was meeting @Gwai .
That said, college also gave me a tremendous amount of worldly understanding, a massive pack of friends, etc. All of this is priceless and arguably worth the thousands of dollars my family (self included) paid for it. My other observation is that undergraduate opens a lot of doors, but it is on the student to convey their ass through them.
A lot of us grew up thinking it was a conveyor belt to success, and that it is not.
I also have a friend, a few years older, who posted to bsky that he became a professor and felt that he got his PhD like an action hero, running across a bridge as it collapsed underneath him.
The world that I grew up in has been in a constant state of flux and this is my generation's continual gripe. We were told there would be rules. There have not been.
Even so, with the absence of STEM, I believe that learning the classics, history, and such are critical to basic education. Just the whole matter of “those who do not know history are likely to repeat it” alone. If I had to choose between the general humanities, and STEM for what would be the most vital for people to learn before learning other stuff, I would absolutely go for the general humanities. I believe that that ties more into basic humanity (no pun intended), and into learning a lot of basic things about life, than the current technological situation, which changes very rapidly.
That's comparing the absolute best case of the humanities with a parody of STEM. I'm pretty sure if you go back a couple of centuries all wars in the Western World were being fought by kings and generals who had variants on 'classical education'
I don’t believe it’s a parody, no. I’m talking about the basic principle of anything to do with the latest technology or advances in the sciences. And I’m tempted to say that for all we know, though as Aslan says no one knows “what would have happened,” things could have been worse and less honorable without that classical education. I really believe that we should have more of it rather than less. This also includes things like logic and what have you. And yes, the sciences matter absolutely but I’m thinking if we had to pick something to start off people with or make sure it was absolutely included, if we had to pick one or the other, then I believe the humanities would be the most vital thing. If we had to rebuild civilization after an apocalypse or something, then I really believe that, yes, the works of Shakespeare or Ancient Greek works or what have you would be more vital than many other things.
It is unusual for a British STEM student to study even a module of humanities. It is a bit more common to study a bit of a foreign language, but it is unusual to find one that has studied philosophy or history or art history.
It can be quite amusing to hear British university professors talking about scientific and/or research ethics when they have never actually had any classes in ethics.
Medical ethics I think are a part of medical degrees but I am not familiar with how those are taught.
We had a classicist as PM during a global pandemic. It did not go well.
Besides which, anyone can pick up an annotated translation of Plato's Republic if they want to; it's much harder to teach yourself maths without someone to explain.
I do not think that is really possible in the UK, or if it is it would be very rare.
This is equally true of the humanities students (and there's also a tendency in the UK of otherwise educated people taking great pride in saying that they don't understand maths/science).
*I’m assuming here that you mean the person in question majored in art, art history or the like, not that they have a Bachelor of Arts. A BA in the US can cover a wider area than just “art.” That said, additional coursework might be required to get into med school. Ditto for someone with a Bachelor of Science, depending on the actual coursework completed.
(I also think that it would be good for people to be getting an education in some really basic life skills that I’m not sure people are getting at home, like how to deal with making a budget and things like that… But this should be before college/university level.)
You did specify, however, Shakespeare and Ancient Greek works as being more important than STEM.
The essentials of a good education should be part of the school curriculum and available to all. Saying things are essential but then hiving them off into higher education is contradictory. Of course, I was required to study Shakespeare at school and did not find the process particularly worthwhile, and did indeed touch on Greek mythology and read versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. It's not clear what benefit I'd have gained from sacrificing parts of my degree to replace them with more dull Tudor plays (or trying to cram more into my already overstuffed course).
If you were already required to study those then that’s a good thing, in my view. And I don’t believe they should be hived off into higher education.
Arguably here in the US we’ve had a lot of extra problems in education because of “no child left behind” and the kind of standardized tests, and approach to standardized tests, that we’ve wound up with ever since the early 2000s. I’m genuinely astonished at the lack of basic writing skills and knowledge of basic sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation issues that I’m seeing out of college students now. I don’t know how it applies over in the math department…
Y'all should go study that so you can figure out what I'm saying.
[Yes, that's a joke. Sort of.]
(The Two Cultures)
I am given to ask if much has changed.
In my experience, a lot of what people get from Literature classes is being a good reader and writer. We tend to hugely underestimate how useful that is. A couple examples:
Most of what I have done in my career is taking mediocre or terrible writing and make it good or excellent. And you know who writes really really terribly? Business/STEM people who think that reading and writing is easy and something anyone can do. I will admit that business folk are worse that way than STEM folk, if we're generalizing, but generally people who think they could do my job if they just tried write badly. It's not just that though, they generally read badly. They skim and miss the point, fail to read for comprehension, and so forth.
Also, take a couple of friends of mine, one literature professor X who is married to science professor Y. Both are well-published and skilled teachers. In person Y is quite charismatic because he holds forth well and listens closely. He adapts his words to his listeners and when approached he tailors his teaching or reteaching based on the students' abilities and interests. Until you get into the written word. There he is a skilled writer compared to his department, but he's not nearly the reader X is. Because those two are married, they would discuss their departmental politics. When Y showed X some of his emails, she told him about a bunch of subtle political implications he had missed. "She says she wants this, but if you read between the lines here, here, and here, she really wants that. She's saying you aren't cooperative because you gave her what she asked for not what she wants," that sort of thing. In my written communication with him I see the same thing.