Opinion: Any education, so long as it’s training

While I fully concur with Prof Braben's assessment of the consumerist mindset promulgated by the present government, I would both further qualify that by using the term "New Labour" (as distinct from "Labour" in the traditional sense), and by asking whether he believes things would be any less consumer-driven under a Tory government? Only when the UK university is once again removed from the realm of market economics will there be education for its own sake and geared towards the greater betterment of humankind.

By chance I have had lunch with a friend who had been a university student with me in the 1960s, whom until today I had seen only once in the intervening 40 years. He is now a successful businessman with his own company, and a smart London address and a Jaguar to go with it. He had read Lord Mandelson's speech on informed choices, so I asked him how he now viewed his own tertiary education. My question was pointed, as I remember he had taken Economic History, which in those days consisted of 5 (or fewer) lectures a week, one hour's tutorial and a very long reading list. His reply:"It was the perfect preparation. I learned the importance of study, sound groundwork, command of the facts and logical argument. I also gained personal confidence from the challenge of piloting my own way through to a successful graduation and social skills from the many interactions with other students all doing the same thing, and at a time of great social change in the UK". How interesting. On the current Mandelson scale of value for money my friend's tutors would have been, to borrow a footballing phrase, " lucky to score nil".

There is nothing inherently wrong about opting for a student as customer model of education. The entire landscape of the economy has changed, and education and training efforts have to relate to what the society requires. There must be some purpose and point to education, or its relevance would be questioned. With the student as customer, it means a greater element of choice by students of various courses, new courses being designed to meet the needs of industry, commerce, and the professions, and a greater involvement by students in formulating their courses, since they have a right to know what kind and quality of education they would be receiving, and how it matches with society's needs. It is also good for the universities to make themselves more attractive to customers, since their competitiveness will be retained, and their relevance guaranteed. Traditionalists will, however, find this new arrangement rather strange. The days of learning because knowledge is good in itself have been replaced with knowledge having practical use and function to enhance the individual's competence and contribute to measurable outputs. All this means that academics must be retrained to acquire a more entrepreneural culture, do more practically oriented research, and show more leadership and managerial competence. Education therefore becomes a business, and operating on business principles becomes the new ethic. Oliver Mills

There is nothing wrong with those (students or academics) who want to study solely for "knowledge", but in that case they should be prepared to pay their own way---in full. In these hard times the taxpayers' money needs to be accounted for, and cutting off self-indulgence seems to be a good place to start.

Informed choice would be a fine thing, but I doubt if teaching hours, employability and the like is the most important information to provide; merely the easiest. It would be like buying a computer on the basis of its colour.

I note that Oliver Mills' contribution contains and indeed is built around the dreadful managementspeak which academics have learned to detest and despise over the past few decades: not only "customer" but "competitiveness", "choice", "measurable outputs", "entrepreneural culture", "leadership" and "managerial competence" (etc.). Now I understand that people get caught up in the language and dogmas of weird sects, in this case the market liberal sect and its dogmas, and think that everyone else ought to adjust to them, but perhaps they should be helped by being warned that this kind of thing can be dangerous to one's health: see for example Burkard Sievers, "The Psychotic University" (available on the internet): "The dominance of economic priorities in universities and science strongly suggests that the present university reform is deceived by psychotic thinking that compensates uncertainty with alleged certainty, euphemistically substitutes freedom with autonomy and reduces knowledge to a mere commodity necessary for the so-called ‘knowledge society’. The psychotic thinking on which university reform is based, however, mirrors not least the psychotic thinking that broadly accompanies the global economy and the global financial markets in particular."

