I filled in the census online the other day (yawn)... and can you believe it, they have rolled having a PhD in with all other degrees obtained (e.g., BA, MSc)... so my husband actually ended up with more ticks on his qualifications than me! Bah humbug (sprout) It makes him feel better though ,-)

Humph... I bet they even equate having an MBA with a PhD! At least we all know the value of a PhD, even if the Bureau of Statistics doesn't...

I was a bit disappointed by that too, when we filled in the census online on Sunday night. My hubby has a PhD too, so it's not so much competition in our house on the academic front. Though I did tick more qualifications boxes than him, mainly because I have a SCOTVEC certificate in interfaces and control systems (robots and traffic lights - I'm really good at designing traffic lights)!

I was annoyed by that too even though I don't have my PhD yet. Even though I have a masters plus everything else that goes before that, I only ticked 1 box more than my bf who has GCSEs and NVQs which he thought was quite funny

I am amused to find this thread because I was a bit grumpy about it too! :-s

Yup, there's no distiction between Bachelors, Masters and PhD. Until recently, the likes of OFQUAL did not distinguish between HND and degree on the one hand, and Masters and PhD on the other.

However, this has changed by the looks of it.

http://www.ofqual.gov.uk/qualification-and-assessment-framework/89-articles/250-explaining-the-national-qualifications-framework

I am wondering if the census can't be specific about qualifications due to the Data Protection Act hence the brad classifications?

I rooted around quite a while back as regards what proportions of people had what qualifications. It takes a lot of working out and trawling, but I came up with a figure of about 0.5% of the UK population having PhDs. The number of sucessful PhDs works out at about 1%, but half of candidates seem to be overseas.

I'm still confused as to why the left one question intentionally blank, why leave the space??

Bizarre!

wasn't that to do with the welsh lot - they had a 'do you speak welsh' question for the welsh survey and obviously they couldn't be bothered with the fuss of entering english and welsh data on the same datset or something - as it would all be 1 column out.

I'd hate to think how they analyse this. My computer freezes up with SPSS with 2000 rows

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apparently it was a Scottish/welsh question only applicable to them!
Thats probably why they only send it out every 100 years it takes that long to analyse!!

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Ah yes, us living in Welshland had the special honour of revealing whether we can read/write/speak Welsh. We also had the honour of receiving the census in both English and Welsh- what a colossal waste of paper! I dread to think how many tress suffered for the sake of that! KB