With ‘A’ level results around the corner, the media return like wasps around a jam-jar to the never-ending debate on the purpose and quality of higher education.
We provide analysis on the subject in two articles from the Telegraph – one by Sherelle Jacobs (15.08.22) on the ‘con-trick’ which universities are playing on thousands of gullible students with degree subjects for which there is precious little use or demand in the world outside.
And the other, by Alison Pearson on the pincer-movement now encircling high-achieving middle-class kids who are denied university places by richer, overseas students on the one hand and lower-achieving applicants from areas of ‘socio-economic disadvantage’ on the other. How is such a policy in any way designed to help Britain?
“But the university system seems impervious to the nation’s outrage,” argues Sherelle Jacobs in our first article.
“Our seats of higher learning no longer have a moral role. In earlier centuries, they were dedicated to the task of instilling the elite class with a respect for truth, goodness and beauty. With the rise of the research university in 19th-century Prussia, they also became important creators of new knowledge.”
Instead, they have degenerated into an elaborate con trick. This involves student “consumers”, many of them not especially academic, taking on tens of thousands in debt to do degrees of questionable quality, in the process earning the university a healthy profit. To serve all their student “consumers”, the universities in turn employ an army of academic “professionals”, again of variable quality.”
These “professionals” are then pressured into justifying their salaries by pitching “marketable” research projects to outside funding bodies. In this vein, the explosion in scientific modelling, bankrolled by an array of global and government institutions, is unsurprising. So, too, critical race studies, which intellectually underpins the diversity and inclusion industry that has become a hallmark of stakeholder capitalism.
The end result is a total mess: a higher education “sector” that prizes liberal-Left dogma over freedom of thought; one that cares not about nurturing young people’s minds, but getting bums on seats at the best possible price.”
The full article can be read below with a link to the original here:
Daily Telegraph
All of which ends up penalising the home-grown aspirational middle-class student with impeccable grades who happens to fall foul of the new system: not wealthy enough to outbid the overseas student or poor enough to be deemed worthy of special help.
The result argues Allison Pearson is both disturbing and self-defeating:
“I can’t believe I am writing this, but data this weekend showed four out of 10 British students are being rejected by Oxford and Cambridge in favour of overseas candidates who pay up to £24,000 a year (£15,000 more than a domestic applicant). A study of undergraduates at the Russell Group of leading universities found that a quarter were from overseas. Over 40 per cent of students at the hugely popular St Andrews come from outside the UK. It’s worse in science and engineering.
The implications for our geo-political safety alone can only be imagined:
Simon, a senior lecturer who taught the Master of Science (M.Sc.) course at one of those Russell Group universities, told me, “Of the 1,200 enrolled students, 900 were from People’s Republic of China. Tutors were told not to discuss Hong Kong or Taiwan in class or refer to them on maps. I criticised the leadership for this censorship and was cancelled as a result. My ex-colleagues kept their mouths shut for fear of being disciplined.”
And it’s Britain’s ‘squeezed middle’ who end up encircled in this educational pincer:
“They just have the misfortune to have grown up in a country so warped by liberal guilt and Marxist educationalists that it prefers to engineer admissions for kids from areas of “socio-economic disadvantage”, rather than improving the school system which failed them. Either that, or Freddie and Olivia’s place will have been sold to the highest bidder from Beijing or Mumbai.”
The full article can be read below with a link to the original here:
Daily Telegraph
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