The idea that if you are a student simply interested in gaining and expanding your knowledge, then you must be prepared to pay for it, is patently right-wing market-driven nonsense. The idea that knowledge for knowledges sake is 'self-indulgent' is abhorrent. Maybe Dr Truth would like to see such areas as philosophy abandoned and more worthy pastimes such as a degrees in 'Dragon's Dennery' or 'Alan Suggary' adopted and awarded by our universities to strutting brace-wearing, pinstripe be-suited graduates? Few students study or research in isolation from the wider student body or those that seek to train their minds in order to ask questions. Shared knowledge and knowledge expanded through collective endeavour have been driving forces of the university system from time immemorial. It has resulted in some of the most ground-breaking research and the flourishing of ideas. Treating students as individual 'customers' privatises the experience: it raises the individual and their own personal satisfaction above all else. It is of course, the inevitable consequence of introducing student tuition fees. As for accounting for taxpayers money, despite much of the tripe that passes for economic analysis these days, Britain is an incredibly wealthy country. It's full of multi-millionaires and billionaire and hugely wealthy corporations. The problem that the mainstream political parties seem to have, is a collective reticence in taxing these people or companies sufficiently. Moreover, there seems to be very little problem spending our hard-earned taxes on all the things we don't need: unnecessary foreign wars, a new generation of nuclear weapons and nuclear power stations... oh and I nearly forgot hundreds of billions poured into the coffers of already wealthy banks and the pockets of their ravenous shareholders. Maybe Dr 'Truth' feels that given the propensity of British governments to continually wage wars, an investment in producing a soldier might be a much more profitable than producing the wastrel thinker? I know which I'd rather 'waste' my taxes on.

Is there any other university system where the development of skills is given so explicit a priority over the transmission and creation of knowledge, as seems to be the way this is going (an apparent goal towards which, we have already in large measure gone)? And if so, are these other systems more, or less, effective both in terms of "higher [N.B.] education", and as a driver of economic success? These aren't rhetorical questions: I would be genuinely interested to know the answer.

To David Trotter: I think you'll find that the prioritization of "skills" above the transmission and creation of knowledge is not specifically a British disease but the goal of the Bologna Process, initiated in 1999, to which the United Kingdom and 45 other European countries have signed up. Another way of putting it is that practically the whole of Europe has now committed itself to the conflation of vocational and academic higher education. David Palfreyman of New College, Oxford, surveys the situation in his "The Legal Impact of Bologna Implementation": "The Bologna Process [does nothing] to preserve what is meaningfully ‘higher’ about higher education ... True higher education is not about delivering narrowly-focused skills" and so on. I suppose one could even conclude that the falling apart - or destruction - of the universities is now a generalized western phenomenon, which requires historical and not merely policy-level explanations - though the politicians of course bear their responsibility for the vandalism.

The reality as I see it is, young people are finding it harder and harder to get work despite being incredibly well qualified. More and more low-paid personal assistants and office assistants have Honours degrees and it's completely mad. This is not the outcome many would-be students have been set-up for school where they are told that if they go to university they can expect to get a good job. The bar keeps rising, and in reality only very few people these days can afford to go to university (or onto higher education in general) to simply gain a wider world view. It's all very interesting having philosophical discussions, but when it comes down to it, businesses pay for people (i.e. graduates) to do technical things not thinking about doing things. That's what you get to do when you're old and grey.

@natasha: If it was only down to 'grey and old people' to think about doing things you would not have been able to type up that message. Getting a university education and a 'wider world view' is what allows many people to come up with new 'technical things to do' and find creative solutions to everyday problems. And also to keep a space open for discussion and critique, and for civilization in general to advance. The kind of 'technical things' that some businesses require can be taught via other forms or training or event through the graduate programs provided by many multinational companies (which seems, incidentally, a reasonable way to go: you study an academic degree in order to develop intellectually and get some deep base knowledge and then you get training for an specific job). The problem you are addressing, it seems to me, has more to do with the high number of people going to university, rather than with what a university is meant to do.

To Heli: thank you for this. I should have known about this, of course; but ... I really do not get the impression in France/Germany/Switzerland/Belgium/Italy/Austria (of all of which I have some limited knowledge) that any of these university systems are actually doing what they (or their politicians) have signed up to. To Natasha: I agree with Larsen: you can't increase the graduate population from 8% to 38% and expect all the new graduates to have similarly high-level jobs as their predecessors. But the problem which you identify is very real.

