'Speak up -- my other ear is wired to the Guardian'

teledu

Wouldn't someone with two brains just say "free" rather than "free up" ?

disenfranchised

it's time we were told exactly what decent, tax-paying english families have done to warrant such scorn from the three prominent parties. at least they would then be able to try to mend their errant ways.....

Rebel Saint

I'm soon going to be one of the select 10% who has got a degree.

Peter Crawford

It is not the way to run any successful enterprise. Did Oxford and Cambridge become pre-eminent in the world with the help of Willetts, Ruth Kelly, or Harriet Harman ? The question is rhetorical of course.

Dr Kevin Law

so lets think about john.

a bright intelligent scholboy who could go far. however he is being dragged up on a sink estate by single mum who barely has enough money to get by. she is on benefits. but thats not john's fault.

john shares a bedroom with two brothers and in between the various men coming and going the culture in his life is that learning is pointless and that his life will be one of benefits and drugs.

but it seems that john is having it all too easy compared with all the middle class kids who are being discriminated against in getting into university.

Torymandias

Tory high command reserve their greatest disdain for the middle class; if you ever dared to puncture their metro bubble you would soon see their snarl of cold command. Not sneer, snarl.

Woodbine Willy

Rebel Saint: I'm one of the select few who has neither a degree, a body piercing or a tattoo

Louis Berk

"Universities with a funding gun at their heads are being forced to turn students away, on the hideously unjust grounds that their families come from the right side of the tracks."

As his party instigated this injustice, I would love to have been a fly on wall at the Blair's breakfast table when it transpired that their young prince would be going to Bristol rather than Balliol. This discrimination came in the year my oldest son finished school with 4 and half A levels at A-A* - all in sciences, and was turned down by Oxford. Fortunately, he ended up at Imperial, where he is completing a PhD. Our crime? As a middle class family who values education we paid for both sons to attend an independent school (at the expense of owning our own house and holidays). Such is the inverted, stupidity of affirmative action against the very individuals whose taxes pay for the education system in the first place. And don't get me started about standing in line for health services behind 'health tourist' who have never paid a penny in tax or NI...

Elizabeth

Here is something he (and all of us) should watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jpP7nWCPas

raymond d

We have no better example of the ability of governments to screw up, than education.We had a reasonably effective Grammar school system and a reasonably sustainable University sector. Then the social engineers in both Labour and Tory wets, were let loose to wreck it. And as Melanie says, it is the aspiring lower Middle class, that get it in the neck. Too poor to to pay all these fees, too rich to get them paid for us ! Stuffed , once again.

Chalcedon

Restrict university entry to the brightest 10% of students and pay them a grant. Solves the money problem and the retention problem. Oh, and reintroduce grammar schols to foster social mobility.

howdiditcometothis

"Those from good schools or leafy postcodes are already discriminated against when it comes to university admissions. Universities with a funding gun at their heads are being forced to turn students away, on the hideously unjust grounds that their families come from the right side of the tracks."

Really? Where has this happened? Who has it happened to? Where is your evidence?

"Just imagine what this would mean in practice! A candidate who had achieved all the required exam grades and been put through interviews and jumped through other admission hoops would suddenly be told: ‘Congratulations! You have qualified for a place at this university. But because your parents are wealthy, you are going to have to pay for it.’ Where would be the justice in that?"

Sounds eminently just to me, especially if Tarquin/Olivia has been hothoused at Mummy and Daddy's expense.

howdiditcometothis

We already do something like this: it's called taxation. It's based on the principle that those who have the most pay the most to help make society as a whole a more stable and pleasant place. Don't be surprised if politicians who support the view that personal taxation is a Bad Thing per se start thinking of other ways to generate neccessary income, however barmy those ideas seem.

Western Independent

In January I put some data on my blog which may be of interest: contrasting historic grammar school participation levels and university participation now http://bit.ly/fugX71; and putting current university participation levels alongside league tables http://bit.ly/gC9SCD

David Lindsay

University placews were and are already going to be for sale, anyway.

You, or your parents, will still be allowed to pay nine thousand pounds upfront to a university at the start of each academic year. That is a lot less than the fees for the grandest schools.

And it would, on the basis of parental wealth, avoid the above-inflation, profiteering interest payable by those who will have to wait until after they themselves have graduated and established themselves in careers.

