Have Governments Put Too Much Resource Into Higher Education
by Ian R Thorpe.
2011-02-03
CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribute, non commercial, no derivs.
KEYWORDS: education, higher, university, academic, degree, graduate, job, jobs, school, pupil, skills, college, unemployment, business, government, science, liberal, arts
30 June 2010
by Ian R Thorpe
For a couple of decades governments have been pushing the idea that higher education and a university degree are the only roads to career success, prosperity and happiness. Since we began putting The Daily Stirrer on line two years ago and before that when Ian wrote Little Nicky Machiavelli blog we have argued that university education is not the be all and end all. Can it really be that incurring tens of thousands of pounds or dollars in debt to attend an educational institution where most of what you learn will not be relevant to a career in business, industry or public service is a bad investment?
Well The Daily Stirrer has always thought the amount of pressure put on young people to enroll on university courses was directly related to the decay of the business and industrial base in some western nations, in fact it was nothing but a ruse to keep people out of the jobs market and make unemployment statistics look, if not respectable, certainly less bad.
As usual what The Daily Stirrer was saying last year (and the year before that) is what our leaders, politicians and the academics who advise them are saying today or will be saying tomorrow. A new report released by Harvard University magazine Harvard Wednesday states in some of the strongest terms yet that such a “university for all” emphasis may actually harm many students by preventing them from having a smooth transition from adolescence to the work place.
A new report released by Harvard Wednesday states in some of the strongest terms yet that such a “college for all” emphasis may actually harm many American students – keeping them from having a smooth transition from adolescence to adulthood and a viable career…
“It would be fine if we had an alternative system [for students who don’t get college degrees], but we’re virtually unique among industrialized countries in terms of not having another system and relying so heavily on higher education,” says Robert Schwartz, who heads the Pathways to Prosperity project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Emphasizing college as the only path may actually cause some students – who are bored in class but could enjoy learning that’s more entwined with the workplace – to drop out, he adds. “If the image [of college] is more years of just sitting in classrooms, that’s not very persuasive.”…
The United States can learn from other countries, particularly in northern Europe, Professor Schwartz says. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, for instance, between 40 and 70 percent of high-schoolers opt for programs that combine classroom and workplace learning, many of them involving apprenticeships. These pathways result in a “qualification” that has real currency in the labor market…
“If we persist with the illusion that everyone is going to college, then we’re cheating those kids who aren’t going,” Professor Ferguson says. “A majority of the workforce does not have a college degree, and a majority of the things those people do are going to continue not requiring a college degree.”
The Daily Stirrer has covered this topic many times from different angles. When we link it from our other blogs where commenting is available the response always suggests the received wisdom about the value of expensive higher education is widely questioned out there on planet reality.
All of us who contribute to this website agree that many of the best engineers and technologists we worked with in our careers (which are now almost over) took the path through apprenticeship and day release / night school. When we were leaving school you see, university was still a comparitave rarity. Only about 15% of school leavers went on to higher education. Certain highly specialised disciplines were exclusively taught in universities but largely they were the preserve of academics. None of us can recall those people who progressed through the job experience / day release system being particularly culturally deprived or lacking in the intellectual skills degree courses are claimed to bestow. In fact I would venture to suggest they were more rounded individuals than the products of the higher education system.
Since then the university system has become an industry, run by academics for academics. More effort is put into empire building than into fulfilling the needs and wishes of students.
Stepping back from the degree course production line might actually be good for the cause of liberal arts. By creating a system that encourages learning at one's own pace with the freedom to wander where interest takes us, a culture of sustained, lifelong autodidacticism in the humanities could be created.
If young people with an interest in, say, great literature know that they can’t cram in depth knowledge and understanding of the subject of the subject into a three year degree course they may end up pursuing it over many years during their adult leisure time. Such learning is said by some to have greater value because it is not taught to exam and statistics do not matter.
We should not forget that the educational philosophy on which the liberal arts curriculum (a.k.a. the renaissance education) is founded is the teaching of a broad based foundation on which pupils can build in later life. Though some scienceheads (people who are addicted to science or just to saying science a lot without understanding what the word means) are wrongly convinced that a liberal arts education is all about romantic poetry, painting pretty pictures and flower arranging, in fact when the term was first employed 'arts' had a different meaning. The Liberal Arts education then includes a broad grounding in mathematics and natural sciences (chemistry, physics, biology) as well as grammar, rhetoric, didactic, languages, music, art, history and philosophy.
What better way could there be to equip a young person with the desire and basic skills to take pleasure in learning thought their life, following this or that interest as the fancy takes them. Learning for personal enrichment rather than for the material benefits of a successful career.
As technology shifts more and more of the workload from humans to machines and government policy in the west shifts more and more of the remaining work for humans to the low cost economies of developing nations we have to find other ways to stimulate people, to make life worth living for them. The other benefit of this approach in an increasingly jobless society is it does not saddle people with a huge debt that can catch them in a poverty trap should they seek to progress from burger flipping to a more intellectually stimulating, financially rewarding career.
In Britain we have a skill shortage. While the stupid whining lefties are pleading that we should open our doors to every semi - literate third world peasant who wants to come and live on our generous benefits system more realistic voices are complaining that we have far too many media studies and journalism graduates, artists, graphic designers, musicians, drama and dance grads and far too many psychologists, theoretical physicists, astronomers, archaeologists and social scientists and no plumbers, bricklayers, carpenters, mechanics and nurses. We have to import people to do these jobs.
