education for tomorrows world

Part of my undergraduate degree was studied in an Education Department where I wrote papers on a variety of subjects, from the case for selective versus comprehensive schooling, to looking at the educational policies of the likes of Milton Friedman.

I also was lucky enough to experience being educated in another country - the US - as a child, where my father still works as a teacher. Many people bemoan things that happen in America that suddenly become common place in this country a few years down the line. I remember one teacher at my school who hated the slow creep of baseball caps into society, hardly the most heinous of crimes, but he did regard the site of a baseball cap on a head as an IQ reducing device.

Roger Helmer MEP and Honorary Chairman of the Freedom Association has an excellent piece on the issue of education which certainly rings true to me. There has been much debate on the issue of higher education, from how it is funded to who should actually go. I seem to remember (and if someone wants to correct me please do) that educational attainment was decided much more by how a child developed in infant school years that how they developed during their University years which always led me to believe that if anything we should spend more at an infant school level and less at a higher education level if that were true.

I remember when we lived in the States in the 80's we as a family were extremely surprised by how many people went to University, how many people did a social arts degree, how long it took those students to graduate, and then how many people went to graduate school.

Now we enter 2008, and we can look at the UK. Roger Helmer points out the ludicrousness of having a 50% target of school leaver entering higher education. Why not have a target of 80% or even a target of 20% or maybe even better, no target at all? Now I remember being sold on a University education by being told that it means that you will earn more over your lifetime. But hang on a minute. Isn't that argument already faulty.

Say you left school at 16 and took a job with a salary of £15,000. If you had no pay rise whatsoever you would already have earned £75,000 by the time you were 21. At the same time your University graduate may well have racked up debts of £20,000. So that means that the none graduate at 21 is effectively £95,000 better off than the graduate. Now there are more and more cases of people leaving school who know what they want to do, actually earning more than new graduates, with stories of new graduates having to accept low paid jobs that a degree isn't needed for.

I remember a joke that I heard in America about a poorly regarded University - lets call it University X. It went along the lines of, "What's the first thing a graduate of University X says?" "Welcome to McDonalds how can I help you?" And therein lies the problem. Does a degree really guarantee you a graduate level job anymore? It would be very interesting to see real hard evidence that a graduate in 2008 really will earn more than a non-graduate - because if that is not the case anymore then we are selling many of our kids down the river by pushing them into a University career with false expectations, and on a flase promise that they should take on debt but will earn much more over their working lifetime to make it worthwile.

Roger Helmer quite rightly highlights the cinderella of education - namely vocational education. I truly believe that if I had a child and they didn't know what they wanted to do after they left school, my advice would not necessarily be to go to University. Now we can have all the arguments about University not just being about a degree and that is right. But again we must come back to one of the biggest arguments given to kids for going to University (often by their teachers) is that it will benefit them in their career in the long term.

We are also told that we need to have more graduates because we need to compete with the likes of India and China who are churning out graduates in their thousands. Yes that is true – but what are they graduating in? Lets have graduates in hi-tech and newly emerging industries, but at the same time lets educate the next generation with the skills that this country is crying out for.

Why has it been so hard in the past to get a plumber or an electrician? Undoubtedly because that career path wasn’t portrayed as being attractive or worthwhile so young people didn’t go into that field. Whilst I am not sure whether we will ever bring back poltechnics as advocated by Roger Helmer, I know that if I was a parent I would back any child who chose a vocational path, and think that if we are serious about educating for tomorrow’s world, that path should be made much easier to take.

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