Graphite

Dr Kevin Law
May 10th, 2011 11:37pm

"so lets think about john."

Does john actually exist and, if so, in what numbers?

Or is he, like those other lower case characters archie and mehitabel, completely imaginary?

Mrs.Josephine Hyde-Hartley

Oddly enough, upon reading the bit where Melanie reckons this so-called middle-class could be robbed twice over -"first by taking away the rewards for academic achievement that should rightfully be theirs; and then by bleeding them dry for the privilege..The middle classes would thus be manoeuvred into paying for the very policy of social engineering that causes them such grief."

- I am reminded of the current load of concern and confusion about dedicated school transport (provided free to any child who lives more than a certain distance away in my own area) and normal public transport which charges children a half or reduced fare.

It seems to have become popular for councils to set up arms length, executive type bodies which seem designed in effect to kid us into believing we (any parents) need to pay twice for our kids to use transport - first for a plastic card, which we do not even get to own outright - and then for the joy of paying a reduced fare for the kids.

I suppose the common thread running along these thoughts and the thing that concerns me the most at the moment is about information, personal data control and privacy.This cuts across all the traditional boundaries of so-called classes and is more becoming of the real world, I think.

This bleeding dry of citizens for information so we can get to pay for stuff we should otherwise be able to access and enjoy freely is probably the worst aspect of so called modern executive effects..And in this context of education -one wonders what we pay our taxes for and what sort of markets do we want to invent?

We should guard against being too easily confused by information that's poorly designed, too easy to misunderstand and even too easily corruptible by anyone and/or everyone concerned, in my view.

TomTom

The whole rubbish about Universities is a postwar fallacy. The US "Missile Gap" issue with the USSR and the high output of Soviet engineers led the US to boost Universities and Defence Research.....Harvard is even a major Defence contractor as is MIT.

The huge funding for Defence Research and University boosted US growth and technology. The Europeans 40 years later discovered their Lisbon Project to make the EU the global economic centre and thought University participation rates determined economic growth - they simply forgot to spend the funds on Defence Research to generate technological economic growth and let China and Taiwan surge ahead

Miranda Rose Smith

And before long, we’d find that more and more students – perhaps even the majority – would be paying for their university education while the state funded merely the poorest.

What's wrong with checking how much a potential student's family can afford to pay before deciding if he's eligible for a scholarship, and if he is eligible, for how much?

Does "surf science" refer to surfing the Internet or surf on the beach?

TomTom

Ah Miranda Rose Smith, I think you should leave Primary School free of such considerations, but clearly your idea for a return to the pre-war system of Fees for State Secondary Schools would be worthy of consideration if they actually offered value-for-money instead of boring children to death

Peter Smeaton

All that needs to be said is contained in the lines "belief that half the population needs a university education, for both their own and the nation’s benefit, could not be more wrong.

It has meant that the universities have disastrously dumbed down ".

Many of us who spent our career in the University sector know this all too well, but have been powerless to do anything about it. University bureaucrats have all benefited immensely from the increasing number of Universities without anyone having the courage to acknowledge the fact that the University of West Wittering is NOT the same as the University of Cambridge. And never will be. So the words 'University graduate' no longer defines, however crudely, a person's academic ability. A spectrum ranging from, say a to c, now extends all the way from a to z and then some. more.

Reason Before Ideology

I am hopeful that reasonable and informed debate can take place in this country and online. To help it do so we need to remove some myths.

Firstly, nobody has ever been refused a place at university because they are too rich. It has never ever happened. I am sure that Louis Berk's son is highly able. His 4 A to A* grades at A'Level reflect that. But he will have been competing with people with 4 A* grades. Furthermore, there will have been more applicants with 4 As than places. The university has to pick some and not others and it will do so on the basis of a general assessment of the candidate. Some will lose out and some of them will have gone to expensive schools. That they do so is not grounds for inferring that the expensive schools are discriminated against.

Secondly, there is myth that university expansion has led to 'stupid' degrees. Here Philips cites the example of 'stained glass window studies'. There is, of course, no such course. She probably took the name from a Daily Mail article by Alan Smithers in August of 2010. What he was referring to is in fact the BA in Architectural Glass at what is now Swansea Metropolitan University. That course began (at what was then the Art college) in 1935. It is not new. Nor is it ‘mickey mouse’. It is one of the most prestigious of such training programmes in world - something of which we ought to be proud. Entry to the scheme is not easy. It takes only a few students a year and they need to be very skilled. The employment rate is far above average (approaching 100% one year after graduation). This is the sort of high-end creative product at which the UK excels. I presume that Melanie has never actually investigated the degree and knows nothing about it. This is worrying because it suggests that she is using it as a token in a game the point of which is simply to assert your prejudices rather than solve problems. We need rather less of such ideological game playing and posturing and more sober thinking about how to address our problems.

