The Daily Stirrer

No Jobs For The Masses In The New Economy Despite University Education

by Ian R Thorpe.

No matter how leaders like David Cameron and Barack Obama try to talk up their economies or assure voters the jobs market is improving, growth returning and unemployment will soon start falling, the truth is change does not equal progress and forcing the pace of social change has only masked the true depth of economic and social problems. One of these is unemployment and particularly joblessness among the young. Even a universdity education does not provide a guaranteed career path.

No Jobs For The Masses

There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from most of the usual suspects on the "progressive left" (for progressive left rational people should read authoritarian right) about record levels of unemployment in the 16 - 24 demographic (demographic is progressiveese for social group). One point universally missed by the wailers and gnashers of teeth is that youth unemployment is nothing new. It has been climbing every single year since 2001. There are full statistics here; in 1990, 10.4 per cent of those under 25 were unemployed. Last year, it was 19.6 per cent. I'm not sure that the headline figure released yesterday is directly comparable to the eurostat number, but this year, it is 21.6 per cent. Since 2007, things have got much worse, of course, as they have in all countries. But in the UK this has been an acceleration of a trend, not a new one entirely.

Youth unemployment was even higher until governments of both political colours cooked up the scam of hugely expanding higher education. Up to the mid 1970s about 15% of school leavers in Britain went on to higher education. By the late 1990s we had Mr. Smarmy Tony Blair bleating about how our education system was failing they young if they did not all get a university education and setting a mid - range target of 50% of young people staying in education to get degrees. His plan of course was to keep more 16 - 25 year olds off the unemployment figures for a few years.

To consider "youth" unemployment as a single, homogenous problem is a gross oversimplification. An the OECD study of youth employment in Britain in 2008 reported:

"Highly qualified young people fare better on the labour market in Britain than do their counterparts in many other OECD countries. But low-skilled 16 to 24 year olds in the United Kingdom perform below the OECD average, the OECD report makes clear. In 2005, the ratio of low skilled to high skilled youth unemployment rates stood at almost five to one, the second highest in the OECD."

Translated to plain English, the brightest here do better than in other countries, but those who do less well at school do worse. That's hardly surprising. In this country still we have some world-class schools and universities. The expensive and exclusive private schools such as Eton and Winchester (ironically these are called public schools because when they were granted their charter by medieval kings any member of the public could enroll their sons so long as they could afford the fees.) Some of the old Grammar schools, in Britain the schools that take brighter pupils from eleven to eighteen, went private and still provide excellent education too. Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and the various colleges of the University of London consistently score top in world ranked universities. For a graduate of these alma maters there will always be work available somewhere, whether it is in a bank (still going), or in Japan teaching English. But at the same time, we also have a state run school system which self-evidently fails many students who leave at sixteen lacking basic literacy, numeracy and social skills. As the British Chambers of Commerce very succinctly puts it, many of our school leavers (and even many of our university graduates from the "new universities" or glorified polytechnics) are "fairly useless". A qualification in being "fairly useless" is hardly going to help anyone get a job (more graduates, less graduate jobs).

The standard solution proposed is to try to increase skills. For the last fifteen years the government has been pushing the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths syllabus in the fond belief that depriving pupils of cultural awareness will position our nation to move boldy forward into the new technological age. If this new technological age is analysed critically however, rather than being eulogised by technology geeks, it becomes clear technology is a job killer rather than a job creator. A current controversy concerns the plight of independent bookshops now that e-books have arrived as a viable proposition. Booksellers were already suffering because of online sales and supermarket chains cutting prices on popular titles. With the advent of Kindle and other e-readers more than half of those that remain are likely to close within two years.

The Government has been pushing a plan to increase the number of trade apprenticeships which, as well as providing a non academic or not entirely academic route to secure employment are also intended to offer remedial training for children who can't read and write. This second part of the plan undermines the first, apprenticeships used to be for electricians, carpenters, plumbers, construction skills, engineering trades, mechanics, printers and such specialised trades, to lump these in with remedial education is not going to attract a high calibre of entrant. More worryingly, the government's outsourcing of job centres with perfomance related payments to contractors passing their targets for getting people into work has provided an incentive for managers and staff to force young workers to spend weeks working for no pay supermarkets in the hope that they will learn the skills of shelf-stacking or carrying boxes. On the political Right, MPs call for the suspension of the minimum wage for young workers: the logic being that at �6 an hour, the young are priced out of jobs. The important thing is to get them onto the "job ladder", from where it is presumed that they can rise. The left naturally strongly oppose this and argue that the government should create public sector jobs for everybody.

