***** WARNING, INCOHERENT RANT FOLLOWS *****
I agree. Lack of communication is probably the dominant issue here. However, it is a symptom of a much wider problem.
The UK government has a "target" of "Enabling half of all young people to attend university."
[
- Interestingly, it took me a while to find a reference to this policy. I searched the Department for Education and Skills website and the The Office of the Prime Minister website without turning anything up. I eventually found the reference on The Labour Party website about 4 levels down from the homepage at the bottom of the list (!) and in the "Young People" section, not the "Education" section. As Douglas Adams wrote, "It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.".]
You cannot deny that the government is well on the way to achieving this aim. The number of university graduates is indeed rising steadily.
Two obvious consequences
1) More graduates means lower graduate salaries (simple supply and demand).
2) Either education standards must rise to maintain the quality of graduates, or the quality of graduates must fall.
Engineering in the UK is still struggling to come to terms with the long decline of the manufacturing base (Of course we are not alone in this and I have no argument with industries which out-source manufacturing beacuase it is cheaper) so there is little money available for either innovation or graduate salaries which compounds the problem of over-supply.
The standards issue is slightly more complex. The answer to point 2 is of course that education standards are falling. This is (understandably) denied by the government despite what "everone else" (i.e. employers and anyone who stops to think about it for a few seconds) thinks. This implies that standards must be "recalibrated" from the bottom upwards.
The chain goes something like this:
1) The current educational trend (a faint legacy of the "all must have prizes" anti-meritocratic thinking of the 1970's) is to move away from fact-based learning of traditional subjects to a much broader curriculum which is spread more thinly with the emphasis placed on qualitative study. This first shows itself at the secondary education stage: Year 7 (~11 years of age)
2) There are of course some subjects where even the most zealous educational reformer cannot remove all traces of fact-based learning, such as maths and sciences. This means that after 3 years of this form of study, pupils can readily divide the curriculum into "easy" and "hard" subjects.
3) In years 9 and 10 (Age 14-16) pupils chose which subjects to study to GCSE level. However, there are core subjects which they MUST study (including maths and sciences). Now beacuse these are "hard" subjects where fact-based learning is still essential, the scope of the curriculum in these areas must be reduced. If this was not the case, then the exam results would not be seen to be improving and that is not what the government wants. Every August, when the results are published, we see a plethora of media articles announcing an increased GCSE pass rate and (usually) an equal number of editorials explaining why this is not necessarily a good thing. The following day, the media reports are always the same with the govenment saying "Your silly comments are putting-down the achievements of pupils".
4) For those who continue their full-time education into years 12 and 13 (16 to 19 years old) and study for AS and A2 examinations, the GCSE pattern is repeated. This time however, the number of subjects studied by individual pupils is again reduced but this time maths and sciences are not mandatory and therefore unsurprisingly not popular choices. The media arguments about pass rates are repeated again (in fact the AS and A2 results are published 1 week before the GCSEs but the media stories are identical, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V!).
5) [optional - don't read this if you have more fun things to do, like emptying the sceptic tank for example] The pass rate issue is actually getting rather comically out of hand. So many students are achieving A grades either through better educational performance (the government's view) or downturn in standards (everyone else's view) that a new top grade of A* has been introduced to differentiate between the highest performing pupils! BUT THIS IS STILL NOT ENOUGH TO DISTINGUISH THEM! The next wave of summer media stories always concerns student x who studied at state-funded school y in regional town z who's application to study (sorry, "read") law at Toffnose College, Oxbridge has been turned down despite the fact that he or she achieved 5 A2 passes at grade A* (the "normal" number of A2 subjects taken is 3). The university responds to the media article by saying "Yes, but we only have 80 places available for people to study law and we had 800 applicants, 150 of which got 5 A* A2 grades [these numbers are not hyperbole despite my sarcastic tone!]. We gave each one a personal interview to select the best 80. Pupil x did not perform as well, in our opinion, as other applicants.". The media go away and think about this for a while and come back with "Ah, of those 80 you chose, 70% came from a privately funded education background. Surely this is just another example of the establishment old boys network?". The university responds "But 60% of the original applicants came from a privately funded education and they performed better at interview too.". Then the government chimes in "But what about the other 10%? The media are right. You are discriminating against state educated pupils. If you don't sort this out we will cut your funding. We've got our eye on you.". Lo and behold, this year we have the first reports appearing that now students from privately funded education are now apparently being "discriminated against" by univerity admissions policies.
6) [back to the real point] The practical upshot of all this is that there are fewer people studying maths, physics and chemistry at age 16-19 and (due to falling standards) those that do are not as well educated in these areas as they would have been in previous years. Therefore, fewer of them go on to study engineering at university. University education and admissions standards have not dropped (with some exceptions and at least not to the same degree as those in secondary education).
***** RANT WARNING ALL CLEAR *****
M
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Dr Michael F Platten