To David Trotter: Comparison between the European national university systems is very interesting. The Netherlands has been argued to be a fiasco. Chris Lorenz, professor in Amsterdam, writes in an article in Oxford Magazine: "The ‘legal privatization’ of the Dutch universities will allow for the removal of the last juridical remnants of self-governance by the academics .... To my knowledge there is no other European country in which the academics have been so completely and insidiously robbed of their traditional administrative responsibility nor one where the academics have been so uncompromisingly transformed into ‘employees like any other’." There is of course some resistance to these assaults. Similarly in Belgium - there is e.g. an article (unfortunately only in Flemish) by Karin Verelst entitled "The Bologna Catastrophe". In Germany things may be worse still. Just to take a couple of examples among so many: The Freiburg sociology professor Wolfgang Essbach has described the Bologna Process as introduced into the German system as a "war against intelligence - "Krieg gegen die Intelligenz" - and exposed its immeasurably reactionary and anti-academic goals. The Mainz theology professor Marius Reiser recently resigned his chair, arguing in a public statement that once upon a time Germany possessed universities, and that their teachers and researchers enjoyed academic freedom; but that since the imposition of the Bologna reforms this has ceased to be the case: the universities no longer deserve to bear that name. There are also innumerable analyses to be found on the "death of the universities" in France. And so on. The vandalism of the ever more philistine ruling classes, which are ceasing to place any value on anything not (more or less immediately) "profit-making", is incalculable, and, I think, truly pan-European. Those countries whose higher education systems have not yet been "reformed", often the poorer, southern or eastern European nations, are temporarily the lucky ones.

Heli --thank you. Instructive, indeed. Doesn't make for very cheerful reading. It looks ominously simiilar, and similarly destructive across the board, at least in terms of intentions. I'm guessing that none of this has been going on, though, for long enough for anyone to be able to say whether in terms of contribution to the economy (which is the claimed reason for it all, though there is obviously a much more ideological dimension too), it actually works. That is, whether pushing universities towards vocational training actually does produce more "useful" future employees. I hesitate to bring this back to the "impact" discussion but there are parallels. In both cases, there is an argument for the underlying premise (that research should have impact and that university education should produce "useful" citizens) but in both, too, the blunt and indeed crass methods being used may in fact not help those aims in other than the very short term.

Of course Lord Mandelson is right and Donald Braben is talking about a world that no longer exists in any Western society. Having gone down the track of 30% or 40% of the age cohort encouraged to get a university degree, where Masters' degrees are churned out on any sort of rubbish, why shouldn't we have some real substance and focus 'higher' education on training? What we really need to retrieve from our 'massified' system is the opportunity for the top 1% to be unconstrained by compulsory years of schooling, to not require them to analyse some vacuous celebrity text which some pretend to be moderm literature in secondary schools, to give them the opportunity of exposure (but not inculcation) to traditional disciplines and give them the opportunity to exhibit academic competency without the boredom of 500 less able students in our mass lecture theatres. It is transparent that I am talking about an elite university opportunity. ...Obviously unpalatable to our bogan based modern culture.

This will come as a surprise to the many academic who do not live in the real world, but the truth is that many people go to university in order to improve their lot in life and secure their future. usually, the first step in that is using the degree to get a decent job. I can assure you that you won't get many takers if you state that a person earning your degree has zero job prospects but that the course is still worthwhile because they can do it just for the "knowledge". Universties, especially those funded by the taxpayer, need to concentrate on useful things. To the extent that they can manage to devote resources to useless things, they should make it clear to students who bite that their degrees will not make the slightest difference to themselves, the world, etc.

Dr Truth: In spite of your name, you seem to be imagining two unreal extremes: a degree that adds nothing to someone's employability and an academic course that will garantee a fixed salary and the existence and availabilty of a particular position through changing economic circumstances. The reality is that, as universities stand now, an education will give you a set of skills which, to a bigger or lesser extent, make you more suitable for a job and, in some cases, are a requirement of a particular occupation, while getting a deep knowledge of the theoretical foundations of that discipline. The formation a student receives is not only dictated by the requirements of the job they might take up after university, but also (in some cases, primarily) by the belief that a degree should reflect the mastering of a discipline and the ability to think independently. Some disciplines become obsolete or go through drastic renewals, but that's a different matter. A university education a massive difference in loads of aspects, but not neccesarily in terms of economic gain: at the end of the day, a plumber or a black cab driver can make much more money than a psychology or businness graduate. Bascially, a university degree is not a passport into an economic elite, but I guess everyone knows that.

Dr Truth: Since you're back with us, peddling the same recycled clichés, I have a short examination paper for you. Question (1): Identify for me a degree with zero job prospects where the course is still worthwhile because students can do it just for the "knowledge". Question (2): Identify the "useless things" which universities do, and show me how you know that they are useless. In both cases, uou should supply and analyse evidence to support your conclusions.