Damn and blast, that Fraser Nelson has beaten me to it - again!

Honestly, I have thought these thoughts before, sometimes years before, but some how I never quite get round to writing them down.  I suppose it's because this blog is a hobby (although sometimes I look on it as a therapy!) and no-one is paying me to write so I don't do it until I feel like it.  Anyway, I have just checked The Coffee House again and there is a post by Fraser Nelson saying all the things with which I have bored countless dinner parties for the last few years!  In effect he suggests that Vince Cable, a man who in my opinion is much, much dafter than he looks and he looks as daft as a really daft thing, has wasted his time coming up with some tricksy scheme to cut costs at our 'universities'.  Instead, says this hugely intelligent young Jock (and this not quite nowhere near as intelligent half-Jock) the government should just cut out all the phony degree courses.

Now I can vouch for the fact that I held this opinion years ago because when 'SoD' was approaching 'university' age I had absolutely no intention of underwriting three years of his life whilst he learned how to drink beer and shag girls unless he wished to study something technical or scientific or rigorous.  As Fraser Nelson points out:

There are plenty hard questions to ask. The main one is what I regard as a national scandal: young people being missold useless degrees that benefit neither students nor society. They get fed this line, about how graduates earn more, and are led to believe that the letters MA after your name mean an extra £7k or more, for life. You can bet such studies merge together Oxford degrees in Science with media studies courses to claim that the degree - not the subject or institution - is what matters.

Under that sort of misselling these youngsters, or their parents, end up with debts of thousands of pounds.  He also goes on to point the finger at that most hackneyed 'university' degree - media studies:

Media studies is a particular bugbear of mine. I was talking to the head of a large newspaper company the other day (not one I write for) who said that no media studies graduates worked anywhere in the whole company. In my own case, no employer has ever asked even if I have a degree - let alone if it was a 2:1 or what it was in. Two of The Spectator's (excellent) staff started out as PAs. Journalism is a trade, people are judged by their output. You really are only as good as your last story.

I can add that three of SoD's close boyhood friends never went to 'university' and that one is a millionaire, one is very high up in a plc and the other is running his own succesful company.  Higher education, like middle and lower education, is a racket these days and it is long overdue a severe seeing-to!

 

Comments

[Juri]

I have a "BA in English Studies" but I work für ein German company at their Copenhagen office as their Jack of all things Finnish. My biggest asset at this firm, and the others before them, is being a native Finnish speaker and fairly fluent in Swedish and Danish. Everything else I've learned "on the job", and I'm still waiting for anything I was taught at the univerity to translate into something directly useful at work. But I still can't bring myself to admit studying for the degree was a waste of time. I was an adult at the time and in no need of tutoring on the fascinating subjects of girls and beer. My focus was elsewhere.

Still, I do agree with you and Nelson on the folly of the degrees for degrees' sake doctrine. The discussion around the subject is particularly vivid here in Scandinavia where education is absolutely free and on top of which each (Danish) student is entitled to a free grant of around 4600 DKK (£516) plus a cheap loan of 2500 DKK (£280) a month. I don't know the figures for Finland, Sweden or Norway but the idea is more or less the same all over the Nordics.

Being a incurable product of the three Scandinavian wellfare states I've lived in, I absolutely support free education at all levels. What I don't support is the trickery of renaming all these third-rate polytechnics into 'universities' and 'universities of applied sciences' and licensing them to fool gullible kids into thinking they are pursuing degrees of some worth. Many of those schools don't deserve anything else than to be shut down.

[Dom]

Somewhere, Milton Friedman points out that public schools (what we call public schools, meaning tax-supported) always turn into useless institutions, but vocational schools do not. The reason is that a student at a vocational school is actually making an investment in himself, and the school needs to attract students by offering good and useful courses that will pay-off at the end.

He also points out that, even though vocational schools attract the poorer students, they are never the site of violence, there is never a request for "native language" (meaning spanish) courses, and no need for affirmative action.

[David Duff]

Juri, welcome back to D&N.

Well, your English studies certainly produced one good result, somewhat better grammatical English than I usually write! Actually, your comment has provoked me into thinking a bit more about universities in the modern age - and please notice that this time I failed to apply the irony-laden inverted commas with which I usually surround the word 'universities' - because it is obvious that places of high, or indeed, stratospheric, education are essential.

Dom, you are entirely right. 'Over here' we used to have Technical Colleges which, with typical British snobbishness, were rather looked down on because the middle-classes all wanted their children to go to a 'university'. So guess what, they changed their names and called themselves 'universities', but what was worse, they then dropped the technical stuff and began offering all these spurious course which are useless.