We have 144+ Universities....we should close at least 105 of them and use the buildings for housing.

This country is too small to sustain so many Universities and we never treasured Technical Colleges, twisting everything towards liberal arts and away from Colleges of Advanced Technology.

We need CalTech and MIT but end up with Community Colleges and UMass. We should live within our means and have full-time students with grants and no fees; part-time Sandwich courses paid by employers; Open University courses for mature students; and Colleges of Advanced Technology working closely with Industry and Start-Ups

There is ,I believe, another reason for the New Labour obsession with increasing the numbers who go to university.

Children from working class backgrounds who leave school and go straight into employment tend to be apolitical and often have a "small c" conservative outlook on life.

Children who go to university, by contrast, are often radicalised and as such are much more likely to be amenable to the creed of political correctness which informs and guides all that New Labour does.

Industry simply votes with its feet. For instance I, as an MD of a small science based company, would never employ anyone who has graduated with a degree in the last 10-15 years. These degrees are not worth the paper they are printed on. The government is, however, wise to this - answer, create thousands of completely pointless public sector jobs to take all these ill-educated individuals. Brilliant, but real business (private sector industry) still has to generate the taxes to support this utopian nonsense. Result, business (starved of good quality employees) is taxed to death at every turn. The whole thing is an ever decreasing circle of poor thinking and short-termism. Mind you, this government won't have to pick up the pieces.

It may well be that our present troubles brought upon us by the obsession of our governing classes with the poisonous combination of multiculturalism, femininism and homosexuality rests upon the failed educational system from the 1970s onwards.

Students then abandoned learning in favour of political posturing and have never been able to grow out of their undergraduate attitudes (Jack Straw is one obvious example who comes to mind). What further horrors will be unleashed when the current student generation succeeds to power and influence?

Derek,

I agree with you. Something has gone very awry in the British education system. I am British but live in Brussels and am struck by the numeracy, literacy and fluency in several languages that my French, German and Belgian colleagues and friends possess, and that schools here on 'the continent' still seek to inculcate from an early age.

The simple truth is that their education systems are far more rigorous in terms of the teaching of maths, science and language subjects using traditional teaching methods than is the case in British state schools.

Examinations and testing are also far more demanding and are used to stretch the best not the opposite.

A smaller percentage of people go to universities than in the UK - with a lot more people gaining vocational qualifications than in the UK.

And there are far fewer different degrees - very few people take up subjects such as media studies for example.

Foreign language learning (at least one foreign language being compulsory) starts at 9 in many schools in France, Germany and Belgium.

Unfortunately, in the UK, the whole debate has become stuck in a parameter whereby good old fashioned common sense about rigorous teaching methods is constantly denigrated and regarded as 'elitist/paternalistic/rote-learning' etc etc etc.

All the nonsense about class sizes for example. I was in a class of 43 at age 11 and 10 of us (yes, nearly 25%) passed the 11+.

The irony is that today's leaders (whether in business or in politics) benefitted from the rigours of the old education system and are now lazily complicit in denying today's generation of students and today's employers of receiving and benefitting from a similar quality of education.

"The simple truth is that their education systems are far more rigorous in terms of the teaching of maths, science and language subjects using traditional teaching methods than is the case in British state schools"

However the OECD "Pisa" Study does not bear out this thesis, and has GErman politicians in abject panic at how low down they appear in the league table.....way below BRitain.

Only Bavaria did really well, and no state with the SPD in control. Further German employers are protesting at poor literacy and numeracy skills of school-leavers.

I think all countries are experiencing the same slide in standards because they are slothful and lazy and schools have atrophied.

Trianon,

You may be right about a general slide in standards.

It's just my personal experience in relation to those French, German and Belgian professionals I meet here in Brussels.

And I get the impression that France is still very good in terms of traditional teaching methods and a very organised and centralised education system with a very exacting examination system.

Do you have any information from the OECD study on France? It might be interesting to share it.

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/

http://www.pisa.oecd.org/docs.htm

Trianon, thanks. appreciated.

The key problem with training in this country is that - aside from law, medicine,etc -you do not have to be formally trained to practice anything.

A German who calls him/herself a plumber must back this up with a recognised qualification.

