Bronwen Maddox | No More PPE | Opposition (2/6) | Oxford Union

SUBSCRIBE for more speakers ► is.gd/OxfordUnion
Oxford Union on Facebook: / theoxfordunion
Oxford Union on Twitter: @OxfordUnion
Website: www.oxford-unio...
PRESIDENT’S FAREWELL DEBATE
Said to be ‘the Oxford degree that runs Britain’, Philosophy, Politics and Economics has dominated politics, law, journalism, and business around the globe like no other degree. From the fifteen members of Cameron’s Government, to international figures like Australian PM Tony Abbott, Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, and Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi, does PPE train the leaders of tomorrow or represent an elitist club? On the belated 100th anniversary of this degree, we evaluate the many criticisms of PPE, and ask whether it remains relevant in the 21st Century.
--------------------------------------
Speakers
1. James Ball: Journalist, author, and former Oxford PPEist. He has written for The Guardian, BuzzFeed, and The Washington Post, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with the Guardian US for reporting on NSA surveillance.
2. Andrew Graham: Political economist, former Master of Balliol College, and former Oxford PPEist. He was Economic Advisor to the Harold Wilson cabinet, and is currently Executive Chair of the Europaeum and a Senior Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute.
3. Dr Rupa Huq MP: Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton, elected 2015. She studied Social and Political Sciences with Law at Cambridge, and was formerly a senior sociology lecturer at Kingston University. She is a part-time DJ.
4. Bronwen Maddox: Director of the Institute for Government. Maddox is a former Foreign Editor of The Times newspaper.
5. Molly Mantle: Incoming President (HT22), PPE student at St Hugh’s College.
6. Chengkai Xie: Outgoing President (MT21), Brasenose College PPE graduate
ABOUT THE OXFORD UNION SOCIETY: The Oxford Union is the world's most prestigious debating society, with an unparalleled reputation for bringing international guests and speakers to Oxford. Since 1823, the Union has been promoting debate and discussion not just in Oxford University, but across the globe.

[@jamesnaughton5657]

By far the best speech. Her point about PPE being brainlessly scapegoated is spot on. 90% of PPE students drop a subject after first year, meaning 8/9ths of their degree will have been in two subjects. The PPE structure therefore is near-identical to joint honours courses at Oxford and many others around the country. If PPE lacks depth, then so do they. The same is true of criticism of supposedly superficial essay-based learning: that is simply the nature of an arts education at Oxford and applies equally to history students doing the French Revolution one week and the Napoleonic Wars the next. PPE should probably be a year longer, with a compulsory dissertation and maybe a paper or two that attempt some sort of synthesis that is largely absent. But in truth that extra year would probably be much better spent doing a master’s degree somewhere else, getting the depth many say is absent. The other common criticism is not of PPE itself but that it has become so dominant a degree in elite institutions - parliament, journalism, etc. Part of that is a scapegoating of PPE for general Oxbridge elitism, which I’ll ignore; part of it is a criticism of the confining perspective of a single degree. It should first be noted that less than 10% of MPs have a PPE degree and that it’s not even the single most popular - law is considerably ahead of it. But, granting that it’s over-represented, it can’t be said that studying philosophy confines one’s perspective to a particular discipline, and when you see that PPE students choose eight finals papers from about sixty, giving rise to dozens of unique combinations, it’s very reductive to say that they all graduate with the same degree. Oxford PPE may have educated Liz Truss and Matt Hancock but it also educated Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper. According to a Wikipedia article, the split of famous MPs with PPE degrees is 42-36 in favour of Labour, with Lib Dems on nine. That’s a very even distribution, demonstrating that it attracts and accommodates a spectrum of perspectives.

[@vitthalpatil1974]

I just love the way these people present their speech

[@argha-qi5hf]

That's quite a classy presentation.

[@DipakBose-bq1vv]

I taught in Oxford Institute of Agricultural Economics for three years teaching Econometrics. I found out that those who are PPE graduates are totally unprepared for the Masters Degree course I used to teach. PPE is only good for the future journalists and politicians. It is not good for anyone who wants go for a Master's Degree and D.Phill. PPE graduates can only talk and talk.

[@kyndramb7050]

This whole time I thought they were talking about Personal Protective Equipment. "4 years is a long time to specialize in PPE...."

[@bamjoshy]

Your comment cracked me up.

[@syedadeelhussain2691]

why would a bank or a fund hire a PPE student in this day and age of machine learning, quantitative finance, risk management, quantum computing and Ai, etc?

[@SemperBadBear]

Because Machines cannot factor ethics, order, and chaos as perceived by the human experience.

[@syedadeelhussain2691]

@@SemperBadBear yes, algos have their limitations, but office work, which relies heavily on digital decision platforms and coding, is not that easy! you have to perform with your head down. For politics or civil services, this degree is ideal.

[@jamie306]

@@syedadeelhussain2691 right..umm, this may come as a shocker, but when it comes to certain wonderful colleges major companies tend not to care about your specific degree, which is why you'll see ivy league kids w sociology degrees head into consulting, tech, and finance after graduating. also, a finance degree in general is taken to be of lesser value in the professional realm than an economics degree, and these kids have studied econ. another example: harvard offers no finance degree or business degree at undergrad, just econ, and a lotta kids go into finance w that, and even w/ it. firms usually have training periods for new hires. mckinsey takes sociologists and math majors, but what do they have to do w consulting? nada, they merely need the talent. the skills can be taught. RenTec(the best hedge fund) exclusively hires scientists, people w no finance backgrounds, and they teach em. and no undergrad degree anywhere teaches the stuff you mentioned-that's skill based work that's taught on the job. on another note, this woman read ppe, and went to work at 2 global inv. banks in london, before becoming a journalist. oh and a tutor at an oxford college once stated that in all the years he taught, the inv. banks simply hoovered up ppe grads. he was there from 2000-2009, so pretty recent. heck, you can find oxonians who read history or eng or classics go work for goldman sachs or barclays. the way college education and professional hiring works it seems is a world you have no direct knowledge of, not at least at a larger scale. the people hiring know what they're doing.

[@syedadeelhussain2691]

@@jamie306 Alright, thanks for educating me further on this issue. It might be different in the First World, where human beings' soft skills are valued as much as the hard science skills that they possess. Employers in larger markets have MTO programs, and they prefer to hire grads who can see the larger picture. Most history graduates do well in the UK, and other Industrial Societies, because the intellectual gift of reasoning is utilized in the workspace. If you visit some of the Germanic states, most of the people in the office have either completed their PhD or are in the process of finishing one just to stay scholarly and competitive. How many countries actually prefer to hire PhDs, as the Germanic Nations do? Not many that come to my mind! However, in the Third World, most of the labour markets are very competitive and crude, hence, employers want to hire human resources which require minimum training and maximum productivity within the shortest period, to realize the ROI on hiring.