BS: Are some universities betraying students

Subject: BS: Are some universities betraying students
From: Iains
Date: 02 Nov 18 - 04:03 AM

Three universities in the UK are teetering on bankruptcy. Average student debt is hovering around £50K
49% of young people enter higher education.
1.8 million in 2013 up from 300,000 in 1960

Are we cheating our young people?
Are we using student numbers to massage unemployment figures?
Are we treating higher education as a business more than a learning center?
"Should we really be encouraging youngsters to spend three of their most vigorous years studying 'body contour fashion', 'tournament golf' or 'beauty promotion', all of which are current degrees.
Ever since the Blair years — it was New Labour that settled, arbitrarily it seems, on a target of getting 50 per cent of school-leavers into university — politicians have cited these figures as signs of great progress."

My cynical view is that a shed load of debt creates docile sheople.
I also think the system needs root and branch overhaul, so all students obtain value for money.



https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6344343/DOMINIC-SANDBROOK-looks-three-universities-brink-bankruptcy.html

Subject: RE: BS: Are some universities betraying students
From: Mr Red
Date: 02 Nov 18 - 04:38 AM

Are we using student numbers to massage unemployment figures?

Probably by default, and governments of all hues are party to it. When in power that is.

It is one of those political conceits like "pension credits" where unemployed people over 60 (?) are encouraged to register for "pension credits" which reduces there need to visit dole offices. The lie is seen when you realise a 60 year-old has enough pension contributions already. Likewise those "education" time-outs, teaching job search skills. All those wheezes remove people from the "unemployed" statistics despite the fact that the "job-search" timeouts are job-search days, transmuted to "education" and thus not unemployed.

I am sure there are many other mendacious wheezes that governments play on us.

But, it is argued, that university education teaches analytical skills. As if analysis can't be taught as a skill in its own right!

Let me see, is there a University course on "analysis" as a life skill?

Subject: RE: BS: Are some universities betraying students
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 02 Nov 18 - 02:07 PM

Thatcher instituted a culture of cheating apropos of unemployment figures by putting hundreds of thousands of fit people on incapacity benefit as she ravaged our industrial base. Since the start of the coalition, other trickery has included allowing over a million people to become victims of zero-hours contracts, putting tens of thousands of young people on compulsory floor-sweeping and tea-making duties, aka "apprenticeships," on half the minimum wage and forcing millions of people, many of whom struggle to find enough work, to declare themselves "self-employed" with no holiday, sickness or maternity leave and obliged to pay all their own NI contributions. All this, helped along not a little by draconian trade union laws which ensure that the exploitation can go on untrammelled, goes under the horrid and iniquitous euphemism "the flexible labour market."

Subject: RE: BS: Are some universities betraying students
From: Iains
Date: 02 Nov 18 - 02:33 PM

Interesting what the Guardian has to say. For a paper it is a reasonably balanced article.
However the failure of the industrial side of the argument is the lack of comparison with the iron and steel industry of Germany, France and the US.(The traditional heavy industries)
   In the background behind the politics a major hollowing out of industrial base occurred throughout the western world, accompanied by the growth of globalism and cheap raw material imports and manufactured goods.
Japanese goods were once laughed at. As Farage would say you are not laughing now! Oil supplanted coal for transport and power generation,
both before and after Maggie. You need to take a comprehensive overview of what changed postwar to the millenium and beyond.
I would argue no politics could have prevented these changes and bleating for a past(imagined)golden age is futile. With the digital age the changes are accelerating. How many high streets have been emptied and shopping malls teetering on bankruptcy because of the onslaught of online shopping. We have yet to see robots reach eveen close to their full potential.Accountants can make a mistake, relational databases do not. That is the future and many back office jobs can be automated. Robots do not drink tea all day, chatter,skive off and go home after 7 or 8 hours. Politicians can have a limited input to attempt to guide these changes, not to stop them.


   If you wish to consider facts in isolation,or judge in terms of political dogma, you place your head in sand and further rational discussion is futile


https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/12/thatcher-britain

We have of course had these discussions before but when rationality hits blinkered dogma sensible dialogue takes a hike.