Yes

Yes

In extremely large numbers is the basic response but let’s look more closely:

Now, this is big. Why is it big? Because there are around 2 million or so students at universities in the UK, and there may be more than 200,000 people working at the UK’s universities, and I might be underestimating that.
My point, therefore, is that this is a serious part of the UK’s economy, which looks to be in a very vulnerable state.
And that part of the economy has also been exceptionally important for the UK’s foreign earnings. And we need those foreign earnings because, as most people know, we import more goods than we export, and so it is things like earnings from the universities sector that help make up the difference.

What takes the breath away, even more than the chutzpah, even more than the ignorance, even more than the naked self-interest hidden behind platitudes is if someone made the same argument around financial services (and one could very easily) he’d be the first to condemn it.

And if the UK does potentially leave some universities bust, the impact is going to be very dramatic too on the local economies involved. In the city where I work, Sheffield, the impact of the university, of Sheffield itself, and Sheffield Hallam University, is enormous.
You can’t walk around the city centre without seeing the presence of universities and the impact that they have on the local economy.
You can’t walk around for much of the year without noticing the very large number of students who are present as well. That activity has an enormous impact on the well-being of that city.
And there are other places where this is even more dramatic. Go to St Andrews in Scotland and see how important the university is there. Or go to somewhere like Bangor in Wales, or Aberystwyth in Wales, and again, see the enormous impact that universities have in those places.
So, we can’t just say that this is an issue that is a nationwide concern. It’s also a very local concern if a university is to fail.

And yet he is arguably the leading partisan for both Net Zero and COVID lockdowns, which are leaving vast swathes of perfectly viable businesses in their wake. He also wants a ban on airports and flying and the economics are arguably at least as compelling for them. It would be very hard to even make this post as a satire.

I know that most people who once have left university aren’t asked very much about their degree. And I know it’s even more common for people who have left university to say, “Well I never used much of what I learned there in my subsequent career”. But neither of those things are entirely true. Because people who’ve been to university learned a particular way to think. That’s what we really teach. It is about discipline and research and formulating answers to questions that are complex in their nature. And where the person who is going to do well at university has to process a great deal of information and present it in a very orderly fashion to the satisfaction of their examiner. That is a skill that you don’t get anywhere else.
So, we do need universities. We need universities to train skilled people >/i>

I’d argue large swathes of the student body engage primarily in terrorism, whether for environmental, religious or ideological reasons and they come out of the experience knowing nothing of any real value and fit only for employment in a public sector which is overstuffed by millions. All the meanwhile useful sectors that feed and provide the necessities of life are struggling for labour.

So, do we face a risk that this area of learning, this area where we have been at the forefront of the world, where we still have some of the best universities in the world, is going to decline?
And I know it’s common for people to say, we don’t need the university of wherever because it’s no more than a further education college. But hang on a minute, further education colleges also have a very serious role in teaching people skills that they need, maybe of a technical nature, and there’s nothing wrong with having technical skills.
We may be shooting ourselves in the foot if we don’t protect this sector is my point. Very seriously, very serious damage to our economy could arise unless we really think about what we’re doing.

And yet Net Zero, DIE and Trans, all of which are savaging the economy must continue unabated? this would be a weak video even if it were in the National or the TES. Feeble doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Any bailout of the universities would be a gross misallocation of resources – they should be allowed to fail, and indeed encouraged to do so.

I doubt Sheffield (or even Hallam, which was a more than half-decent poly, despite employing the Spud) is in immediate danger of bankruptcy. The unis that are – the ones that nobody has ever heard of, teaching mostly pointless ‘studies’ courses – deserve to go bust, and should certainly do so. If, as a result, we end up with fewer young people with enormous debts incurred for a useless piece of paper, and more of them gaining experience through apprenticeships and plain ordinary work, we’ll have done well from the deal.

Still need the carpet bombing & the bulldozers, though, to get the big ones. I note Sir Kneeler is the latest of a long list of abject failures have attended Oxford. Still only three not since Churchill.

Jeez, half the Labour parliamentary party seems now to be foreign surnames with dodgy degrees. Not saying the Tory party’s much better.

’Because people who’ve been to university learned a particular way to think.’

Yes, and these days, that’s a problem.

Huddersfield Poly’s main contribution to the area has been the explosion of Chinese restaurants and supermarkets. Whether that’s net benefit I’m not sure.

