16th August 2018

Exam results out, university applications down, unemployment numbers up

It has taken twenty years for the country to catch up with Tony Blair’s cunning plan based on the mantra “education, education, education.

The unsaid intent all those years ago was not to make sure that the students would continue into further education, as a rite of passage, being processed to create a valuable asset for the country and its workforce.

It was to keep the youth, feral or not, who would have had a lot of time on their hands due to high unemployment, off the unemployment numbers. 

Of course, that had some unexpected ‘Brucie bonuses’. 

It saved on unemployment benefits, it created work in the university education sector adding more lecturers (not teachers) to run the myriad of ‘new opportunity’ courses while turning what was once technical colleges into universities. It filled up BTL properties in the campus towns as well as bars, fastfood outlets, STD clinics and very many other support services required these days for ‘students’. 

What use are some degrees? Surfing management at Plymouth, Birmingham’s golf course management, psychology, sociology, fashion design, culinary arts? And I just love this one, ‘The Science of Harry Potter at Frostburg University, Maryland, USA. A variation of a physics class that investigates the magic of Harry Potter. Seems like an excuse to watch the Harry Potter movies rather than read the books. 

And what about ‘David Beckham studies’ at Staffordshire University. 

This might sound like a joke. It is not. The idiot who thought this job creation scheme up reckons that degree courses must keep up with the times. He must have been on a course about course creating.

The UK is not alone. To celebrate her 60^thbirthday, as a HB2U gesture, ‘Madonna studies’ has been parachuted into the ‘Gender’ course at Harvard.

More importantly though, due to increasing tuition fees, students are leaving with debts of £50k or more having, in effect, paid for themselves to be kept off the streets. To make matters worse, many will never ever pay it back, it will hit their credit rating for mortgage purposes and worse of all create a sense of regret that replaced the sense of entitlement they thought their degree would confer on them.

A few years ago, we worked with a government ‘quango’ that was looking at placements of graduates into advisory firms, to become the advisers of the future. Grants were available and just over one thousand graduates applied. An initial sifting of these graduate applicants (yes graduates) saw over half rejected because they had severe failings in the maths area and / or did not have sufficient skills to write a letter. Eventually, forty-nine passed muster.  

As of the 15^thAugust, some 27,576-degree courses listed had vacancies for students from England – 84 per cent of the total of 32,763 available at universities in the UK. This is after the A levels had seen a toughening up of marking and a lowering of passmark grades. So lowered that for a number of universities, the course pass entry threshhold was D grade.

Some universities are treating students rather like WW1 conscripts, cannon fodder to be thrown out with a useless degree after three years, having bled them dry to feed their own hunger for revenue. 

I think it was the Jaws movie that saw a scene with Messrs Dreyfus, Scheider and Shaw, throwing bait from the back of the boat while fishing for the killer shark. ‘Jaws’ attacked the boat. Scheiders character Brody turned to Robert Shaw playing the fishing boat captain Quint, ‘You’re going to need a bigger boat”.

In this case, the education system needs a much smaller, better equipped, more focussed University ‘boat,’ with less useless degree bait and more rigour, better suited to the catch it really should be trying to reel on board. 

And as for the advisers of the future???????

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