Over Qualified, Under educated.

In days of yore when men had mullets, women had shoulder pads, and pop music (apart from The Smiths obviously) was crap, I was a student.

There was no such thing as tuition fees and, apart from some mumblings from the Thatcher government, the student maintenance grant was seen as sacrosanct.
It wasn't much, but with a bit of part time work you could do your three years and emerge not owing a penny.

There were less than a third of the graduates there are today. A degree set you apart and you had your pick of graduate trainee jobs offered by blue chip companies. No debt and a good job almost gauranteed; we were a lucky and charmed generation.

The massive expansion of higher education over the past twenty years has changed everything. No one can argue against widening access to education; the more elitist system that existed in the past was heavily skewed towards kids from a middle class backgroud. What can be argued against is the governments assertion that a degree today has the same value as twenty years ago, and that the standard of education has not suffered from this rapid and underfunded expansion.

The funding per student head has not just fallen, the ratio of students to tutor has risen to the point where any notion of one-to-one tuition and support is derisory. Student tutorials where one of the bedrocks of our university system. The erosion of that bedrock must inevitably have had an impact on the quality of the learning experience. New technology and the interweb have made individual research much easier, but by removing the dialogue between tutor and student we have lost something vital.

It annoys me when the government continually quote statistics to prove that the average graduate will earn 40% more over their lifetime than their non-graduate peers. This figure is based on the earnings of people who graduated twenty or thirty years ago. It is not comparable. This is just another meaningless statistic bandied about to justify tuition fees and student loans. We all know people with good degrees who are working in call centres or stacking supermarket shelves. Lets face it, someone with a degree in Surfing Studies from Plymouth University is probably not going to earn as much over their lifetime as a qualified plumber.

We are already seeing the emergence of a British Ivy league of elite Universities. This is inevitable. If the British university system is to retain any international reputation for academic excellence there has to be an elite. In the future, the academic institution attended will have more impact on future career prospects than the subject studied or the degree classification attained. The government will of course insist that all educational institutions are equal. That is, of course, balls. They never have been and never will be.

If I was eighteen again I would think long and hard before taking a degree if I couldn't obtain a place at one of the top universities. Why lumber yourself with £18k of debt if the degree you come out with is of little or no value? If you ask me it is, as our American cousins would say; a 'fucking no-brainer'.