The Cult of university, Ctd

On BBC Radio 4's programme Zeitgesters, Will Gompertz, BBC Art Editor, meets cultural entrepreneurs who are shaping our lives. People who know what we want, even when we do not. The men and women whose impact goes beyond mere commerce, people who shape contemporary culture. On programme 3, Gompertz met Theaster Gates. A man with two degrees in urban planning (and a further one in religious studies), who worked for the city's Transport Authority, but now uses sculpture, installation and performance to bridge the gap between art and life. Will Gompertz travels to Chicago to meet the the artist who is using collectors' desire for his artworks (they sell for anything upwards of several hundred thousand dollars each) to transform the rundown Southside where he now lives. Theaster Gates said of vocational work:

"We have to make labour more skillful and more sensitive. We gotta bring dignity back. We have to assume that the entire world won't be a tech invested world and that the more we can create a skilled hand, we'll create new sectors of opportunity. Because the tech dude doesn't know how to change his plumbing. And so I don't think that there's a dignity issue in being a plumber. When I watch these guys sauter copper, I realise that they are much more sophisticated people than I am. Keeping water out of places were you don't want it is a big deal. For the roofer, for the plumber, for the electrician I'm paying these people 100s of thousands of dollars to do this work and these is no way I can argue with there value. [This goes deep with me, my dad was a roofer] and

The Cult of University, Ctd Val McDermid

Val McDermid (@valmcdermid) appeared on the Question Time of March 20 2014 held in Warrington and said (21 minutes):

"Young people who've been betrayed by the promises that have been made to them, who've gone off to university, got their degrees, run up a huge amount of debt and all they do is find themselves pushing a trolling up and down an inner-city train, because there aren't graduate jobs for them. These are actually the things that upset me, that I care about."

Yet university applications and entrants continues to increase. That is why I have said that 'University Is Now An ETHICAL Question.' And let's remember what Erica Buist said; she captured the betrayal of young people perfectly:

"The minute [young people] graduated, something switched in employers' heads. The same generation who had us sit... the 11-plus and the 12-plus... and mock GCSEs and real GCSEs and AS-levels and A-levels and BAs and MAs and MScs and PhDs decided education is an afterthought. Experience is what's really important."

Watch video here.

Cult of university, Ctd @ericabuist: "We've done what you asked,society! Release the jobs!"

Erica Buist (@ericabuist) is the founder of the How To Be Jobless blog and now works on the Guardian Digital Journalism Scheme. She wrote a fantastic blog 'Telling a young person to 'Just get a job' is like going to the Sahara and yelling 'Just rain!'.' She said:  

"Today's youth has spent years chasing qualifications no one ever asks us about. The notion that algebra would ever be useful seemed fishy, but the grownups insisted: education, no matter how apparently arbitrary, leads to jobs."

Money quote right here:

"The minute we graduated, something switched in employers' heads. The same generation who had us sit Sats and the 11-plus and the 12-plus and Sats again and mock GCSEs and real GCSEs and AS-levels and A-levels and BAs and MAs and MScs and PhDs decided education is an afterthought. Experience is what's really important."

Another great bit:

The cult of university, Ctd Short-changed

Rob Behrens, chief executive of The Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education

The Sunday Times (9.iii.2014) reported on a 2013 study of more than 17,000 undergraduates (commissioned by Which?) which found weekly contact time between students and staff had fallen from 14 hours and 48 minutes in 1963 to 13 hours 42 minutes in 2012. Some students shared their experiences:

Josh Vallance, a first-year history student at one university, said:

"I have seven hours’ contact time at the moment but that will drop to three in my final year. Some of the seminars are good, but there are just too few of them."

A first-year geography student who wished to remain anonymous, said she regretted going to university:

"As far as the university is concerned, I am non- existent. I could disappear for good and none of the academic staff would ever notice... When I’ve emailed my personal tutor about something, she just says she’s the wrong person to ask. I feel that I am wasting my time." 

