Mind's Eye Education as we have it is no longer a solution

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-19/sorry-poor-kids-road-rags-riches-no-longer-goes-through-college

One of the higher education colleges I taught at (now a university) is
making lots of staff redundant - it can't attract enough students who
will put themselves in £50k debt to get one of the certificates I used
to 'sign'. The article above at Zerohedge (via Reuters) explains what
has been going on. This is largely why I quit full time lecturing ten
years ago. My old college is now bidding to teach 14 - 19 year olds
in technical subjects demanded by employers, no doubt seeing kids of
this age as a captive market. Stuff about skills in employer demand
has usually been guff over the last 40 years.

I see education as an aim in itself and want everyone to have access
to university. My ideal is a long way from the scandal of what has
happened - something that involves the ludicrous claim that the ratio
of graduate to other jobs can be 50:50 given the encouragement of a
50% participation rate at 18. Universities have long been lying about
the jobs their graduates actually end up in. Stuff like 'The Wire' is
nearer the truth on education in general than the plethora of league
tables and statistics bandied about.

It seems strange we can no longer recommend education as a 'good' -
but I'm sure we have to come round to this. In many aspects it's now
a business as out of control as financial services, selling
equivalents of ppi, swaps and the lie of reward without effort. If I
had kids of college age now I'd work to send them to a top university
(less than 10% of those in the UK), probably abroad to learn another
language and culture, for them to graduate without debt - but if they
weren't smart enough I'd get them out of school at 16 and into
apprenticeships or the armed services.

The madness of this is clear in the promise you can get financial
advantage for life by getting the same qualification as half of the
rest of the population. The actual academic costs of teaching/library
provision outside science are about £3K not 27K and teaching content
is really only part-time, not full-time. Our universities, except a
few, are not centres of excellence, but clapped-out factories that
should be closing against on-line competition. There is an
alternative.

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