An article by Aditya Chakrabortty points out that in 1979, manufacturing employed 6.8 million people in Britain. Today, we produce almost as much, and yet the sector employs just 2.5 milion people. Robots and Chinese people have taken over the sorts of jobs that 16 year olds could get without any qualifications straight out of school and work in for a lifetime. The only jobs left for the under-educated, or often just the less academic, are in service industries: serving coffee, cleaning toilets, stacking shelves. These jobs are not the first rung on the ladder. There is no ladder; no one hopes to work in Pret a Manger for life. In one of my previous articles on this topic I had one commenter smugly inform me that the answer is for people to specialise. Sadly he had missed the main point of the article that it was the specialists who were being squeezed. Carrying boxes and stacking shelves is hardly a specialist skill.

As Chakrabortty notes and I have observed many times in my UK blogs, the Labour Prime Ministers between 1997 and 2010, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair chased a fantasy of the "knowledge economy". They believed that if they invested enough money in education, we could become a nation entirely of software engineers, 3D computer game designers, lawyers, academics, scientists and Goldman Sachs bankers. Unfortunately, it's rubbish. Just as not everybody is suited to academic pursuits and wee will always have people whose natural abilities are better suited to practical tasks, so society will never have need for so many professionals and academics. And only a fool or an ideological dreamer could delude themselves that China, Japan, India, the Arab world and emergent nations of Africa, South East Asia and South America and, or even from the Eastern European would have to few highly intelligent and educated young people to meet the needs of their jobs market and thus would be forced to buy in suck skills from Britain.

One of the most difficult problems for our society is what can we offer those people who simply don't fit into the high tech modern economy? Ever worse pay and ever longer lines of unemployed people shuffling aimlessly around like the epsilon semi morons of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World cannot be a long term solution. Even if we have the resources, relying on an ever shrinking proportion of the population for the taxes which clothe, house and feed the rest as well as funding government vanity projects and caring for a larger population of elderly people is not politically or economically sustainable.

To talk of protectionism, of keeping jobs at home in the domestic market, is politically unfashionable but it may be necessary. Globalisation has failed, Barack Obama and David Cameron may make windy speeches about free trade and when they tell Chinese and Indian audiences of the advantages of opening their markets to the west the listeners will nod, smile and applaud politely and then carry on doing things the way they always have. I recall a story from the days when Margaret Thatcher was busy exporting British jobs to the east and destroying whole industries. While the Iron Lady was tearing up import controls on Japanese cars claiming she had secured a treaty with Japan to allow British cars into the Land of the Rising Sun, it was reported that indeed the Japanese the Japanese had scrapped their import quotas. Britain could send as many cars as we liked to Japan where our quality and sports cars were in demand. When those cars arrived however they were subject to a forensic inspection by a small team of Japanese customs officers which required each car to be taken to pieces, each component inspected for compliance with specification and the car then rebuilt.

Few customers were prepared to wait over a year and then get a rebuilt car.

Free trade was seen as a panacea for economic problems by neo - cons, an engine which would provide infinite economic growth. Even if everybody understood free trade to mean the same thing however, in an increasingly automated world it would still fail to fulfill expectations. Problems of employment, welfare dependency, falling educational standards and ageing populations must be dealt with locally and there are no quick fixes.

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Education news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk
Updated : Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:29:09 GMT

Songwriting courses: a path into the music industry?

Good songwriters are always in demand, which is why many are studying the art at university

Without songwriting there would be no music industry, but there are surprisingly few places to study it. Bath Spa University believes it was the first in the world to launch a master's in songwriting in 2007. Now the University of the West of Scotland (UWS) is offering one too.

Reality TV competitions, such as The Voice and X Factor, are selling the myth that the music industry is desperate for great vocalists, says Joe Bennett, dean of music and performing arts at Bath Spa. "Most people in the industry have plenty of vocalists in their contact books. What the industry is desperate for is amazing songs," he says.

