So here is my big idea to boost the GDP of this country: radically reduce the size of the university sector and with it the proportion of young people taking degrees. How radical? Cutting it in half would be a good start.
Yep.
a cull of lecturers and professors, buildings and all facilities in universities.
There is that slight problem though. We know how bureaucracies react. They’d cull all the engineering and leave themselves only with the grievance studies departments.
Quite right Tim. The only way’s carpet bombing, bull-dozing the rubble & salting the earth with nuclear waste from the research reactors.
Universities are the last vestiges of the guild system. Not gateways to knowledge but gate keepers.
As tempting as it is – been tested in Cambodia, didn’t work.
We don’t need to cull anyone. All we need to do is to declare that only students at the best universities, studying the most useful degrees, can get state-backed funding ie student loans.
You can still take up that degree in LGBT Grievance Studies at Bullshit University, but you’ll have to fund it yourself, or persuade a bank to lend you £60k to do it. Useless universities would soon be out of business.
@MC They try that one in the US… It’s amazing how many people are wllling to take on hefty loans for degrees in Basket Weaving, Interpretive Dance, and Creative Writing.
“Parents and employers are rating university too highly – many professionals could thrive without degrees”.
It should read “public sector employers who aren’t reliant on a productive and appropriately trained workforce as the taxpayer will always be there to fund their inefficiencies and incompetencies are rating universities too highly”.
The private sector sees many of today’s higher qualifications as a red flag and recruits accordingly.
It’s as what I used to say when in local government. Half the councillors are useless*. Ok, half the size of the council. But then you’d still have half the coucillors being useless, just a smaller number of them, and the smaller number of useful ones would have twice the work.
*Adjust to fit your own opinion.
“studying the most useful degrees”
Who gets to decide what are the most useful degrees and so worthy of funding?
@ jgh
I can remember people having corporate sponsorship (IIRC this was called “graduate apprenticeships”) to study engineering and other useful courses. The companies putting their money where their mouth was.
Also vac jobs (paid) with potential future employers
So some mug calls for what amounts to a Purge–without the “punish Marxism” element and gets a thread.
Roust-fire all leftists first. Staff, Admin and students. And then return Unis to grant system. With the old figure of about 10% I believe it was of kids going on the basis of exam results. Bliar only wanted 50% at Uni so the Marxist brainwashing started by schools could be completed . With the shite results we see around us today.
As MC says you can still study leftist shite at your own expense.
And also the mugs employing leftist stooges need a kicking. Massive reductions in public sector and woke business hangers on by cutting off the Govt tit. And a quiet word with advertising pukes to can the multi-cult mixed marriages bullshit voluntarily. Before anything nasty happens so to speak.
Bootle needs to be a bit more careful in his choice of course to denigrate. In fact, graduates in Golf Studies find appropriate jobs rather easily. Likewise Tourism and Leisure is a growth industry needing managers, and is hard to automate. I agree about nursing and policing, that’s a mistake. But to interfere in the university market risks making the kind of top down micro decision making that in other contexts he would decry.
Companies that insist on graduates for non graduate positions are simply idiotic. It may help limit the number of applicants and the work required by HR but having a bored disgruntled employee is inefficient.
philip,
“Bootle needs to be a bit more careful in his choice of course to denigrate. In fact, graduates in Golf Studies find appropriate jobs rather easily. Likewise Tourism and Leisure is a growth industry needing managers, and is hard to automate. I agree about nursing and policing, that’s a mistake. But to interfere in the university market risks making the kind of top down micro decision making that in other contexts he would decry.”
What jobs? How much do they pay? Is 3 years of academic study and £27K of tuition the best way to get to that job?
I make an exception for the hard sciences, because the universities are where the leading research is done, so you get the top experts, but most people teaching in universities are not. The people teaching computer science, film or photography are flakes who either just like being on campus or failed in the real world. You can learn more useful stuff about software development in 3 months of courses and reading about software development than you will learn from 3 years in university.
The right answer is for universities to collect the student debt. Let them judge what is useful in terms of remuneration back to them.
