Robert Ainsley - The Bluffers Guide to University

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First published 1988

This edition published 2013

Copyright Bluffers 2013

Publisher: Thomas Drewry

Publishing Director: Brooke McDonald

Series Editor: David Allsop

Design and Illustration: Jim Shannon

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A CIP Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Its all too easy to fritter away these years struggling to write essays, successfully spinning debt into credit or unsuccessfully spinning your washing.

THE GAME OF LIFE

U niversity is a bluffers paradise: interest-free overdrafts, optional workload, endless holidays, elastic deadlines, cheap travel and discount drinks. Even French civil servants dont have it this good. As such, it is in among the gleaming spires, red brick and poured concrete of university towns that you will encounter the best and brightest of bluffers. Its tough competition. But if you can make it here, youll make it anywhere (maximum points if you can slip that last sentence past a film studies student, especially one from York).

Although its a struggle to get kicked out of university (youre only let out early on very bad behaviour), it is relatively easy to wander out of a lecture and never return. Even Harry Potter actress Emma Watson (aka renowned swot Hermione Granger) is said to have abandoned her undergraduate degree at the USAs Brown University. Admittedly, this was not so much a case of giving up, as of not being allowed to grow up. It was rumoured that Watson left after her fellow students refused to stop heckling, Five points to Gryffindor! whenever she answered a question. At least this is proof that higher education produces more intelligent bullying, which is probably why Oxbridge produces so many prime ministers.

If you do make it to graduation there is no guarantee that youll have done so in true student style. Its all too easy to fritter away these years struggling to write essays, successfully spinning debt into credit or unsuccessfully spinning your washing. And contrary to popular belief, this is not how you should be spending the best years of your life, as disenchanted former students tend to call them.

Instead, you should be feathering your nest with outrageous anecdotes, meeting people who you refuse to recognise as your social doppelgnger and neglecting to wash your sheets.

Luckily for you, this reassuringly short guide promises to let you in on the secret of MIMO (minimum input, maximum output; maximum points if you can slip that past a computing student as if it were a genuine computing term). It will conduct you safely through the main danger zones encountered in discussions about university life, and equip you with a vocabulary and evasive technique that will minimise the risk of being rumbled as a bluffer; it might even allow you to be accepted as a worldly student of rare knowledge and experience. But it will do more; it will give you the tools to impress legions of marvelling listeners with your wisdom and insight without anyone discovering that, until you read it, you probably didnt know the difference between a Geoff (a first) and a Desmond (a 2:2).

By the time you reach the glossary you will be more than able to ace the game of student life. And trust us, university is a game. Play it right and you can collect money just for passing Go, score 75 points for a well-placed three-letter word, and win big on a pair of twos. What are you waiting for? Its almost lunchtime.

With a degree, you can end up with jobs youd never have imagined yourself doing working at a burger bar or a call centre, for instance.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

WHY GO TO UNIVERSITY ANYWAY?

How many undergraduates are currently studying at university in Britain? Depending on the time of day, the answers probably no more than 2% of them. The rest are doing what students have done ever since Bologna started off the whole university thing in 1088 conducting research into chemistry and human biology of the decidedly nonacademic kind.

Every year in Britain, over half a million people start undergraduate life. Why should you join them? The standard reason is that graduates earn more; if you have a degree, it is estimated that you will earn over 160,000 more during your working life than a non-graduate who got similar A-level results. You earn on average 30,000 a year; they scrape by on a measly 18,000.

This will be enough to persuade most parents, or to put woolly-minded non-graduates in their place. But as a critical thinker of tertiary-education calibre, you know its not as simple as this.

Because that average is inflated by the high-earning medics and dentists, who put away a third of a million more than their unqualified peers. For humanities graduates, the figure is only 50,000; for arts grads, 35,000.

Today, a degree will cost you three or four years of 9,000 a year just for tuition. Add in living costs and, even with that part-time restaurant job, youll rack up an eye-watering debt of between 30,000 to 60,000 which, with interest, will involve repaying more like 65,000 to 85,000 over the ensuing years. Even a media studies first-year can see that those figures dont add up for everyone.

Of course, there are other benefits to having a degree, but even these must be taken with a pinch of salt. Graduates are fitter and healthier, for example, perhaps because theyve slept a lot during the past three or four years and know about the dangers of a salty diet. (Though if being a graduate implies good health, being a student with a lifestyle of late nights, junk food and excessive consumption often doesnt.)

Research suggests that grads are also more active community participants probably because theyre going through their contacts book trying to get a job. Theyre also less likely to have criminal records, though thats possibly because theyre smart enough not to get caught. Theyre more tolerant, too, on diversity and sexual matters, no doubt because theyve done so much primary research on this themselves.

Bear in mind, though, that all the above figures come from research done by postgrad students. So treat anything you read on their website with caution. Those PDFs may not be worth the paper theyre written on.

But a university degree is about more than this. You make many new lifelong friends and contacts. And only a few new lifelong enemies. With a degree, you can end up with jobs youd never have imagined yourself doing working at a burger bar or a call centre, for instance.