My HongKong ex-wife wants to move away from Sheffield, because it’s become “swamped with Chinese”. Admittedly, she means Mainlanders rather than proper HongKongers, but yes: the census enumeration district with the highest proportion of mainland Chinese in the entire UK – at 78% ! – is on the edge of Sheffield city centre. And it shows. 起名兒北走向房子 !

Go bust? I still have trouble believing that some of them exist!

I once saw a sign saying “Luton University”, and had to stop in the street, rub my eyes, and give my head a little shake.

I worked in Further Education, so I’m familiar with the marketing of F.E. (how we got them in) and H.E. (where we sent them off to). It’s interesting to see the marketing strategy of Portsmouth Uni, which I now live a few yards from. Massive pictures of fat ugly girls, dreary Asian blokes , and spotty nobodies with bad haircuts.

Less glittering prizes, and more “We’ll take anyone, even a fucking useless dullard like you”.

Andrew C

Evil never sleeps and he is living proof of that if nothing else!

Don’t recall using quantum mechanics in the past 60 years although Schrödinger’s Cat has popped up for an ear scratch on a couple of occasions.

@ Julia M
I was told that Oxford teaches you to think – not any particular way, just to actually think. To what extent that is true and to what extent it chooses (chose) people who could *already* think I do not know – I remain convinced that I passed the entrance exam because I looked at one question and thought “what would my father have said?” and then the solution just fell into my hands.
BUT Islington Poly and Sheffield University are just not “in the same class”. My post-grad Diploma in Statistics was worth more than a Sheffield M.Sc. (I know that because a couple of years later a Yorkshireman who had read Maths at Cambridge but then went back north for his M.Sc. joined the department where I was working and we looked at the requirements for the rwo courses: mine was significantly greater).
What so-called “universities” do in brain-washing “grievance studies” is not universal.

A pal of mine used to work in a poly where the hierarchy were set on it becoming a uni. He disapproved. He said that almost nobody there but him had graduated from a good university. They had no idea what was involved in teaching to that sort of level. It was, in his view, nonsense on stilts.

We need universities. I.think everyone who is clever enough and wants go should study for a degree. The more educated population is the more skilled and able the society will be.
We need to get away from conspiracy theories that try to keep people down we need to stoo the right wing policy to dumb peoole down.
We need a MORE educated society, not less.
We need to respect education.

It is bonkers imv that tuition fees for UK students have decreased in real terms, stayed fixed in nominal.
It’s also daft that a foreign student is eligible for ILR after 5 years i think (first 3 years as a full-time student) but a foreign worker is eligible for ILR after 5 years. The first pays no council tax until they graduate meaning landlords can charge a little more for students as they don’t have to factor in council tax as a cost. On average of course. Should start the clock to gain ILR at graduation day imv.
But I don’t understand why restricting student visas is a good idea – I get that ‘studies’ or ‘public administration’ don’t add much value in the TW aggregate view but if a foreign student is willing to pay a multiple of their worth, why should the UK try to fight them off. Boris got this right.

When Blair declared that colleges could now describe themselves as universities and start issuing degrees he missed a trick, I feel, in not also declaring that all army regiments were now SAS regiments.

“We need a MORE educated society, not less.”

I agree.

“We need to respect education.”

I (sort of) disagree. What people mean by ‘Education’ is often the institution, or the people, supplying ‘Education’. I don’t think that Education automatically deserves respect; or that it is something that can be done by one person to another.

Looking back, what I learned at university was how to find information if it already existed; how to discover information by experiment if it didn’t already exist; how to develop hypotheses and refine them into usable knowledge. I’ve been Educating myself ever since.

At university I also had a lot of fun and met my wife.

…. although Schrödinger’s Cat has popped up for an ear scratch on a couple of occasions.

How could you tell?

Educate said:
“We need a MORE educated society, not less.
We need to respect education.”

Yawn. Yes, but only if that education is of sufficient quality. Not everything that calls itself education is.

And not every education institution is actually providing education of sufficient quality to be worthy of respect. Or even worthy of being described as education.

Isn’t that obvious?

“We need a MORE educated society, not less.”

I agree.

I don’t. Is a 25-year-old with a media studies degree and a truckload of student debt better off than a time-served plumber? We need a better-educated society. And if that means shutting down three-quarters of the universities and a return of technical colleges and genuine apprenticeships, then the sooner the better.

Yeah Jim. Sounds just like the way it happens in Oz.