If Rachel Reeves cannot see that university student loans are becoming a totemic issue among graduates, then she may be heading for her own Nick-Clegg-moment when one decision prompts a haemorrhaging of the graduate vote (from Labour).

@ChrisMayLA6 @jwi

I think there are a lot of related issues that mean that this can’t be addressed in isolation.

Dismantling the polytechnics removed the best vocational qualifications. The best route into aerospace engineering, for example, used to be through a poly, but when they became a university they had to restructure the course to make it an accredited degree and that destroyed a lot of its value. There were several other subjects where a high-quality course at a poly was a better route in than a university degree.

This has meant that universities have had to take up that rôle as a path to employment. This, in turn, has led to jobs requiring ‘a degree’ but as a box-ticking exercise rather than anything that the job needs or as anything that gives the student either personal enrichment or transferable skills.

I saw some of the worst outcomes of this first hand when I was at Swansea. The Vice Chancellor shut down the Chemistry department because he wanted to get more students into the Media Studies department. The Chemistry department was rated 5 in the previous RAE, the Media Studies department was rated 1. There are some great Media Studies courses, which lead directly to careers in journalism (Cardiff used to have one, no idea if that’s still true. Again, this used to be something the polys did better), but the Swansea one was a waste of everyone’s time.

So there’s a massive push towards academic qualifications as entry to jobs, which means lots of people taking on loans to do degrees in which they have no interest, giving them a piece of paper that prevents them from being deselected but no knowledge or skills that they will actually use in the future. That’s enormously wasteful but also something that can’t be addressed by any intervention solely in the university sector.

There’s also the social aspect. I viewed my student loan as a poorly administered graduate tax: I took the loan and then, if I earned enough, I would pay more tax. But that’s a very middle-class attitude to debt. There are stark differences in how people view this kind of debt and working class people are far more likely to view any form of debt as a negative. So student loans end up skewing the demographics of university attendance away from working class people, at the same time as increasing the number of graduates is advertised as a tool for improving social mobility. That can be addressed by moving to a graduate tax.

I am increasingly convinced that universities fall far short of meeting their requirements both as centres of research excellence and as educational institutions, but fixing either or both of those requires some significant reforms (and defenestration of most university senior administrators).

@david_chisnall @ChrisMayLA6 @jwi

Indeed, the comparison in professionalism and abilities of the workforce between the UK and countries that have kept their work schools vs universities separate is stark.

@albertcardona @ChrisMayLA6 @jwi

This has roots in classism, which Thatcher and Blair both made worse. There’s a perception that degrees are more valuable than vocational qualifications and that jobs in professions are more than those in trades. Both of which are total nonsense. And don’t even correlate with income, just with Victorian prejudices.

@david_chisnall @ChrisMayLA6 @jwi

What's more, without the earlier UK policies that enabled anyone from a EU country to immigrate to the UK regardless of Schengen status the UK's trades like plumbers, electricians, and much more would be in tatters. Now that innane politics have closed that avenue, there's a time bomb awaiting.

@david_chisnall @ChrisMayLA6 @jwi

What's more, without the earlier UK policies that enabled anyone from a EU country to immigrate to the UK regardless of Schengen status the UK's trades like plumbers, electricians, and much more would be in tatters. Now that innane politics have closed that avenue, there's a time bomb awaiting.

@albertcardona @david_chisnall @jwi

And the key way to diffuse that would be massive investment in the Further Education Colleges sector, which has been starved of funded for years... suffering the prejudices detailed above in this thread

@albertcardona @david_chisnall @jwi

And the key way to diffuse that would be massive investment in the Further Education Colleges sector, which has been starved of funded for years... suffering the prejudices detailed above in this thread

@albertcardona @ChrisMayLA6 @jwi

This was starting prior to Brexit. A lot of Polish plumbers were leaving the country because they could be better paid elsewhere, leading to a skills shortage. Brexit made it worse.

@ChrisMayLA6 @albertcardona @jwi

I suspect you could also do something with unfair hiring legislation to make discrimination on the grounds of holding a degree illegal. Unless you can show that a specific degree confers skills that cannot be acquired without it then you may not use it in hiring decisions. Companies never 100% comply with these things, but they do provide nudges. HR in big organisations will avoid automated filtering on them and will strip this information before passing it to a hiring manager.

@ChrisMayLA6 @david_chisnall @jwi

And more than that, a change in perceptions. For when I ask undergraduates here at Cambridge University why are they here, to learn or to get a credential, almost all say the latter. None of them should be here, they should be in a professional school where the credentials will match the jobs they seek.

@ChrisMayLA6 @david_chisnall @jwi

And more than that, a change in perceptions. For when I ask undergraduates here at Cambridge University why are they here, to learn or to get a credential, almost all say the latter. None of them should be here, they should be in a professional school where the credentials will match the jobs they seek.

@albertcardona @david_chisnall @jwi

but that instrumentalism has been, of course, the focus of Govt. policy pronouncements for decades

@ChrisMayLA6 @david_chisnall @jwi

So how do we create the necessary circumstances of available information and public opinion to shift government policy towards reinstating professional schools? How can that be made acceptable and desirable to those in charge of now called universities that used to be polytechniques? And to the government to supply the funding?

@albertcardona @david_chisnall @jwi

Well the first thing would be to de-professionalise politics - while out political class are predominantly university educated they will see that as the the key educative norm - that said, nowadays they seem also happy to destroy much of the sector on the alter of what used to be called the new pubic management & might now best de called market-normalisation

@ChrisMayLA6 @david_chisnall @jwi

If that's the desirable action, what will create the conditions for it? Because anyone in power will only move if they see it as a win for themselves.

@ChrisMayLA6 And the reason UKLabour are out of time is #FPTP.

In 2007–11, #FiannaFail drove Ireland's economy over a cliff edge. #FF lost 58% of its vote share at Ireland's 2011 general election, but #STV ensured that #FF was not wiped out. It partially rebuilt, and by 2024 FF was again the largest party.

But #FPTP is far more brutal to losers. Labour's likely fall to under 20% of the vote will leave it as a tiny rump, too weak to rebuild.

@2legged @ChrisMayLA6 They've still got time to fix the voting system - which the tories would probably back, the libdems and other minor parties would back.

Not quite how I expected the UK broken voting system to get fixed but they may have to do it to survive

If Rachel Reeves cannot see that university student loans are becoming a totemic issue among graduates, then she may be heading for her own Nick-Clegg-moment when one decision prompts a haemorrhaging of the graduate vote (from Labour).

The problem is that Labour still thinks they can bank on there being no vialable alternative on their left flank; which with Zack Polanski leading the GPEW, is no longer true; another Labour miscalculation?

#politics #universities #Greens
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3k4xdqyp1o