Some people claim that the ability to write songs is innate, the same argument that was once used about entrepreneurship. "Maybe you can't teach it but you can create a climate in which people can learn it. By listening to a lot of songs and a sort of geeky analysis of the way they are constructed you can build up an arsenal of songwriting weaponry."

The MMus songwriting course, full-time over one year or part-time over two, attracts a mix of students, some recent music graduates others already working in the field. Most play an instrument, but it is not compulsory. "The art of songwriting doesn't even require the ability to read music," says Bennett. It's the talent of recognising great hooks, great lyric ideas and beautiful shape in melody."

Last September UWS launched its MA in songwriting performance led by David Scott, a songwriter, performer and radio presenter. Students get the opportunity to work with agents and artists looking for songs and on projects, such as recording an album.

"We look for potential. If someone comes to us who is technically not so good but has brilliant ideas, we can work with that," says Scott.

Songwriters can make a living out of the craft, says Scott. "Most have portfolio careers, writing songs they are passionate about and writing for television or film or advertising campaigns. Many also get involved in community songwriting workshops."

So the course includes a dose of reality about maximising income streams but the real focus is on the writing.

"Let's not forget that without great songs there would be no music industry," says Scott.

Sibling songsters

The world's first masters degree in songwriting may be about to give rise to a new talent. Students Maryann and Michael Tedstone are convinced that the songs they are writing for singer Tabatha Pegg will help catapult her into the charts.

"She is going to be huge," says Maryann who joined the MMus course at Bath Spa university with Michael, her younger brother.

The founders of Manike Music, a composition studio based in Leicester, wanted academic accreditation for the work they were doing and found themselves going in a new direction, writing for pop artists.

Maryann, 42, was trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in early woodwind and Michael, 30, plays keyboard and guitar. By doing the course part-time over two years they are able to keep up with their work writing music for big names such as Warner, Universal and Pepsi and for television. They are also composing the music for the Richard III exhibition in Leicester.

"The course has been incredibly effective," says Maryann. "It has helped us with our television and film work, something we had not anticipated, and we have also started writing pop music. We are composing songs for Tabatha, producing and rehearsing with her. I don't think we would have done that if we had not joined the course."

"I have long had a fascination with ancient Roman music and we put out an album last year and filmed a television pilot about the music. We were able to use the university's rehearsal space at Corsham to practise."

After graduating with a music degree in 1995 Maryann worked in a Chamber ensemble when her brother came to live with her and they started to compose. "The lecturers are very interested in what we are doing and give us very good advice; one of them even played on our Roman album. We enrolled because we wanted academic recognition. We ended up gaining new skills and inspiration."

Carrie Dunn

Publ.Date : Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Letters: Northern museums