I think it would be hard to roll back on nursing being a graduate profession now, given the way that’s become standard internationally. The job is more technically demanding than it was fifty years ago, so you’re always going to have to train them at some kind of nursing school – if that happens to be attached to a university and they get a degree for their efforts, so be it. And it isn’t like nursing degrees have a low employment rate afterwards.
If degrees in policing will include a lot of “contextual” sociology/criminology that’s not so relevant to the job at hand, then that’s a waste. But UK police training was already quite long (especially compared to US police) with the amount of law, procedure, situational awareness and management etc they had to learn. If they’d been given some kind of undergraduate-level diploma for completing Hendon then that would have been fair enough. Do they need three years? I fear that might be more about gaining “parity of respect” with other careers, or trying to exclude a certain kind of high-brawn low-brain copper. I can’t claim any special knowledge but suspect there’s a certain kind of “streetwise” knowledge that is of more practical use than academic chops, and graduate-only policing may mean fewer entrants who grew up with those kind of experiences, but without glittering school grades.
If you look at international comparisons, it is generally true that countries with more people doing higher education (not necessarily a full degree, would include things like HNC/HND in the UK or associates degrees in the US system) have more productive workforces. But hard to distinguish causality there because both those things are indicative of wealthier countries. One big exception to the rule is Germany, where the proportion of people who do higher education is surprisingly low for a country with such high GDP per capita. But vocational education is a much stronger alternative there, and a viable and culturally acceptable route for someone smart and ambitious to go down. “Shut down the universities” isn’t really a solution in its own right. Build something better as an alternative, stick the investment in if needs be, and give it adequate status and prestige. If you do it right, people will be prepared to go down that route instead of a negative net present value degree course, and the universities with the worst value proposition to students will atrophy and close – or more realistically, “merge” and be asset-stripped for their decent departments.
In general I would be more concerned about the offering for those who don’t go to uni than those who do – every national newspaper talks about A-level results, the best schools to get the best A-levels and Oxbridge or Russell Group admissions, the University league tables, even minor rows in University student politics get significant media airtime. The non-academic route gets media silence. Yet only about half of 16-18 year olds take A-levels!
To be fair there have been a lot of apprenticeships launched in the UK in recent years, but they’re often just a way to acquire cheap labour and have minimal training. Improving the standard of vocational education really requires investment. Didn’t have to be government investment of course, but the fact people now change job – and indeed career path – so many more times in a lifetime than they did historically, realistically is an impediment to expecting companies to train their own staff. The free rider problem – people using companies to get free training, companies poaching from others to avoid training their own – is pretty pernicious.
Wrong way around. Cull the government, quango and council jobs the graduates of these courses infest. The more astute school leaver will soon learn to make wiser choices and possibly take up a trade instead of patronising third rate courses. As long as the public sector acts as a sponge for these people the universities will churn them out.
A simple reactionary solution would be to demand a GCSE pass in Latin for admission to university. Even though the idea of having your brightest youngsters wasting their time studying Latin appears mad, it would probably reduce university admissions substantially.
Personally I’d be more inclined to demand an A-level in maths, being a non-mad way to achieve the same end. Except that there would then be an almighty grade inflation in A-level maths, wouldn’t there?
I fear an Ecksian solution might be necessary.
@Grikath
Unfortunately it is the government backing these loans. Hence no selectivity on what degrees are funded. Besides which, Biden is trying to forgive these loans, so the taxpayer ends up on the hook for them. He just hasn’t found a judge or advisor who will say it’s legal.
“…there have been a lot of apprenticeships launched in the UK in recent years, but they’re often just a way to acquire cheap labour and have minimal training.”
It was always the way. I did my apprenticeship in the late 1970s and I would say that this was a pretty accurate appraisal. The thing was, you learned how to do stuff by doing it and sort of picked up knowledge by osmosis. I ended up being very good at fixing things, which will always be in demand, and not thousands in debt. I never commanded huge salaries but I could always get work.
Ltw August 30, 2021 at 7:46 am
“As tempting as it is – been tested in Cambodia, didn’t work.”
Of course it would work, if only it had been properly tried !