The real economy includes the university sector and associated research institutions and science parks. Yet the university sector is entangled with some of the most inane, expensive, ill thought out, long-established social engineering culture ever.
Universities are places of learning and research. They are not providers of qualifications for jobs as council workers, office staff, personal assistants, civil servants, or any other ostensibly meritocratic state or quasi state employment. Nor are they a tax-funded extended gap period between school and work. It is so silly to have the steady, information-based teaching needed for a first degree being provided by university teaching officers with imaginations, brains, technical skills, and outstanding and expensive qualification. It is even sillier that the resources that should be devoted to learning and research are being applied to what could be integrated with school and home-based learning.
Undergraduates should start their university studies in school, with the relatively limited library and laboratory resources they need there, at any age after 16 and their GCSEs, when they demonstrate themselves capable of following a tertiary level course. They could then qualify for consideration for all sorts of jobs, or they could display the capacities that might interest a university department and its teachers in offering a post-graduate place. Then, and only then, it could well be necessary to frequent, away from home, a particular scholar, department, laboratory, or School. And those wishing to, and capable of continuing their work, could be properly supported.
We must stop draining off the funds, taken from us all, into attempts at pretending that undergraduates who have no mastery of the language of university-level discourse should waste the enormous social investment that our great universities embody. Doing so is blunting any kind of cutting edge in every discipline and creating a steady loss of our knowledge-based economic human resources to places where conditions for research and living standards reflect their rarity.
University level work is not a proper object of egalitarian social policies. It requires qualities of determination, clear-sightedness, imagination, capacities, skills, and commitment that are not involved in qualifying for a good job. The sooner we clear our ideas about the difference between qualification and open-minded research, the sooner our economy might begin to recover.
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10 comments:
AIG,
I popped in to offer 'Awrabest fur the bells' and other such sadly derided mawkishness deplored by the westendy Professional Glaswegians sadly now decamped to (The Horror! The Horror!) south-of-the-river BBC and I was reminded of the mistake I made in my youth of leaving a tranquil place of learning and entering the sad system of an Academy in name but a Comprehensive in actuality...
But. But, the former had no library except samizdat.
Not enough, dear lady, I moved on and made the first of many youthful mistakes: ahem.
Perhaps your thought should be writ large, next to the hymn to the EU that adorns/adores the entranceway to almost every seat of learning in this country as a counterpart to the puerile propaganda pusillanimously portrayed.
Next year I shall attempt a Janus offering before reading any comment.
STB.
p.s. Happy New Year
What does latiessa mean? 'Tis the word verification and as such suggests a feminine laissez-fairenough. Am I on the right track?
STB.
Very interesting thoughts -- there certainly are some big problems with our universities.
Happy New Year! STB. The Scottish education system isn't in such a mess at the top end is it? Lots of students studying from home and local colleges teaching local people? And better prepared by the schools anyway?
The errors flowing from the mode of expansion of the university system in the 1960s after the Robbins report have never been either corrected or the changing importance of universities as research institutions.
First degrees and the qualification they bring, the kind of teaching and resources they require, need to be separated out from specialised research and from specialised advanced training.
We ought to recognise there is something wrong when the dons are making the university level learning inadequacies of their pupils an object of study in its own right.
There's some statistic that says something like, China is producing 250,000 graduates per annum which begs the tacit question, how are we supposed to compete with that?
For me it begs the question raised by your post: what sort of quality are these graduates? Scarecrow degrees conferred by the Wizard of Oz or something more worthwhile?
Gyg, I know nothing of Chinese universities or their graduate quality. There is cause for concern about the hybrid objectives of our universities, the quality of the undergraduate input, and their graduate output, and wasting sociocultural and economic resources on the scale that is going on at the moment in England.
Once upon a time, we had a three tier further education system which seemed fit for purpose.
There were the Colleges of Further Education, many of which taught trades, and (for lack of a better term) "blue collar" skills. Many a tradesman of my age will have passed through such.
Then there were the Polytechnics. My older brother attended one such, to become an Architect. They lent themselves to skilled professions which did not perhaps require academic rigour. Many business skills could also be learnt at Polys.
And then there were the Universities, which did demand academic rigour, and fed into the "higher" professions.
This still seems to me a well-designed approach, with most young people being able to find a good fit for what they could achieve.
And now we have Universities on every street corner. Children who arrive at them illiterate and innumerate, and leave with qualifications for .... what?
The dumbing down our the education system, and the subsequent sinister bending of it by New Labour, would, even it were dismantled and reconstructed overnight, require another two generations to return to full productivity.
To summarise. We're fucked. FUBAR.
Personal note; so horrified was I at where the education system was heading, even in the late 70s, that we sent all four of our kids (my ex, Pat, and myself that is), to Steiner schools, for the better protection of their immortal souls.
So far, only one has attended Uni; and that was our eldest, who went to the Royal Academy Of Music aged 27, to study the Baroque Flute. They are all in employment, standing on their own feet, and only Gabriel, the eldest has debt form a student loan, and that relatively small, as he went as a mature student.
We have no regrets whatsoever, and they all understand now what we did it. What kind of education is unable to honour the inner being of a child? What kind of education thinks to right to test five year olds? Early school is about play, and playing is how we learnt to become socialised.
Again. FUBAR.
It seems to me that the expansion of higher education was a policy that went through on the nod because of a lack of clear thinking about the economic function of education. I recommend reading "Does Education Matter?" by Alison Wolf. One thing she points out is that, as far as the job market is concerned, education is a positional good, so that whereas in my day it was perfectly possible to get a job, and subsequently a partnership, with a 'big four' accountancy firm straight from school nowadays accountancy is an graduate-entry profession with no obvious benefit to anyone.
quite true, many first degrees are now complete toss, designed to fail the minimum possible number of students. Bums on seats = revenue. Failed students = a poor university! Quality control in reverse.
But what you probably don't realise is that most Masters level degrees are equally crap. They will probably consist of say six undergraduate level modulesfollowed by a piece of research.
And the point of the research is not to be unique and push boundaries but to read everything about a published topic (let's say "web services" as an example) and then prove that you've researched the subject by creating a web service. Where the hell's the intellectual achievement in that? And the standard of some of the successfull dissertations I've seen lately has been execrable.
But from talking to foreign students, they still revere British Education as the best in the world, so this particular Ponzi scheme hasn't been rumbled yet.
gyg3s 500 of those Chinese students are at one provincial English University, paid for by their families, not the Chinese State. Extrapolate that around Western Academe and you may have your answer.
My local, proper, University concerns itself mostly with a very rapid increase in the numbers of overseas students and post graduates.
This is because they pay top dollar for the privilege, get on with their work and do not treat three years at Uni as an extended piss up.
They must go home wondering whatever happened to the so called Protestant work ethic because they won't have seen it in most of the slobs who pass for home grown students.
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