We are concerned at the threatened closure of the northern "national" science museums: Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, the National Railway Museum, York, and the National Media Museum, Bradford (Report, 5 June). These are of enormous value to both scholarly and popular understanding of our industrial and scientific heritage, and represent one of the few areas where there has been a concerted attempt to develop national museums outside London. The news of the threatened closure of institutions which preserve our industrial and cultural heritage is particularly ironic, given that it follows shortly on the heels of the prime minister announcing his strong backing for the creation of a London-based Margaret Thatcher Museum and Library, at a cost of £15m.
Peter Scott Professor of international business history, Henley Business School at the University of Reading
Etsuo ABE Meiji University in Tokyo
Alison Bancroft Queen Mary, University of London
Bernardo Batiz-Lazo Professor of business history and bank management, Bangor University
Mark Billings University of Exeter
Regina Lee Blaszczyk Professor of business history, University of Leeds
Alan Booth Professor of history, University of Exeter
David Boughey Associate professor & associate dean, University of Exeter Business School
Martin Campbell-Kelly University of Warwick
John Chartres Emeritus professor of social & economic history, University of Leeds
Martin Chick University of Edinburgh
D'Maris Coffman Director, Centre for Financial History, University of Cambridge
Bill Cooke Professor of management and society, Lancaster University Management School
Richard Coopey University of Aberystwyth
Stephanie Decker Aston Business School
Neil Forbes Professor of international history, Coventry University
Dave Goodwin
David J Jeremy Emeritus professor of business history, Manchester Metropolitan University
John Killick University of Leeds
Katey Logan Business Archives Council
Peter Lyth Nottingham University Business School
Niall MacKenzie University of Strathclyde
Mairi Maclean Professor of International Management and Organisation Studies, University of Exeter Business School
Christine MacLeod
Ian Martin Senior Lecturer in Business Information Technology, Leeds Metropolitan University
Rory Miller University of Liverpool Management School
Robert Millward Professor emeritus of economic history, University of Manchester
Peter Miskell Henley Business School at the University of Reading
Simon Mollan University of Liverpool Management School
Stephen L Morgan Professor of Chinese Economic History, University of Nottingham
Simon Mowatt Associate professor of management, AUT University, New Zealand
Lucy Newton Henley Business School at the University of Reading
Richard Noakes Senior lecturer in history, University of Exeter
Derek J Oddy Emeritus professor of economic and social history, University of Westminster
Brian O' Sullivan
David Paulson University of Cambridge
Andrew Perchard University of Strathclyde Business School
Andrew Popp University of Liverpool Management School
Michael Pritchard De Montfort University
Michael Rowlinson Professor of organization studies, Queen Mary, University of London
Philip Scranton Professor, hstory of technology and science, Rutgers University, USA
Kevin D Tennent University of York
Steven Tolliday (University of Leeds), past president, Business History Conference
Steven Toms Professor of accounting, joint editor, Business History, University of Leeds
David Walker Scottish Oral History Centre, University of Strathclyde
James Walker Professor, Henley Business School at the University of Reading
Maggie Walsh Emeritus professor of American economic & social history, University of Nottingham
Peter Wardley Head of history, University of the West of England
Deborah Woodman University of Salford & Huddersfield
Judith Wright
Chris Wrigley Emeritus professor of modern British history, Nottingham University

Publ.Date : Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:02:02 GMT

Postdoc dilemma: to leave or not to leave academia? – live chat

Join our live chat Friday 21 June from 12pm to discuss making an informed choice on the future of your research career

The traditional academic career path for newly qualified postdocs is changing. The wide gulf emerging between the number of postdocs and academic positions available is forcing people to make tough decisions on where they see their career heading. Academics no longer live in ivory towers; short-term contracts, limited number of academic posts and funding opportunities, publish or perish attitude… and the list goes on, make it tough to progress.

According to Vitae's latest Careers in Research Online Survey (CROS) in 2011, 26% of respondents said they aspired to a research career outside of higher education, and 16% a non-research career, compared to 44% of respondents who aspired to a career in research in higher education. With a total of 75% saying they wanted to remain in higher education, it's no surprise competition for academic jobs is tough – but is leaving academia the only solution?

Like many, the University of Manchester's website offers advice for postdocs questioning their career ambitions, laying down the crux of the problem: "Some academics assume that if you are undertaking doctoral research, you must be aiming for an academic career; anything else would be second best (or even 'failure')."

Is it still the case that opting for an alternative career to academia is deemed as failure? What then are the alternative opportunities available to someone who has dedicated years of their life to research? And are universities doing enough to support postdocs in their decision whether to stay or go?

In this week's live web chat we're interested to talk about the support and career opportunities available to postdocs in and outside academia, how to go about making the right choice, and the skills required to compete successfully.

Join us on Friday 21 June from 12-2pm BST to discuss whether academia is the right option for you.

You can also follow the debate live on Twitter using the hashtag #HElivechat.

Here's what we're looking to discuss:

• Postdoc support

• Alternative career options

• Making the right choice

• Role of the university

• Challenges of staying in/leaving academia

Panel to be confirmed

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, become a member of the Higher Education Network.

Claire Shaw

Publ.Date : Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:45:00 GMT

Phyllis Want obituary

Throughout her life, my mother Phyllis Want, who has died aged 99, embraced the new and the challenging. She learned to drive aged 18 and in her 80s taught herself to use a computer.

