The Right Education

What is the value of a university education? In money terms it can be worth a great deal for those in certain professions - medicine, law - but for many the earning potential will only be marginally better than for someone who left school well qualified at 18. Our current government - back in the days of Blair - decided that 50% of the population should be sent to university. Why 50%? Why not 40% or 60% or any other percentage you care to name? Sending kids off to university was a good idea in the short term because it kept unemployment figures down but whether it is the right use of the country's resources is another matter. We rig exam results so that everybody passes - even if they can hardly read or write - and then send them off to do media studies. Universities are under-funded for proper subjects and we demand that students pay for their own education in a way that I never did. I am sure that many an old socialist would be appalled by what this government has done. And, unfortunately, a few years on there is increasing unemployment in the ranks of graduates. There aren't enough media studies jobs to go round.

We have had problems already with this government seeking to select candidates for a university education on the basis of sociology and we have had more mad suggestions from Mr Lord High Everything Else himself - Peter Mandelson. The best universities - Oxford, Cambridge, London - should select students taking into account their backgrounds. No they should not. They should be selected on the basis of academic achievements and qualifications and on their personalities and aptitudes. We have abandoned the 11+ exam which allowed me and many others to go to a grammar school and then to a university. I was the first and still the only individual from our family tree in 300 years to have obtained entry into a university. I achieved it on the basis of academic success; not via any system of social engineering. I came from a working class background and along with many other children, I was encouraged and helped by all the staff of my primary school and only after an interview did I fail to gain entry into one of the best direct grant grammar schools in the area. So I went to a state grammar school. I was a child of the 1944 education act; an act that gave opportunities for so many to go to a grammar school and a university. For many years grammar school boys and girls became prime minister - Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Now it looks like we will revert to Old Etonians - the natural school for those who expect to govern. Perhaps it is right that we select the best people from the right school to run the country when our democracy is under threat through apathy and abuse in a way that has never happened before in modern times.