A similar change to the law in this country would mean that demand for vocational training would increase dramatically, and the pressure on universities would decrease.

Of course, being a good idea, it won't happen.

In answer to dave fordwych's comment about students becoming radicalised:

First, political correctness is about as a radical as a unwashed pair of socks stuffed down the side of Jimmy Tarbuck's sofa. PC is the jargon spouted by bureaucrats who want to turn people into components that can be plugged in at will anywhere in the globalised economy.

Second, the current generation of students are the least politicised ever.

But much of this fetishising of degrees is simply the booby prize the British working class ended up with after the Second World War. Instead of any real say in political or economic matters, you can make do with a bit of paper from the Beckton College of Media Arts.

I have to take exception to the reference to Frenchmen being multi-lingual. That simply isn't the case. The French do take two languages in school (plus Latin), but that only means that they end up forgetting two languages (plus Latin). The only Frenchmen I knew who spoke any other language than French were business students in Paris. Maybe this fellow's French colleagues were multilingual, but they were far from representative. I know that the Germans generally have excellent English, and that Europeans from the smaller countries tend to be multi-lingual, but not the French (or Italians).

Kev Cidle is out of date. The German Government is currently legislating to drop the Meisterbrief across a range of trades.

It is irrelevant anyway, applying only to Germans whereas any other EU citizen can set up without a Meisterbrief........so a German hairdresser has to get a Meisterbrief to open a salon, but a Portuguese entering Germany does not.......EU Law

". I know that the Germans generally have excellent English,"

Sprechen Sie mal Deutsch ?

Ein bisschen.

That is usually the level: the exceptions prove the rule

I am British, but have lived outside of Britain for 25 of the last 33 years. In the process I learnt Portuguese. The hard way. I had foolishly left school at fifteen and lacking good English grammar skills found learning another languages structure very difficult.
I have three boys, twins 23yrs old & my youngest is 20yrs old.
I lived for 15 yrs in Brazil until 1985 when I returned to the UK for about 8 years. My children went straight into UK primary schools and went on to Secondary education, mostly in RC schools in the UK. In 1994 I decided to go back to Brazil. One of the reasons for the move was for my sons education. They were not getting the right incentive at school to attain their maximum. I wanted them to give value to learning, get as much of it as possible, see life from a different aspect and most important get the spirit that it was OK to strive to achieve. This just was not happening. I just knew that if we stayed in the UK they would be just another cog in the dreary wheel. So back to Sao Paulo we went, they were enrolled in the British School. It was and still is an Excellent Private school and its fees were expensive. Thank goodness my company paid for the tuition. What a difference, teachers in school really wanted them to achieve. It wasn't always easy, but with the teachers and our help the Twins ended up with International Baccalaureate on leaving the school in 1998. In 1998 I decided to accept a position in the USA. There, one twin went on to get a Degree in Political Sciences and is now studying Law in Vermont USA. The other twin decided on a more vocational education and went on to get his Commercial Instrument Pilot Licence. He is now getting flying hours as a Flight Instructor and hoping to move onto Jets in the Airlines next year. My youngest, the quiet one is completing his 3rd Year of a 4 year Bachelors Degree in History and to our surprise he decided to join the US Army reserve in January, even with the Iraq war imminent. He went and completed his Basic training during his summer holidays.
The twin that’s studying law, said when talking to me recently, how surprised he was when he went back to the UK to visit old school friends that only one of them had gone onto study in University (sponsored by a US Communication Company) and the others, all reasonably intelligent and capable of going to University, were just drifting around, working at menial jobs with no challenge, seemingly no objective in sight. In my private thoughts “I thought maybe that could have been him and his brothers” ? They are all still at the start of a life long journey with many a struggle to come. But hopefully they will be better prepared, most important will continue to strive for knowledge and facts, develop an even wider view of the world, make more good decisions than bad, be happy and achieve beyond their wildest dreams.
Keep the spark alive!

Interesting Peter Curtis, but you did not risk your children in a Brasilian State School, which you well know are poor quality and only available to 60% prinary school leavers.

In fact had you used an Independent School in the UK you would probably have seen what people describe as a "good education" but so rarely see.