She was born in Orsett, Essex, the youngest of six children of Frank Eagling, a policeman, and his wife Maud, a teacher. The family moved frequently because of her father's job, and Phyllis went to several different schools in Essex and Hertfordshire. With all the older children already working, when Phyllis left school her parents were able to support her through teacher training college, at Hockerill College, Bishop's Stortford.

After only two years in the classroom, she was appointed headteacher of the village school in Black Notley, Essex, in 1937. Phyllis recalled teaching with no electricity or running water; instead the school had earth toilets and coal fires. During the second world war, lessons took place in the shelter during air raids. When the school closed in 1965, Phyllis became head of a much bigger school in Braintree. She loved the challenge, but always looked back to her days in the village school with great affection.

Phyllis had married Walter, a lorry driver, in 1938. At the time, female teachers were expected to resign from their jobs when they married; and Phyllis confessed that she had taken off her engagement ring for her interview at Black Notley. However, the outbreak of war changed things and in the end she did not have to give up her job when my brother, Arthur, sister, Denise, and I were born. It also brought to Black Notley people who would never normally have come to a small village. Phyllis and Walter made lifelong friends in those years, including a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia and a soldier from India.

In the postwar years Phyllis served on the parish council and the village hall committee. She told me she felt she had to show that she could take on the roles expected of a headteacher, even though she was a busy mother. Although she earned twice as much as Walter, the rules of the time meant they could never get a mortgage and we grew up very happily in a council house. Phyllis retired from teaching in 1972 but remained active in the community and enjoyed travelling.

Walter died in 1992. Phyllis is survived by me, Arthur, Denise, seven grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

Publ.Date : Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:04:17 GMT

Letters: Changing schools into academies – and back again

Dr Selina Todd is wrong about our relationship with the University of Liverpool (Letters, June 16). Liverpool College is an independent school with 813 pupils which has chosen to become an academy. That decision was made by our governors, not the university. One reason for our decision – and the government's support of it – is that we have an established record of more than 50% of our pupils gaining admittance to a Russell Group university.

We believe that, as an academy, we will be able to provide the excellent sixth-form preparation we provide to our fee-paying pupils to more pupils from a wider social and economic background, without regard to ability to pay. The more than 100 applications we have received for our sixth form and the 500 applications for year 7 seem to suggest that the people of Liverpool agree. In 2009 Liverpool College became an associated college of the University of Liverpool. This partnership has provided local state-school pupils with access to Latin and Greek; sixth formers, including those in state schools, with access to a philosophy course at the university; and has enabled the school to serve the community.

No pupil in our boarding programme, either from the EU or outside the EU, is guaranteed an offer or a place at the University of Liverpool. I have no idea where Dr Todd got that idea – except, perhaps, in overhearing the idle gossip of fellow historians in the corridors of academia. Liverpool University far surpasses Oxford in its effective outreach to non-traditional students and in its enrolment of pupils from poorer backgrounds. We are proud to partner with the university in making Russell Group education more available to pupils from poorer backgrounds.
Hans van Mourik Broekman
Principal, Liverpool College

• Fiona Millar says that "converting all academies back into maintained schools would be a massive and costly undertaking" (Education, 11 June). But this is not what David Wolfe actually says in his Education Law Journal article. What would be expensive would be to transfer land ownership. But that isn't necessary – local authorities don't own the land of foundation schools, including voluntary-aided schools, but they remain maintained schools.

Wolfe demonstrates that funding agreements can be overridden to bring academies into line with maintained schools, with the local authority as the admissions authority for all schools. The crucial question, then, which Fiona Millar doesn't address, is what a Labour government should do about chains of academies "sponsored" – ie owned and controlled – by private organisations. But the full integration of academies into a reconstructed – and democratised – local authority system requires that no school is controlled by an external private organisation. (I do not refer to denominational schools here: that's a separate issue.) It only requires the secretary of state to terminate the funding agreements with sponsors, including their control of governing bodies by appointees.

If a school wants to continue a partnership with an ex-sponsor, as with any external organisation, it should be able to do so, but this does not require any power to be handed over to it from the reconstituted governing body. Let's see how many of these millionaires and overpaid officers who run chains of academies retain their enthusiasm for education when they are asked to support schools, but not control them.
Richard Hatcher
Birmingham

Publ.Date : Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:00:02 GMT

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