Gareth,
That's not a good analogy, because Oxford and Cambridge get to cream off the brightest A-Level students in the country. Quality students in = quality graduates out. That's why they command the respect they do.
OATS on the other hand, does not select its self-sponsored students: if you can pay you're in. The respect that they have in the industry comes from being BA's school of choice, being around a long time and being one of just two domestic integrated course providers.
At the end of the day, an Oxford integrated course will cost you at least £20,000 more than a run-of-the-mill modular course, the new APP course much more. However all people graduating with a CPL/IR and 200-ish hours currently end up in the same dole queue. Is it really worth spending all that extra money just to get to the same place as your non-OATS contemporaries?
Note that this has always been the case - even when times were good only a tiny proportion of self-sponsored OATS graduates were recommended by OATS to airlines, and only a small proportion more were hired by airlines with no further experience, just on the strength of having gone to OATS.
You have to ask yourself whether you could better spend all that extra cash on an instructor rating, maybe on the ATP scheme, (dare I mention it) a type rating, or even just making your training debts more manageable so you can afford a few more tins of beans a month or a slightly bigger caravan when you're earning a paltry instructor's salary and repaying those huge loans?
I have no real axe to grind with OATS, they run a quality integrated course that sells well amongst their primary audience: airlines running cadet schemes. At the end of the day they are running a business: when this source of income dries up as it has recently, they are going to look to other markets, and one of these is playing on their reputation to fill their expensive courses with enthusiastic self-sponsored students looking for that mythical OATS-factor on their CVs. I personally think that anyone who is prepared to burn large amounts of money on the off-chance that they might get an airline recommendation, is either loaded, ill-informed, or both. Because after graduating in the cold light of day most find that the £20,000+ extra has bought them little, if any, advantage.
cheers!
foggy
Last edited by foghorn; 27th Jan 2003 at 13:02.