Thirdly, the myth that we don't need more graduates. Smithers' selective comparisons with the Swiss and the Poles notwithstanding, every survey of employment needs and qualifications indicates the vital need of increasing the skills and education level of our population. We cannot compete with the Swiss for the market in financial services (and which helps them feed a population about 10% the size of ours); the Polish and British economies are not so similar that taking graduates as the independent variable makes sense. Lots of the countries with high graduation rates look weaker than us - but that is because their graduates are recent and only now beginning to enter and enrich their labour markets. They are going up and we are going down. We cannot compete with Asia in the provision of unskilled cheap labour (if we did somehow manage to impose wages of one pound a day our economy would collapse since most of the workforce would not be able to buy the things it was making).

We need to increase the skill levels of our young people. And part of doing that is increasing higher-end qualification and training opportunities.

Our concern, then, should be how to expand participation while ensuring quality.

The mistake we made was to try and increase rates while keeping costs the same. As a result class sizes rocketed, access to resources (books, labs etc.) was thus restricted and the quality of HE did worsen in many institutions. Of course most of the people who entered HE once numbers rose above 10% were from the middle class and they might well want to know why, once they were given access to a privileged experience, it was reduced in quality. But the answer is not because money was being siphoned off to the poor. The last twenty years in the UK have seen wealth redistribution upwards: the rich have gotten richer (and that is happening very quickly just now as top-end salaried recover (over 150k) and middle incomes stagnate (thanks to a fiscal crisis caused by irresponsibility at the top end).

The debate on this thread displays two different views as to the function of HE. One wants a system that effectively sorts everyone into a hierarchy. It is not clear why this is wanted but the emotional tone suggests that people fear that without such a hierarchy they are or their children will lose out. The other perspective thinks that the point of HE is to generally improve skills on the basis that this will make the country as a whole more productive and wealthier. It seems to me that the latter is much more sensible since it will ultimately benefit those from both camps. That requires increased investment in HE along with the development of varied degree programmes that can provide the varied range of skills from the specific (stained glass, managing a small business such as one providing training or holidays in surfing in Cornwall, inventing electronic labour-saving devices, surgery) to the more general (writing, speaking and management skills etc.) a well as the propagation of our culture, its history and origins (i.e. what is taught in Schools of Humanities). It also requires proper and clear thought about how to provide these things – not overcharged and ideologically driven debate. What would also be nice is respect for the quality and skills of many of our university staff and their graduates who have – believe it or not – managed to increase the general level of knowledge and skill in the country despite ongoing reductions in financial support over the last twenty years.

John ( Rispek) Richardson

"Reason Before Ideology
May 12th, 2011 12:33pm

Secondly, there is myth that university expansion has led to 'stupid' degrees..."

you is got zat al rite innit!

mi digree is in somin what realy is worf it n no messin.

John Richardson

'Reason Before Ideology'

I just could not resist that.

Your repulsive 'name' alone deserved it.

Well, who ever you are, you are correct about one thing; obviously Philips makes things up.
She is a MSM journalist*, how do you think they make a living year after year after year?

Knowing what they are talking about?

Research?

In this case going into Universities/classrooms/
employment agencies where PEOPLE get, or do not get; JOBS?

Imagine how long that would take.

Days and days.

At least M.P. has the decency to sign her own name. Unlike you.
How can you imagine that anyone over the age of 16 could be fooled by your risible...

"Lots of the countries with high graduation rates look weaker than us - but that is because their graduates are recent and only now beginning to enter and enrich their labour markets. " ?

As a rule: any person in any situation who ever uses the word 'enrich' should be asked to get a real job. That is; not the parasitic State 'job' they now pretend to do. Oh, and then shot. Then shot again.

My only consolation in that respect, 'Reason Before Ideology Before Anything One Honest Thing To Say Before One Single Thought Of Your Own Or Even Your Own Real Name', is that you will never ever get your promised gold plated state pension; you transparent 'pseudo intellectual tertiary education fraud'.
I know that might seem mean but why should it?
Why shouldn't I be glad that parasites are never going to consume the wealth of others as they expect to do?