The Government here has abolished Assisted Places in Education but introduced them into the NHS, by giving patients the right to use private hospitals at NHS expense !

Trace,
Im sorry, I don’t really understand what you are getting at. What’s your point here?

As I indicated I want to do good for my children. I didn’t want to accept the status quo. I found a way to do that.

By the way, my school fees were federally taxed as wages, I paid local state taxes for schools. So as I also didn’t use up scarce state school places, I guess overall I should have had a positive economic effect on the Brazilian system. That some corrupt local politician probably took his cut doesn’t please me though.

The Brazilian State Universities are in general considered the best option in Brazil. These are assisted. Entry is by a country wide state exam. All’s fair as everybody has a chance? Yes and No. Remember as you have indicated the primary and secondary schools are not always good, the people who make the best score on the exam are quite likely to be people who could parents can afford private schools. As far as I am aware there is no means test. So you do end up having the State subsidizing people who can well afford to pay their own tuition fees. This in a country with extreme contrasts between rich and the poor it seems the poor subsidize the rich? As it’s well known in Brazil that many rich people have ways of avoiding to pay any taxes, assisted University seems doubly cruel?

On arriving in USA I did pay full fees for Private Schools / Universities for my sons in USA. Poof! There went the family fortune. Also one of my son’s, after getting his Bachelors Degree, decided he wanted to go to Law school and took out a loan to cover the tuition, books and living expenses for three years. Here in the USA there is a means test for Federal and state education grants, also some limited tax relief .

Still I think the important thing that my own experience has pointed out that a good Higher Education is a very important step in life. It doesn't have to be a first step but it probably is best to be a first step. It can bring great personal benefits. I want to pass that on to my children and I will help them as much as I can, that’s my choice. I guess what I mean is, attitude to life, go out there and go for it, don’t sit back and expect a free lunch.

And it certainly education is never free. Someone always pays for it.

Graduates can and usually do get personal lifelong benefits and financial rewards from a University education. Is it not fair that they pay for for this? Certainly not everybody will go to University. Therefore why should everybody subsidize their University education through taxes?

I guess you could say that their higher education benefits the society as a whole and it should be assisted and payed for by taxes. It probably does, but they do gain personally and therefore I think that they should be prepared to pay in some way.

It also reduces Government meddling in an area that maybe they should not be to deeply involved with. Thats good.

I don't think your NHS example is valid.

Everybody pays NHS insurance taxes. And everybody can use the NHS.
Medical technological advances have meant many more ailments can be cured and treated albeit sometimes at a much higher cost. This means the NHS (yes, probably the bean counters) have to make very difficult choices on who gets what treatment.
If they stop subidizing higher education maybe the NHS will get more money?

It seems in your example the Private Sector is acting as a useful buffer to supply services that the NHS cannot manage to supply at this time, probably due to the lack of Capital investment required. And also I do believe that this is one area that some private competition will bring benefits in the long run.

PS: I do think that the NHS works pretty well within its cost limits. Like many things it could be better. I think there is a lot of data out there showing it is good value.

The US system of health care makes me shudder every time I think about it. The cost I mean, and the consequences of not having Health Insurance. But I made the choice to live here.

Yes Peter Curtis you have completely misunderstood.

The point was that State education in Britain should not be contrasted with private education anywhere. All private schools have different expectations of children from State schools which are tasked with turning out product at lowest average cost.

My point was that your criticism of English State school was unreasonable when compared with a Brasilian private school in Sao-Paulo....which I know.

My point about the NHS was simply that a government which abolished assisted-places for children to go to independent schools omn scholarship; is the same one now funding NHS patients to be operated on in BUPA hospitals and paying private hospital groups from Canada and Souyth Africa and Germany to operate new private surgery centres built using urban regeneration funds and PFI.

So, it is wrong to send a gifted child on scholarship to a private school; but okay to use taxpayers money to support BUPA ???

The NHS constrain is not money....it is DOCTORS. They will have fewer in 5 years time than now...but that is a side-issue.

