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

[Nurseries] feed the skills gap, Ctd

It seems the trend is embedded and endemic. A pernicious culture of short-sightedness. Ofsted's chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw said:

"More than two-thirds of our poorest children - and in some of our poorest communities that goes up to eight children out of 10 - go to school unprepared. That means they can't hold a pen, they have poor language and communication skills, they don't recognise simple numbers, they can't use the toilet independently and so on."

Sir Michael added:

"The corollary of not preparing children well for school is that they don't do well in reception and, if they don't do well in reception, they don't get on at key stage one, they find it difficult to read at seven, they fail at the end of primary school and that failure continues into secondary school."

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."

Seth Godin - "Reject the tyranny of being picked: Pick yourself"

Six years ago, Seth Godin wrote about the job of the future - the (online) community organizer. More recently, Seth Godin wrote a piece, 'Reject the tyranny of being picked: Pick yourself,' and said:

"Amanda Hocking is making a million dollars a year publishing her own work to the Kindle. No publisher. Rebecca Black has reached more than 15,000,000 listeners, like it or not, without a record label. 

Closing the skills gap, Ctd

Kids to be taught to code from age 5 in Eng & Wales - we need this urgently for schools in NI http://t.co/ZFaAEFo9iM
— Jenni Porter (@jenporterhall) January 24, 2014

Eleanor Mills (@EleanorMills) wrote in The Sunday Times here, 'This mum says: Here’s looking at you, code.' She said: "As more IT jobs go unfilled, the government has put coding on the curriculum. Parents should get techy too: after only a day’s tuition I built my own app."

HOWEVER. Coding is not being put on the curriculum in Northern Ireland. Nor is it being put on the curriculum in Wales! AS Jenni Porter said, we all need this urgently now.

 

@brianjohnspencr England only at present cc @DrTomCrick @Lottiedexter @BBCRadio4
— Miles Berry (@mberry) February 6, 2014

@brianjohnspencr Scotland has 'computing education' already, which includes programming from c age 7, I think. Wales set to improve soon.
— Miles Berry (@mberry) February 10, 2014

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.

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.”

The Cult of University, Ctd Barack Obama

In the video above and here, Obama lays into the cult of university. He says:

"The problem is that a lot of young people no longer see trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career. But I promise you, folks can earn a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree."

Barack Obama has previously entered the debate on law school, see here. A PhD student objected to Obama here. As I noted previously here:

"Attending 8 hours of lectures per week in an arts/humanities/social 'science' course is a waste of £27,000 except for the academically gifted."

Previous posts on the cult of university here, here, here and here. Also with The Sunday Times, apprenticeships and comments from young people here, and here on the effect of bringing university to the masses. In the Huffington Post here.

There's no business like the Law School business

Sian Griffiths (@SianGriffiths6) recently did wonderful some work in The Sunday Times (@thesundaytimes) here, reporting on the "1000s of law students who will never practice law." The Sunday Times (@thesundaytimes) is now complicit in this economic madness, offering to add yet more aspiring, but credulous, law students to the "glut" of jobless or desk-monkey law students - see advertisement above! Above that advertisement The Sunday Times included a lengthy encomium, via Sian Griffiths, on a racing driver turned law student. 

Nigel Savage, chief executive of the University of Law was featured on that encomium. He passed wise words on employer-led practice learning, as opposed to the "traditional liberal education" (euphemism for "bums on seats, don't teach education" (as per the Jenni Russell article here)). Apart from that it was cheap salesmanship, PR passed as journalism. Journalism's ignoble and shameful capitulation.

Yet here's what people don't know. The University of Law was sold to a private equity fund for £200 million. With that, you have to ask: If someone was prepared to pay £200 million for the University of Law, there must be big money to be made from teaching law students?

Yes, there's no business like the Law School business. So here's my question for the Sunday Times: Why not offer scholarships for a degree in languages? In technology and engineering? For this is where the growth and economic opportunity lies. 

As a post-script. Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) has written feverishly on his ad-free blog The Dish about "the surrender of journalism to PR and advertising." It seems that it's infected even The Sunday Times. 

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."