I was an Imperial physics student who had an interview between 1st and 2.1, not this year, but many years ago. I remember being in there for a quarter of the alloted time and things went well so I knew as soon as I left that I'd made the grade. I also believe Stephen Hawking had a similar experience at Oxford so I like to tell people I got the same grade at university as Stephen Hawking. ;-) I actually think Simon Jenkins makes some useful points. Especially within science it amazes me that people don't really question the need for more scientists, despite the fact that some of the science jobs I apply for have 200+ applicants. The cuts that we're about to face are quite likely to cost me my job and may even cost me my career, so it is worrying. With a science training all the way to PhD level it still puzzles me that it's harder for me to get a job I'm trained for than one outside of science that I'm not. I worked a while outside of science after my MSc and I don't really believe that the science training was that useful. Being smart helped, but I didn't get that just from being trained as a scientist. The guys I worked with who had studied economics and humanities had a better professional network, a better understanding of what was expected of them and were more easily integrated into the business world than me, because they'd basically lived in it their whole lives. There's a tendency in science to say that the money being spent on it is not a lot compared to cruise missiles and aircraft carriers. But there's often little real questioning beyond that. Take the LISA gravitational wave mission, supposedly will cost 2 billion dollars. If the already operating LIGO collaboration is anything to go by, they might end up with around 1,000 scientists working on it. That's 2 million dollars per scientist! A lot of money, even if the science case is exciting. What could 1,000 smart, educated people do with 2 million dollars each? Retire, for starters.