The point is the hypocrisy.....and then to tax students at the same time claiming the loans they live on are "income" so they can be disqualified from claimining benefit, and they can be made to pay prescription charges out of borrowed funds, whereas if they were on benefit instead of being stdents they would get free prescriptions, training places, and a taxpayer-funded income !

To avoid raising income tax on the very high earners - "unfair" says Tony.....he is prepared to levy increased income tax on those starting out and earning less than the average wage......they could be in the absurd position of claiming Working Families Tax Credit and still paying higher marginal rates of tax than a non-graduate earning much higher salary.

I merely highlight absurdities.

Public education throughout the world, with the possible exception of the elementary grades, has been so distorted by the various social, cultural, economic, and political forces and demands placed upon it, that one can easily replace the word education with the expression indoctrination. Like many other once intrinsically valuable aspects of modern society, public education, and especially higher public education, is often nothing more than a tawdry and often sullied means to a dreary and predictable end, rather than a delightful and enlightening experience in and of itself.

"The universities must now break free from state control. They should become independent institutions able to set their own fees. Students should be given public money in vouchers to spend on the university of their choice, and the inevitable top-ups should be offset by bursaries and scholarships for the poor."

Super idea Melanie. So University of Independence can charge £18.000 to a medical student and over 5 years pre-clinical that comes to £90.000 plus his/her 5 years of accommodation and food and books....say a further £5000 a year in London - and most British doctors are trained in LOndon.....so he can start as a House Officer with around £115-£130.000 in debt.

Say he married another medic and she has only £80.000 in debt....that is £210.000 before they apply for their mortgage to buy a UK-average home at £139.000 and their incomes as HOs are about what, £18.000 each in Central London ?

But you want the State to subsidise this with vouchers....let's say it pays £50.000 and writes this off as a 'gift' then lends the other £80.000 to male medic ....that means the State ie taxpayer has paid the University £18.000 pa. for what it was getting much cheaper before.......so public spending must rise to meet this.

Our medic of course is burning with desire to work for the NHS, but cannot afford to....so Foundation Hospital X bids up pay rates for scarce doctors and starts him off on a Registrar fast-track course at £50.000 pa so he can specialise in training as a cardio-thoracic surgeon (big shortage) and they can become a focused-factory on this speciality bringing in fee-paying customers and building a big private practice.

This will give us the benefits of a market-driven price-focused University system and Healthcare......which if the State continues to finance both will lead to an explosion in public spending and higher taxes.......unless....the subsidy is eradicated and people pay for education and healthcare out of their own pocket.

Then taxes will need to fall dramatically and politicians will have no money to bribe the electorate, so they will meddle.

What about 17.5% VAT on newspapers as a way of funding Universities ?

Hi Trace,

I was not trying make comparisons. I have become suspicious of all State schools. I like small government.
I must say I agree with Melanie in many areas, the most frightening is the way education is being "homogenized" by government political correctness and teachers unions. School teachers should of course transfer knowledge, but a little bit of shared wisdom on life would also go a long way. I also do believe that Gifted people do have really good chance at getting a scholarship at some of the best universities. Being intelligent and driven they usually know where to go as well. The schools also pamper to them, sometime at the price of leaving the other not so gifted behind. It is in the best interest of the Famous Universities to recruit gifted students, thus keep standards high or risk falling by the wayside.

Don't get me wrong it really makes me unhappy to see good kids seemingly leaving school badly prepared.
I don't think everyone should be in University, but they should be better prepared.

All this bollix about working class children not necessarily wanting to go to uni and benefitting more from vocatioanl training is just a modern version of that old canard, the servant problem. If more working class kids get degrees and nice, clean jobs in offices, who's going to spend their working lives up to their armpits in oudure unblocking the toilets of the middle class?

Just a thought...

Jenny,

Don't be so 'classist'! ;-)

Don't plumbers block the toilets of the working class too?

And, what exactly IS the working class now? The traditional occupational boundaries between classes have been bent and blurred.

Everyone who wants to make a really useful contribution to the debate on education would do themselves (and their readers) a little favour by examining their assumptions, stripping away some of the 'vested interests' involved and ask:

1) whose choice is it to be educated beyond minimum school leaving age?

2) who should pick up the bill?