So there.

What would you do if you ever had to earn a living?

No ! Please for goodness sake do not confess that !

I'm not usually this honest with other bloggers, however with your mediocre vainglorious wittering I am prepared to make an exception.
Also, your refusal to identify yourself in an 'academic' discussion is provocation enough.

You deserve it.

*Not you Dellingpole!
Brooker, make him sit down.

Signed....

'Voice of reason singing alone in the storm of confusion and nastiness.'

Bickers

Dr Kevin Law:

what's your point? That Universities are the place to sort out the social problems caused to children by their parents or a poor secondary education? That's not the job of Universities!

We need to get politicians out of Universities' hair and get them to fix primary & secondary education. As for the government 'fixing' useless parents I don't know where to start, other than we should stop throwing benefits at them

Reason Above Ideology

Dear Mr. Richardson,

Thanks for the reply. I hope I have not misread you - please do correct me if I have.

You are contesting my arguments about three of the myths that shape this debate about HE and in particular one of the three arguments I put against the claims of Prof. Alan Smithers cited by Melanie Philips in the article above. If I follow you correctly your refutation rests on a) a dislike of the word 'enrich' and b) an ad hominen attack based around the word 'parasites'.

Can you clarify your criticism of the word 'enrich' and say more about why you consider its use to be a capital offence? And then can you clarify how exactly this argument contributes to a discussion about how we might increase the skills levels of our young people?

Thanks.

John Richardson

Hello Ms 'Reason above Ideology'

I may have misread things as you seem quiet sweet....

However,I've just arrived home after 'one or two', so I'll reply tomorrow. Though I must say

1)I did not demand your execution...not once. Not once that I recall...

2)I apologise for applying 'parasites'. Sorry.

3) No-one should ever say 'enrich'. Honest. Never ever ever.

I'll explain (sober) tomorrow if you really need me to...

Kind regards.

TomTom

"We cannot compete with the Swiss for the market in financial services"

BUT we do. Britain is more reliant on banking than Switzerlandm but Switzerland is more reliant on Manufacturing than Britain

Reason Above Ideology

Dear Jon,

I appreciate your politeness.

You said in your original post that anyone who used the word 'enrich' should be "shot. Then shot again". I took that to mean execution but perhaps you meant merely severely wounded?

I still don't understand the basis on which you want to police the word 'enrich' out of our ancient and world-renowned language. More importantly, I don't see how this would assist in increasing the skills level of the UK and thus its capacity to survive global economic competition.

Reason Above Ideology

Dear TomTom,

Thanks for the comment.

I am not convinced that even if we were able to secure all the financial services business currently contracted by Switzerland it would resolve our economic difficulties. Switzerland, as I said before, is a tenth the size of the UK - we cannot emulate their model.

Nor am I convinced that manufacturing, though important, can make everything right again. As I said before, we cannot compete with 3rd world wage rates.

What we are good at is services and high end export goods. That is why we need - contra the implications of Melanie's original article - people trained in producing and selling stained glass to the world's cathedrals; people who run holiday and tourism services (including surfing) who are trained in business management and in how to market their product internationally (there is a rising middle-class in China and it will want to spend its money on things like holidays...).

in this context I really don't understand why Melanie or anyone else would complain about the college courses that are most vocational and most likely to lead to productive employment. What's wrong with managing a hair-dressing salon? People who do that sort of thing may not have the glamour of people who went to Oxford or Cambridge and who work in the media or whatever. But they work hard, employ people and contribute to our economy.

Why would we want to return to the old system of HE in which 10% of the population spent three years learning about Greek literature and how to riot?

To reject vocational learning seems to me to be economically foolish and - more to the point - completely un-conservative.

John Holland

It reaaly is awful how the most privelidged members of society, those with the dumb luck to be born to wealthy parents, are consistently oppressed.
It seems in this crazy society, the better off you are, the more disadvantaged you are. Thanks, for your unerring logic.

Alan Bale

The term that is beyond the pale in the education debate is 'IQ'. It is never made clear that as the average IQ is 100 with half the population above this figure and half below, this means that with 50% of school leavers attending university there will be many students of 100-105 IQ struggling with courses intended for those having IQ of 120-130 and higher