Progress

We learn this morning, with no surprise whatsoever, that the number of visas issued to foreign students rose by 35% to 362,015 in the year to June.

Last week we learned that the system was short of around 200,000 University places for this year's A Level students.

Anyone spot the correlation there?

If you're perhaps a wee bit frustrated with the whole university applications thing then simply pop overseas, acquire a foreign passport and providing you're waving a cheque for twenty grand in your sticky mitt, you can more or less get into any university you care for with none of this A* / A grades nonsense involved.

Oddly enough, that's more or less the way things worked here a hundred years ago. Do we get to take the vote back from women next?

Comments

[Smudger]

It wouldn't be such a big deal if our university system was geared to providing qualifications which actually had some benefit to society. Blair's social experiment to get 50% of youngsters into higher education has resulted in thousands and thousands of people with degrees in useless subjects like media studies, which benefit no-one, at enormous cost to the government, in 3 years wasted to the student, and then leaves them unemployable at the age of 21.

Rather than tax graduates, we should be charging up-front for the education (say £100 to do a medicine degree and £10k to do an Art History degree). That would at least apply market forces to the problem and try to make sure that the graduates we produce are the ones we need.

[Hunk of Junk]

I tend to agree as it happens, and frankly I'd just shut down some if not all of the third line "universities." The current system leads to a skills mismatch and a big dislocation between expectation and reality.

If the coalition government pursues a policy of charging British nationals post degree then it is very likely to result in a number of unintended consequences which may include,

- Parents will demand higher standards at universities; the 3 hours of lectures a week thing won't cut it any longer.

- More kids will head to the US universities

- As one blogger highlighted earlier this week, (can't remember who), it's likely that many people at the best universities will be heading into political research and advisory jobs as political stepping stones, leaving the bloke from South Thames Uni with an IT geeky degree to pay for them because he'll have the higher salary working for a bank. The Westminster research dogsbody however, will have a low salary but a platinum plated job for life on the Westminster research, advisor, MP, junior Minister, lobbyist, Quango roundabout. Net result - social mobility goes into reverse.

- Market forces will inevitabely exert themselves and I would imagine one or two institutions would quickly go private and perhaps one or two would start up from scratch.

The social mobility that these muddled ideas are designed to encourage would all have quite the opposite effect. These muppets need to start being honest and have the courage to bring back grammer schools, which did more for smart but poor working class kids than any other initiative before or since.

Funny old world isn't it, when Vince Cable sends his son to St Pauls................. intellectually, morally and politically dishonest.