This backs up my assertion that for many young people university is a giant holding pen. A student in her final year of an English literature degree at a Scottish university said:

"My last essay took two months to be marked, which may sound trivial but it’s impossible to know how you are getting on without feedback."

The cult of university, Ctd Michael Gove and Matthew Hancock speeches

Going into an #Apprenticeship or to University should become the new norm for young people when they leave school: both must be top options
— Matt Hancock (@matthancockmp) March 5, 2014

Two speeches to look at. Firstly, Michael Gove's speech at McLaren Technology Centre, Woking, Surrey about the future of vocational education. Secondly, Matthew Hancock's (@matthancockmp) speech at the BBC's 'You're Hired' conference, launching the National Apprenticeship Week 2014.

Michael Gove speech

Speaking at McLaren, where educational and technical innovation meet, his goal was to talk about the relationship between education and the world of work. He said:

"If young people are to be prepared for that radically changing world of work, we need a plan to change our education system - and to secure their future. In particular, we need to end the artificial and damaging division between the academic and the practical."

What Michael Gove called "the apartheid at the heart of our education system." More:

"And we need to ensure that practical, technical and vocational education is integrated with academic learning to make both more compelling for all students in our schools, and more valuable in the new labour market."

University feeds the skills gap, Ctd Northern Ireland

The skills gap has been described as one of the 'biggest' threats to the recovery and that careers education is palpably ‘failing young people’. Discussion has been healthy in America, growing in England in Wales, but silent in Northern Ireland.

That's changed. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in Northern Ireland has published a critical review of the outworking of relations between schools and employers. The Belfast Telegraph reports here:

"Too many young people are ill-prepared for the job market when they finish full-time education. Advice and guidance offered in the schools is sometimes not given sufficient priority in school activities."

And so:

"The CBI combines a series of critical comments on careers advice with a number of positive suggestions on the ways in which employers can, and should, be more supportive of the challenges faced by schools."

The Cult of University, Ctd Eisenhower and the Free University

During his Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 196, Eisenhower said how university had been captured by government and other interests:

"The free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. 

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. 

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. 

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society. 

...We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the [two]."

Address in full here.

Liberal arts education feeds the Skills Gap

Robert W. Goldfarb wrote in the New York Times here:

"The general message from [business] leaders is this: More young people would be hired if they had the right qualifications, but too few have the skills and discipline needed to succeed in today’s demanding workplace. 

Over the last few years, I’ve interviewed more than 200 young people from diverse backgrounds of income, education, race and geography. About half told me that they had liberal arts degrees, and I was struck by how many of them regretted majoring in a discipline now seen as impractical. 

Many liberal-arts graduates say they are eager to find an employer willing to train them in skills that don’t require a degree in engineering or computer science. They cite six-sigma analysis, supply-chain procedures, customer service, inventory control, quality assurance and Internet marketing. They want a chance to master one of those skills.

Too many lawyers

The co-CEO of leading international law firm DLA Piper Nigel Knowles wrote in The News Statesman here:

"The [legal] sector is still remarkably fragmented: there are simply too many firms (and too many lawyers) offering the same services without any clear differentiation. Consolidation is an imminent certainty and, furthermore, I expect to see consolidation on an unprecedented scale." 

The Cult of University, Ctd The university bubble

In the video above and here we are introduced to 'Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses', a book by Richard Arum with Josipa Roksa, published January 2011. The video above said:

"As with the housing bubble, cheap and readilty available credit has let people borrow huge amounts of money to finance education, and both students and parents continue to believe that whatever the cost the college education is a necessary ticket to future prosperity."

 It continued:

"The book found that as prices have been going up, learning seems to be going down, as 45% of students did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning during the first 2 years of collegeand 36% did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning over 4 years of college. The primary reason is that course aren't very rigorous. In fact a recent survey of over 700 schools... found that many have virtually no requirements."

