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The UK Secretary of State for Education, Damian Hinds, wishes to see a new ‘value for money’ test applied to universities, which, he says, will see cuts to the fees charged to students doing Arts and Social Sciences subjects.
Mr Hinds, who got a First in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, seems to think in terms of the first and third of those subjects. Mr Corbyn is offering to abolish fees, so politically the Tories need to do something to appeal to the young. One might expect a man with an Oxford First to realise that offering something for nothing is always going to trump offering something from which you have to pay; especially with anyone economically illiterate enough to believe the Labour leader. Economically, he seems to think it an easy matter to put a value on a degree. Does it lead you to a good job?
Mr Hinds was educated at a Catholic Grammar School. One presumes he did not come across the Blessed John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University there, or, indeed, elsewhere. But that he went through a Catholic education and should have come out with such a utilitarian view of the purpose of higher education is a disappointment. Managing to study Philosophy at Oxford and still having a purely instrumentalist view of higher education ought to be surprising.
But one does not need to be a philosopher to question whether Arts and Humanities subjects are of lesser value than more vocational ones. That well-known leftist Think Tank (that is joke by the way), The World Economic Forum, has articulated the qualities it thinks desirable in national leaders. Not one of the qualities, which are needed among more than just the ‘leaders’, is discipline specific. All of them require what the Minister himself seems to lack, which is the ability to take the skills one learns at university, skills such as critical thinking and empathetic understanding, and apply them to the task in hand. One hopes Mr Hinds will remember some of those skills before it is too later.
At the moment the UK’s universities stand second only to those of America as an international success story. In the last five years they have faced a revolution in the context within which they work. From a situation where they had to deal with a Government-imposed cap on the number of students they could take, and low fees, they were pushed into a free market where they could take as many students as they could get, and charge up to £9k a year (now £9.25K) to each of those students. The market worked as the market tends to. Many students went where they thought they could get the best value for that money. They based that judgment of ‘value’ on many things, but not money alone. Universities adapted with speed and agility to the new situation. But now, just as they are coming to terms with it, HMG seem determined to change the rules of the game – again.
If Mr Hinds’ views are economically reductionist, they are also regressive. Children from backgrounds where there is enough social capital to realise the value of Arts and Social Science subjects, will continue to do them, but at a reduced price; children from other backgrounds will be deterred. So, within a generation, Arts and Humanities and Social Science subjects will be the the preserve of a social elite at a few “top” universities. Let’s return to the 1930s, it was so much better then.
But above all, Hinds expresses a deeply philistine view of education. Wilde defined a philistine as one who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Value and ‘values’ as not the same thing. What value a society of educated people able to think and make informed decisions about political and economic issues? But let’s not worry, seems to be the argument, ‘value for money’ can be defined in narrow utilitarian terms.
If, as Mr Hinds claims, he wants to continue widening access to Higher Education – a line I support, let us widen it for all subjects, not just the ones a current generation think economically useful, especially when the yardstick used is the wrong one. That a Conservative Catholic should be so confused about the value of higher education is deeply depressing.
All Along the Watchtower 
There’s a place, even an honored place for trade schools, which is what the minister is talking about. The electricians, plumbers, draftsmen, HR drones, and all the rest have to come from somewhere. One can even put such schools as MIT, Purdue, Cal Poly, and most of the American Land Grants amongst them. That’s fine, necessary and proper. But it is not what we think of when we think of a traditional university, which is Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, and a few other in each country. The thing is, they seem to have lost the plot. They are no longer educating in the traditional sense, they are indoctrinating to a particular view, one shared mostly by a political elite. That is very sad, because what we really need is ethical leadership, who can reason, not merely scream and shout, and I’m seeing very little of it.
John Adams wrote to Abigail that:
“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.””
We seem to be regressing.
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Yes, sadly, our Universities to an alarming extent have turned into liberal thought factories. The most prized of all students are those who excel in the art of political activism. It matters not if they learn something useful for society or not as long as they have the ability to overturn societal and Christian norms and become hardened to the extent that they cannot, and therefore will not, listen to a counter argument: and thus we now have the “snowflakes” who are quick to sack and burn down a city because a spokesman for a counter-view is going to be invited to speak on campus.
If this is what university is, we would be better without them. Obama was the first of many politicians that came from this system and rose to the top of the elites in Washington and many more occupy the seats of Congress and the Senate.
