Another step towards this article from the Euro thread coming true:

http://paconsulting.com/EasySiteWeb/getresource.ax...

Looks like we are dumbing down while the Chinese produce 10,000 phd's a year.

From anecdotal experience with friends children leaving university and being unable to get a job that their degree is relevant for suggests that there is disconnect between what the UK produces in higher education and the world of work.

There is a large opportunity cost in turning out degrees that then are not used. Maybe the politicians would be better placed looking at a different paradigm altogther for higher education, and focusing on how to educate children when they are very young much better than they do now.

To me, the best way to reduce relative poverty is to make sure everybody is well prepared for work, and that there are jobs to go around. Giving handouts in the form of welfare, and socially engineering admissions policy will, in the end, just damage our competitiveness as UK plc. in a world of globalisation.

Given that the test they've taken is the same nationally, and the test itself should be a guide to those best able to take advantage of a university education, social factors shouldn't come into it.

Even if considering social factors are important in finding the best applicants? What are you after in applicants, someone best able to score well a test or someone most capable of getting degrees?

When I watch Formula 1 and see Marussia drivers lapping a second of two adrift of a Ferrari I don't automatically think that Marussia employ woeful drivers. It's just that when judging driver performance absolute lap times aren't always a good indicator of a drivers ability. Similarly exam scores won't be a good indicator of academic ability without other references.

I wish I had your faith in admission tutors. I have formed the opinion that, certainly at Bath University, the man is a two faced fkwit. However he may be an exception to the rule.

Why do we need anythinhg more than an interview to test the potential student's fit leading to a conditional offer which, if met, leads to a place?

Why does it matter whether the applicant's father was a Duke or a dustman?

As you will appreciate it's not possible to cover every individual, I was talking about the breed as a whole. Well-coached students are easy to spot, you then move on to see if they have the potential to do well on the course they applied for, i.e. if they have merit.


Agreed about the aim (though the road to hell is paved with well intentioned social meddling) and on the whole yes, my experience is that admissions bods can spot talent in amongst the well-rehearsed acts. It really isn't that difficult.

At the heart of this there remains to my mind a certain lack of logic.

If the claim is that students from less affluent backgrounds in underperforming schools get lower grades than they should, presumably the basis for this view is that if these students had received better encouragement and higher quality teaching then they would have done better in their exams.

That's curious because at university the nature of study is more about independent learning and self-motivation than school sixth-forms are. Also, the quality of teaching isn't always top dollar, any more than in sixth-forms. If students can't self-motivate and overcome weak teaching at school, they'll do no better at university. If in spite of their background they can and do aspire to higher education, and can overcome poor teaching, then they should have got top grades in the first place. Their merit would shine through as it already does in many such students from weaker schools.

No sense - just social meddling from the usual handwringers and do-gooders who will cause harm.

I don't dis-agree but is that not what the interview should be for?

What is the motivator now for University selection.

Since it is all about money and funding, what is driving their selection choices.

Perhaps each country's Olympic team should be required to have a quota of white althletes in its "track & field" team and a quota of non-whites in its cycling/rowing/dressage etc - just to level up the playing field. Hmmmmmm

The real issue in further education and value for money is IMO what the kids are studying. There should be entry and/or financial incentives to get students into the woefully underpopular subjects on which the future of UK is likely to depend. In other words fewer journalists, fewer politicians and more engineers etc.

At uni they will get little more suppport than they got at school, probably less, and very likely have a mix of good and weak teachers i.e. lecturers and tutors. Not disagreeing with you about the different levels of attainment across schools, just pointing out that as far as success predictions go, not doing well in a crappy first environment hardly bodes well for doing better in a future crappy environment which also carries a new level of difficulty.

The other problem for social engineers is that there are many capable students who do well in harsh school environments. Students from deprived areas that struggle to attract the best teachers to their schools do still manage to become high achievers. This suggests that a significant part of the equation is the nature of each individual student in terms of their capacity for further academic success including self-motivation and aspiration.

It's not a huge leap from this interference to what happens right through to job selection processes. You can almost hear the meddlers thinking "we got them into uni but they still didn't do well, we need to make sure that finals are policed better and marked sympathetically, and what's the point of that if they still don't get jobs - our work is unfinished..."



Oh yes, that too, if they put the chubby kid off the Nike advert in a Moh 10km Olympic training regime he's bound to win