On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 11:40:31 +0000, Andy Hall
wrote:

On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 10:57:36 +0000, Julian Fowler
wrote:


Well said that man ... its not even necessary to scrap the
institutions (although many of their staff would have to go). The
resulting qualification can be called a "degree" if that satisfies the
need of the PTB to have meaningless statistics about the number of
graduates in the working population.

However, it should be evident to all but the most dogmatic of
politcally motivated social-engineers that it would be of immense
benefit to all (students, tax payers, consumers, ...) to restore the
distinction between tertiary *education* (academic, oriented towards
research, maximizing the potential of intellectual capability, etc.)
and tertiary *training* (vocational, job- and skills-oriented).

Of course, *accessiblity* would have to be universal -- children from
low income families should be able to benefit from academic education
if they have the ability to do so, just as those from higher income
families, without the ability to benefit from academia, should be
routed towards vocational training and prevented from taking academic
university places from those more deserving of them.

Julian

Quite. IIRC, the means tested grant arrangement worked quite well
for dealing with the access issue..

It is a little more involved than that, I think. At some point we, as
a society, need to come to grips with prejudices that affect the
accessibility issue - for example, the attriude of some lower-income
parents that tertiary information isn't "for their sort of people",
schools and teachers that discourage pupils from applying to certain
universities for reasons of reverse snobbery, etc. In addition,
something would need to be done to avoid the trap in which students
from low income families are fully funded from taxation, students from
high income families are funded with little real impact on parents'
disposible income, leaving those in the middle to dig really deep into
their pockets ...

I suspect also a significant dent in the need for taxpayer-funded
tertiary education could be made by bringing back / re-emphasizing the
sorts of courses that are undertaken part time alongside paid
employment - again, names are unimportant - call them
"apprenticeships", "sandwich courses", etc. Again, a cultural
attitude shift is needed such that these are recognized as of equal
value to "academic" university courses whilst being substantially
different in their content and intent.

Julian

--
Julian Fowler
julian (at) bellevue-barn (dot) org (dot) uk