A good Catholic, Christian for that matter, is risking the loss of thinking skills as well as the loss of their children’s souls when they send them off to be ‘re-educated’ these days. There is hardly a believer to found among the graduates of a large university these days and the only skill they have is in how to best put untold stress on family or social values.
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Yes, my Alma Mater, a public university, is an activist factory. Most of anyone, students or professors, were either Atheist or maybe some variant of religion that agreed with all of identity ideology. My faith was improved through the experience only because during my time there, I met my friend who was a very outspoken Orthodox Christian and my mentoring professor, more or less, a secret Catholic. I remember having a conversation with the Professor in some topic to which he replied, “Well because my position, you’ll forgive if I can say no more on the topic.” I said, “got it.”
What a sham, not shame, a sham.
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It is the oddest thing to question some of the kids at school today by asking them what their major is. Quite often the reply will be something along the line of “Women Studies”. Not sure but I’ll go out on a limb here and say that they are learning that women are victims and they will spend the rest of their lives marching, screaming and simply trying to overthrow the society they were born into. Just a guess. 🙂
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They will probably get well-paid jobs in the public sector
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No doubt. They can write a book, or teach (God forbid), or organize along with the rest of the activists these days. Quite a good living can be made by organizing revolutions apparently.
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indeed, though if they ever succeed, quite who is going to pay their salaries will be an interesting question
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One of the local liberal arts colleges has a new degree called “Individualistic Studies” where the students just picks an ala carte of classes… …
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With a degree like that I’m sure they will be able to write their own ticket in life. 🙂
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Funny thing is that my degree is still in its cardboard mailer somewhere in the middle of other junk of mine.
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I hope you have a scanned copy. Over here it is quite common for (good) jobs to request transcripts or even scanned copies of degree certificates.
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I do have my digital transcripts; all employers here really just ask for transcripts. Oddly enough, my day job doesn’t require a college education and I make more than the average of those with my degree.
So, I’m not looking at the moment to changing careers anytime soon.
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There is nothing wrong with trade schools, except that does not seem to be something the Minister is interested in.
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. . . until his plumbing or electrical goes out at an inconvenient time. 🙂
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We have immigrant labour for that …
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Indeed. But their tool of choice is the scimitar.
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Not the Poles 🙂
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My impression as well. In fact, my take is you could use a fair number more, likely we could as well.
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Indeed. My brother, who is a little younger than I, is a builder, and his skills are in great demand – but then he served his time as an apprentice back in the day
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Always the best way to learn the trades, although experience tells me that those of us who can teach while doing are fast leaving the ground.
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My brother taught his son the trade, and both of them are in great demand – but then they know what they are doing.
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Yep, at the risk of sounding like I’m bragging, I rarely had any trouble earning a living, although sometimes I managed to put myself in holes that I should have stopped digging sooner. 🙂
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In America, the public school system teaches kids to read, write, and arithmetic; however, it also teaches them what to read, what to write, and what ‘correct’ way to do arithmetic.
When I was substitute teaching, one day I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the ‘Social Studies’ (whatever that means) teacher leading the Junior High kids outside to teach them how to protest on the street. Furthermore, I was horrified when I was the Social Studies teaching to see that the assignment left for the students was a Eugenics assignment where the children had to pick the healthiest and most skillful to save to live on island together. I am literally not exaggerating this testimony. At that point, I knew if I had to work three jobs to put my kids through parochial school, it was going to be done.
Another thing that our education system lacks is Classical education. From the scholastics to the Enlighteners; the education was rooted in Greek and Latin, classical literature, and critical thinking from an early age. An education of how to think now what to think.
So, now in America, you get get these kids with all a uniformed experience of education, who several may come from broken families, so the system also raised them, into a University system now set up to further tell them what to think. And my Alma Mater is one of the worse.
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There has been a sad betrayal of our heritage, and it gets no better
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I would like us to adopt the rabbinical method personally: all potential rabbis still had to learn a trade they could fall back on (e.g. Paul was a tent-maker). I studied Classics, so I have one of the most (if not the most) traditional degrees amongst our contributors here, but even I would have been pleased to exchange some of my modules in return for a course on elementary programming or business law (which I am learning now).
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Extra note: when Cambridge created the English faculty, they assigned a “crazy” classicist to run it.
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