In some areas there are jobs available that can’t be filled by the unemployed because they don’t have the right skills. Maybe focusing the efforts of the state on building skill bases that are useful to society should be a priority. It would also serve young people who aren’t much interested in higher education better. When I hear the word 'fairness' being used by politicians who have shown themselves to be ready to use authoritarian means to force conformity on us I have to reach for the sick bucket.
Now more than ever we have the tools available in society to make lifelong learning a reality. Once it was just libraries and nightschool. Now the Internet is available to make the intellectual “market” more efficient by providing a means for people with similar interests to communicate. Digital television with its plethora of channels s a wonderful way of delivering information to those who want to learn. Unfortunately this type of learning is looked down on and sneered at by academics for no reason other than that it deprives those sneering, elitist academics of their power.
Successive British leaders from Margaret Thatcher onwards have said they want to see Britain among nations with the highest rate of university graduates, 50% is a figure often bandied about. That is an absolutely stupid goal given the soul destroying cost of higher education and the amount of time wasted at school because of inappropriate lessons imposed by our politically correct curriculum and the disruptive influence of bored pupils who simply do not want to be in class. Another thing that has been overlooked in shaping the education production line is that children are individuals. They develop along different paths and at different speeds. A one-size-fits-all education policy devoid of flexibility will let down more pupils that it serves.
What politicians of both governing parties have pledged to deliver from their education reforms is a meritocracy. What they have given us is a mediocracy, a system in which the dull conformist is rewarded and the bright individual penalised.
RELATED POSTS:
Decadent Exam Results DayWhere do the television people find those wussy, goodie goodie teenage A level students who come over Anthea Turner on a level results day. It just does no present a realistic picture of loutish modern youth. Here our cub reporter recounts his own exam results day experience...
More Graduates, Less Graduate JobsAll the while Labour were in power they kept muttering about the knowledge economy as if simply having attained a University degree was a marketable asset. In reality were were spending fortunes on educating people to be call centre clerks, shelf fillers and burger flippers. Now the coalition must find a way to deal with the problem of having too many graducates in areas that offer no jobs.
Graduate Tax Would Deter Many From University EducationAs the public sector debt crisis forces the coalition to cut the Universities budget Ian R Thorpe wades into the argument about university education as a right and tuition fees
The Higher Education DisasterEverybody has been feeling the pinch this past couple of years so just think how well off we would all be if this government stopped wasting our money! Each party is suggesting the other will bring in the more savage cuts to public spending. But they don't have to cut any necessary spending at all, just stop wasting the money we bung into the kitty via our tax on stupid schemes thought up by The Politically Correct Thought Police
The Blight Of Educations education all it's cracked up to be. Satirist Ian R Thorpe thinks not and explains why in this article about the pretensions of science, the naivete of graduates with university degrees and the realities of the jobs market.
Devaluation By DegreeA Degree used to be epitome of higher education, the indicator of academic excellence rather than vocational skills. With the proliferation of Universities and the Pick - And - Mix nature of many degree courses, this article asks if the University Degree is being devalued and the university courses downgraded to mere further education as the divinding line between academic ...
University Bosses Become Fat Cats As Student Fees Rise
The pay packets of Britain’s university heads rocketed by as much as a fifth last year, just as institutions lobbied for a huge hike in student tuition fees. More than 950 university staff, including all vice-chancellors, were paid more than the Prime Minister – an eight per cent increase on the year before. One senior administrator at Oxford was given a salary of almost £600,000, thought to be the highest-paid university post in ...
Tens of thousands of children will be able to abandon academic study at 14 to undertake vocational training under plans unveiled last night.Up to 70 technical schools teaching youngsters practical skills from bricklaying to fashion are to be opened within the next five years. The scheme is one of the most radical shake-ups of the education system since ...
Dumbing Down Has Destroyed Respect For Academics
Academic inflation is as dangerous to any country as its financial equivalent. When university degrees no longer represent a genuine assessment of a graduate’s abilities, the whole intellectual currency is debased. In Britain, as we report today, this insidious process has reached
Lib Dems Planned To Drop Tuition Fees Pledge
The Liberal Democrats were drawing up plans to abandon Nick Clegg's flagship policy to scrap university tuition fees two months before the general election, secret party documents reveal.
The amount of rage being hurled at Nick Clegg and other Liberal Democrat ministers in the coalition government by labour-lefie-loonies and by their own party members is as amusing as it is
Higher Tuition Fees Will Keep Costs Down Says Cameron
A surprise remark from David Cameron is likely to anger parents who are being forced to find thousands more to fund their children's higher education.
The Prime Minister was quizzed on a trip to a university in Beijing about last week's Coalition proposal to raise tuition fees by up to £9,000 a year.
it's hard to see quite what The Prime Minister is driving at here, how can higher fees possibly keep
Obama's watered down speech to schools
Barack Obama's much hyped speech to school pupils caused a storm when it was leaked that the self-worshipper-in-chief planned to exhort kids to ask themselves "what can I do to serve President Obama. No dount a man as deluded as Barack Hussein Obama thought he was doing something really cute in paraphrasing Jack Kennedy. Kennedy of course had the political acumen to say, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what
If you liked this, please give it a boost
Close Window and return to menu
Skip RSS Feeds and go to Greenteeth Main Navigaton Panel
|
|
More From Around The Labyrinth
|
