Bertster7 wrote:
But on the other hand if everyone in the country has a degree then it does undermine the value of them a bit. It also goes hand in hand with the notion that everyone can have high paying jobs - which is not feasible. Some people have to do the shitty badly paid jobs and there is already a trend in many western countries for these jobs to be done by immigrants - which is unsustainable.
i see this point made time and time again and i EMPHATICALLY agree with it. labour made the small mistake when they promised 'higher-education' for all, in that they flooded the graduate market with tons of worthless degrees and over-qualification. however, the financial and funding side of university education i think they got very right-- monetarily accessible to everyone, regardless of economic situation. big thumbs up from me there.
really what you/we are proposing when we complain of 'cheapened' degrees is higher rates of entry and less 'registered' universities, i.e. removal of polytechnics as degree-granting institutions. increasing the cost of tuition isn't going to make the degree qualification any more 'valuable' other than in £'s and $'s, which is totally the wrong way to go. increase entry requirements and do away with bogus degrees - yes. artificially inflate the value of degrees using monetary policy - no no.
Ilocano:
1) EVERY university had the same, flat-rate tuition fees. Oxford geniuses and polytechnic vocational courses were the same.
2) Access to higher-education schemes saw that the rate of state educated people from lower-income backgrounds was 40-60% at top institutions.
3) Among my own socio-economic group (pardoning my complete lack of effort in attaining it), that being public-school level (i.e. top level of education, money-wise), almost everybody has gone to a top-level university. people just didnt leave my public school without 'average' grades, at least. anything else would be contrary to the school's elite and privileged status. i know a few kids that had their parents brought in and were politely asked to leave / contractually terminated... because they were under-achieving.
your assumptions are mostly wrong, and the inverse occurred under our previous labour government. poorer income students were supported and given a certain 'quota' of placements at top-tier universities, and were progressively backed and funded by government hand-outs, bursary schemes, scholarships etc. recognising the INSANE levels of elitism in our university system (probably the flag-runner for the whole world on that front) that was prevalent right up to, say, the 1970's-1980's, the government made huge efforts to shake-up the system and do away with the educational pattern of 'public school -> oxbridge -> public service/foreign office/government intelligence job'.
the wealthy didn't exactly "have it sweet", though. the public school system is an equally operative and elitist system that prequels the university process. to send a child to public school (including the preparatory school beforehand, from 7-13 typically), you're going to be paying ~£8,000/yr for prep-school and up to £30,000/yr for the public school itself. add on 2 years of a-levels before university and you're paying £30k a year from age 13-18. that's 6 years, minimum. multiply that by the number of children (my family has 2)... and so you get a costing almost comparable to harvard-yale. not exactly "sweet".
Last edited by Uzique (2010-11-04 10:09:20)