3) why should access to the best universities be made easier for some sections of society than others - shouldn't access should be based on actual aptitude and no other criteria?

4) If under-achievement correlates to class, how can this under-achievement be tackled at its roots (ie from the beginning of education until 18).

So, the 'servant' problem really has nothing to do with it, Jenny.

And, I speak as a boy who went to grammar school boy who had to work very hard at school before you jump to the conclusion I went to a private school...

The root of all this blather is that all children don't receive a rational education in literacy when they enter primary school.
Even with the failure to wipe out the toffs and their well-endowed education with the 1944 Education Act, the Labour govt. was by then well in the grips of toff-promoted progressive educational ideology.

Peter Curtis, Education started out local, usually associated with Squire and Church; after 1870 the Borough had authority to levy a rate to pay for schools......but until 1944 Education was essentially local.

It is now a sprawling State corporation with branch managers.....and it has been subject to whims and fancies of the Centre.

As for Jenny, lots of graduates spend their time with hands in plumbing......they call them surgeons. In no other country are professionals like doctors treated with as little respect.....paid worse than accountants or bankers, yet on call on 24 hour shifts.

Prior to 1975 Accountants and Solicitors did not need to be graduates....they left school to take articles.

The fact is - if India employs graduates in Call-Centres....what will non-graduates do in England when graduates take their jobs ?

Why should people leaving school at 16 pay to subsidise those staying on ? especially those receiving £40/week to stay on ? Maybe all post-16 education should be fee-based with loans ?

Jenny, what do you think you should pay to visit the GP ? £50 ? £100 ? There is a big shortage of GPs and surely paying directly for healthcare with user-fees will help them pay their university debt.

I agree with every point except the last.

Melanie seems to have an obsession with "freeing" every institution from state control, as if the results must, by some inner necessity, always be pernicious.

No. What we need is to go back to the sort of university system that existed in the 1960s and 70s. The academically-able received state-funded university education as a reward for good performance in rigorous competitive examinations.

Universities have already turned themselves into businesses - a complete betrayal of their nature and purpose. "Freeing" them from state control would hardly reverse this baleful tendency.

Perhaps the intellectually feeble Blair and his New Labour acolytes really are persuaded that wider access to universities, by any means necessary, is an inherently good thing. If this is so, they are certainly committed to a kind of fundamentalist egalitarianism that will accept nothing less than (apparent) equality of outcome.

I can't help thinking, however, that any means of encouraging young people of employable age to stay on in education is a marvellous way of massaging the unemployment statistics. (The other great scam, of course, was to remove the right to benefits from 16- to 18-year olds.)

There's a lot of muddled thinking in much of the responses to Melanie's article.

What needs to be decided is what is the purpose of education and how is this to be achieved so that all attain the best according to their abilities.

Those best able to achieve high academic status should be able to go onto university. Those less able should have access to a properly structured vocational qualification, like accountants for example.

As it is, and speaking from personal observation, many degrees on offer are more suited to vocational qualifications. Because, money is attached, and the academic merit debatable, youngsters flock to undemanding and less than rigorous studies.

Trying to attract 50% of school leavers into higher education is a nonsense. Firstly, there is no demand from industry for so many graduates.

Secondly, what is badly needed in industry is skills that are deployable immediately.

Thirdly, increasing the supply of graduates, must affect overall earnings, because of increased competition but no increase in suitable jobs. What price those students with substantial loans repayable from taxed income?

I would not like to be starting out again, it was hard all those years ago. But then, despite a brand spanking new degree and accounting qualification, I was still only able to get an assistant accountants job. These days, with poorer degrees, and less practical accounting qualifications, youngsters expect princely sums to entice them to join companies they deem are fit for them to display their knowledge, rather than skills.

One thing all graduates seem to understand well, is entitlements. Not for them responsibilities and duties, perish the thought. But they know what to expect from companies that take them on. repay this by hard work, that would never do.

In all this debate about educational standards, what often gets lost is business needs and the country's future. I will not encourage my three grandchildren to remain in Britain, until and unless it becomes a country of opportunity, and rewards equal results. This can only be achieved through a rigorous eduaction system. Ours has been failing since Mathew Arnold reported on it in 1868.

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.