Well worth reading as the government is unwilling to be open about the issue and it only takes a few seconds to see why that might be.
When will the Government be honest about university?
Students and parents deserve the truth about Britain’s education system. Successive governments have pushed generations along a single, well-worn track; through primary and secondary school, into college or sixth form and finally to university.
The underlying promise appeared straightforward: if students followed this route and graduated with a degree, higher pay would follow. Politicians of all colours repeatedly spoke of the so-called ‘graduate premium’, often referring to the familiar statistic that graduates earn, on average, £100,000 more over a lifetime than non-graduates. Labour and Conservative education ministers have argued this system is the ‘engine’ of social mobility: some organisations have even linked the role of universities in driving greater upwards mobility with ‘higher levels of employment and pay, better living standards and more‘.
Today, those assurances seem hollow. Millions of graduates are leaving university to find the toughest job market in decades. Today, more than 700,000 are out of work and on benefits. Even the graduates who managed to find a position are struggling: many are making repayments on their student loans, only to find their debt continues to rise every month. In fact, those on a Plan 2 loan must earn £66,000 annually to begin reducing their overall debt, rather than just servicing the interest. It is these circumstances that have made the promise of a ‘graduate premium’ look far from certain.
When will the Government be honest about university?
- Successive governments have concealed the truth about the so-called 'graduate premium'
- It's time to be candid about the true value of an undergraduate degree
- Young people deserve to make an informed decision about their future
Students and parents deserve the truth about Britain’s education system. Successive governments have pushed generations along a single, well-worn track; through primary and secondary school, into college or sixth form and finally to university.
The underlying promise appeared straightforward: if students followed this route and graduated with a degree, higher pay would follow. Politicians of all colours repeatedly spoke of the so-called ‘graduate premium’, often referring to the familiar statistic that graduates earn, on average, £100,000 more over a lifetime than non-graduates. Labour and Conservative education ministers have argued this system is the ‘engine’ of social mobility: some organisations have even linked the role of universities in driving greater upwards mobility with ‘higher levels of employment and pay, better living standards and more‘.
Today, those assurances seem hollow. Millions of graduates are leaving university to find the toughest job market in decades. Today, more than 700,000 are out of work and on benefits. Even the graduates who managed to find a position are struggling: many are making repayments on their student loans, only to find their debt continues to rise every month. In fact, those on a Plan 2 loan must earn £66,000 annually to begin reducing their overall debt, rather than just servicing the interest. It is these circumstances that have made the promise of a ‘graduate premium’ look far from certain.
6 comments:
It must have been before The Flood that someone last asked a prospective undergraduate "Is there any subject in which you have a genuine intellectual interest?"
The great expansion of numbers under Blair seemed to me to be a natural consequence of his being a dim wee bugger, incapable of any critical thinking. Which was hardly a good advert for the university education his generation got. Though, on the other hand, you could argue that training in the technicalities of English law is scarcely an education at all.
dearieme - and Starmer is another indicator that training in the technicalities of English law is not an education. I watched a Victor Davis Hanson video yesterday where he was complaining that Stanford graduates don't seem to know anything about US history.
I know of people whom left Uni with 'good' degrees... I wouldn't trust them to run a bath, a couple were in the RAF, one was a 'manager' she was useless, except as a bad example, in which she excelled. It was said that the men only followed her out of morbid curiosity. Another one was so clever, he never would admit, even to himself, that he could be wrong about anything, even things out of his experience. I learned to just ignore him completely, which worked reasonably well until I lost my temper and had a nose to nose with him. Didn't affect my career as he had already shot that down in flames. A friend had a uni graduate parachuted into a senior-ish position. His first bad decision ( Another know it all ) cost their company £3/4 million... My friend went on to a better job pretty quickly.
Tony - interesting, I bet your friend never made that mistake again. A degree should guarantee something, yet anyone with a reasonable amount of experience knows it does no such thing. The worst chemist I ever knew had a chemistry degree but he seemed to know no chemistry at all. He eventually left to join his dad's bakery business.
People who talk about 'failing upwards' do seem to have a point, it does happen for qualified but useless people, at least it does in the public sector.
It may be worth pointing out that "it depends on the subject". When I got my first job after university, it was with a defence electronics company. I and the rest of that intake were mostly graduates in electronics or related subjects, and we started with some pretty basic tasks like "check this formally laid-out circuit diagram for the production system matches the tatty but working one produced by the development team".
No-one assumed that a degree in, say, accountancy or zoology would qualify anyone to do that, or that having even a relevant degree would qualify us to dive in and start designing systems. Nor would any of us kids be on a formal management track unless and until we demonstrated that we had that in us.
A degree guarantees nothing beyond the ability to retain maybe 60% of three years' worth of information on a possibly abstruse subject, long enough to pass the final exam. Or these days, just long enough to pass a test at the end of the same week. If the course is properly designed, that will usually (NO guarantee) provide a grounding in a subject that enables the graduate to start learning to work in that field - and no more than that. It should (though I suspect not so much these days) also encourage an ability to find information outside a formal classroom setting, and judge its quality.
Employers looking for staff need to take people on with all that in mind - and, in my day, they did. In the private sector, at least.
Barbarus - yes it does depend on the subject, but university expansion seems to have gone beyond preparing students to acquire genuine expertise . The preparation aspect is important, but from what I've seen it doesn't seem to be tightly linked to the ability to pass exams.
The best scientists I ever came across had the same qualifications as the worst and for that matter the mediocrities who muddled along but without achieving any more than an unqualified but capable person could have achieved. In my experience the public sector is too keen on credentials over ability and from what I now see from the vantage point of retirement it's worse than it was.
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