Perhaps this expansion of the universities has gone a little too far:
Britain’s first ever degree in rap as university offers qualification to find next Stormzy
The first comment is that the moment we institutionalise pop music it is no longer pop music. The second that the point of the stuff is to epater les bourgeois and there’s nothing more bourgeois than a middle aged lecturer attempting to be down and hip with the kidz.…
See MoreAround and about half of student loans are never repaid, meaning that the taxpayer – you and me – picks up the bill. This isn’t a sensible manner of funding the universities but it is the one we’ve got. A justification is offered for this.
First though, some degrees have very much lower repayment rates than others:
Degrees in “creative arts” subjects – which includes Music, Drama, Fine Art and Design Studies – are the most costly to the taxpayer since so few alumni earn enough money to pay back their student loan in full.
It’s entirely true that there is a certain gender disparity in the number of people employed to write software. This is not unusual in our society. There are gender disparities in may things. There’s a definite lack of female miners for example. There’s no reason why women shouldn’t or couldn’t be electricity repair linemen but there don’t seem to be many of them.
It’s even true that there’s a disparity in who trains to do which jobs.…
See MoreWe all know the modern educational mantra. This sector of the economy is becoming more important, people must be educated in this sector of the economy, employ more of those who cannot do to teach them degrees in this sector of the economy. The problem here being that the world might not work this way. Sure, it’s true that increased human capital makes a society richer. Sure, it’s true that increasing human capital is a matter of knowledge and education.…
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A colleague of mine has two sons and a daughter all at University for the first time. Talk about triple whammy. To make matters worse, in their second year they’ll have to move out of the University halls of accommodation and he’ll have to be a guarantor for their 52 week rented accommodation.
I was the first in the family to go to University. This was the late 1970s when only the top 5% went to University and you got a grant not a lifetime of debt.…
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