The Cult of University, Ctd

Benjamin Marlow (@benjaminmarlow) wrote in The Sunday Times here, 'University and debts of £50,000? No thanks, I’ll be an apprentice'. He shared the story of Rosie Messiha-Harlock:

"Like the rest of her school friends, the high-achieving 18-year-old had not considered anything after A-levels apart from going on to do a degree. Armed with two As and two Bs, Messiha-Harlock went to Kent University to study criminology and law. 

“In the sixth form, everyone is pushed to go to university, so I went along with it, but it wasn’t really for me. I felt as if I was treading water when what I really wanted to do was get on with my career.”

Jenni Russell - Young people spent 13 years listening to a Labour government telling them that university is the key to a better life. The exhortations have shaped reality.

In 2011 Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) wrote in The Guardian here:

"[Young people have] spent 13 of the past 14 years listening to a Labour government telling them that university is the key to a better life. The exhortations have shaped reality. With almost half the age group going on to higher education, anyone who doesn't do so risks being labelled as below average, however unjust that might be. A degree might not be worth what it used to be now that so many people have them. For anyone who is ambitious, though, not having one has become a handicap that needs to be explained away."

She finished by saying:

"We have spent the past 10 days agonising about how to give the most desperate young people hope in their futures and a stake in society. This week we are turning around to those who have worked diligently and telling them: sorry, we know it's tough out there, and the good jobs don't exist in any quantity, but we're not prepared to develop you any further – you're on your own. It's a foolish, short-sighted, rotten way to be running either the country or the education system."

On a side but related note, the skills minister Matthew Hancock recently said in an article, 'Parents must drop 'sniffy' attitude to apprenticeships, leading headmistress says':

"Concentrating only on academic training to the exclusion of technical training was a big mistake."

Jenni Russell in full here. In a blog post here I wrote that a Sunday Times poll found that in many universities are more interested in research than their students. My previous post on Jenni Russell here and here. Previous posts in The Cult of University series here, here university here, here, here, on the University Neurosis here, on The Legally Blonde complex here and also a piece here. Also on the Huffington Post here. My blog post on YouGov who found that employers have found graduates non-work-ready, here. My blog posthere where a Sunday Times poll found that students are critical of university teaching standard and that universities are more interested in research than teaching students.

Jenni Russell - 'Some universities teach and some do not'

Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) wrote in The Times:

"We must throw a spotlight on those institutions where students can get away with little work... [the] mass of words and numbers avoids the hidden truth about university courses; that a few offer a terrific, demanding education while many others are content to allow students to drift through — in a three-year haze. 

Occasionally that is obvious. Everyone expects medicine at Oxford to be more gruelling than event management at a new university. For a majority of courses, though, it is impossible to understand from descriptions just how much study is involved. Hundreds of thousands of students are miserably ill-served as a result. 

A tiny think-tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute, collaborated with Which? magazine last summer to research the student experience. In a survey that consulted almost 40,000 students over two years, it discovered that, on average, they work only three-quarters of the hours that ministers assumed they did. The number of hours per week that law students put in varied from 21 at some universities to 47 at others. Medicine, which one might assume was tough everywhere, varied from 32 to 50. Maths and computer courses required an average of 23 hours a week at the least demanding universities and 44 at the toughest."

Why "Thinking like a lawyer" is a nonsense

Senior editor and legal correspondent, Dahlia Lithwick said in The New Republic here:

"Being trained to “think like a lawyer” is terrific as far as it goes. But legal education is notoriously abstract, impractical, and obfuscating. I don’t want someone to “think like a doctor” when she’s taking out my gall bladder. I want her to take out my gall bladder."

Jordan Weismann, associate editor of The Atlantic Magazine said the same for the tired platitude, "thinking like a lawyer". He said here:

"And in the end, despite all the homilies about how you can do anything with a law degree, firms big and small are still the major driver of J.D. hiring. Without Big Law's explosive growth, it's impossible to imagine that law schools would have ever expanded or raised tuition the way they did during the good times. With Big Law on the rocks, we can only be thankful that schools themselves are now shrinking."