Is there such a thing as too much education?

Those of your who follow me on Facebook will know that I currently have a bonnet bee on the subject of ELQ legislation.

Concisely: if you are a home student, when you do a degree most of your fee is paid for by the government (hence why overseas fees are so much higher). In 2007, funding for people doing an equal or lower-level qualification (ELQ) than one they already possess was dropped. For them, fees have jumped by at least 100%, often much more.

For most, that means a hike from around £3000 for a 1 yr masters to around £9000.  For me, however, it’s a crippling blow. I have[1] my heart set on this course provided jointly by the RCA and Imperial.  It’s a two year practical course spread across two universities, most of it is studio time, which is exceedingly resource intensive for the unis involved and, therefor, it is very expensive.  Before the ELQ legislation, the two year course would have cost me around £10k in fees, now it  costs £48k.

The worst thing about this rather ill thought-out piece of legislation is who it punishes. First of all, it punishes people like me: those with PhDs who don’t wish to stay in academia and who would like to take the superb transferable skills a PhD gives you and retrain in another field. There’s nothing like enough academic jobs to provide employment for everyone with a PhD, so that’s quite a high number of people.

Again, using myself as an example, if I had spent the last 7 years in telesales, I would be able to afford my place on the course; I wouldn’t have been able to get on it, of course, because I wouldn’t have had the required expertise, but at least money wouldn’t have been an issue. Because I spent that time learning the skills that will enable me to extract the absolute maximum benefit and to give myself a decent shot of being accepted onto it, the government won’t fund me and I can’t go.

In case your now thinking “awwww, poor ickle high achiever, wants to go back to school and the nasty government won’t pay”; let’s look at the wider harm. The people most affected by this are highly-educated adult-learners. That is, people who are highly trained in one field but who would like to transfer to another.  These are also the people who tend to perform the best on these courses because they have usually worked hard to get onto them, they have chosen that career above all others and they have experience of learning and know how to do it well. The best students tend to go to the best schools. Can you see where this is going yet?

Universities are already seeing a reduction in uptake on the kinds of courses most often attended by these kinds of people. A reduction in uptake means a reduction in money coming in and a reduction in their ability to teach.  In other words, the best schools have lost the most students and so have been hit disproportionately hard.  As their funding is cut, they will no longer be able to provide such high quality training and the courses will disappear. The long term effects of this loss on our standing as the provider of some of the best education in the world and on the economy are grave; and that’s before you consider the loss of all those uber achievers who tend to contribute far above their share to society, both financially and socially, and who will now be trapped in careers they no longer want and are no longer motivated to do well in.

The reason I am telling you this now is because of todays news story on the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR), who have recommended the government ditch its target to put 50% of people through university. They say it has resulted in a reduction in the quality of courses. To me, that seems a bit of a no brainer.  I’ve doodled a little graph to show what I mean:

Let’s assume all that decides whether you go to university is whether or not you are smart enough to pass the course[2] and let’s assume the threshold is set where I’ve put the arrow marked “old IQ”.  When you move the threshold to the 50 %, which, because of the way intelligence is distributed, is also the mean average IQ, you create lots of students who cannot pass the currently available courses. If they were to fail, it would render the whole exercise rather pointless, so easier courses must be created that cater to their needs. Again, because of that pesky normal distribution, those students are rather large in number and they tend to dominate the others in the pool of available graduates. That makes it rather harder for potential employers to judge the quality of applicants based on their qualifications. Instead they must start developing their own metrics, which makes recruitment harder and more expensive, reduces profits and has a knock-on effect on the economy.  It also devalues the qualification for everyone, including those who would have qualified under the old system, because what is the point of a degree if no-one can tell what it means anymore? Now, instead of improving your job prospects, a degree may actually be holding you back; it delays your first step onto the career ladder and makes you less attractive to employers because you have less experience than those of an equal age who didn’t put off starting work.  The smartest kids will recognize this and will choose work instead of university; in order to get enough bums on seats to justify their existence, the best unis have to dumb down and the whole system begins to spiral down.  It’s a bad idea every way you look at it.  The only winners are the providers of lesser-quality qualifications, who suddenly have huge government funding and masses of students.

The AGRs solution is the utterly ridiculous idea of putting up tuition fees. They’re right, it WILL reduce student numbers…[3].

I’m sure you’re wondering the link between this and ELQs.  Fear not, I’am about to make it clear; the money saved by withdrawing funding from people like me was diverted so as to help get more of the population through university. In other words, funding was taken from the best universities and diverted into the coffers of the rubbish ones.

If that sounds like a good idea to you, perhaps you need to go back to school.

1.  I’m not done fighting yet, so, for now, this remains in the present tense. The universities are pretty miffed about the whole thing, especially the best ones, and they are raising stink. Maybe by the time I’m ready to enroll, ELQ legislation will be consigned to the circular file and this whole sorry episode will be forgotten.

2. I know that’s a gross oversimplification.

3. I’m so annoyed by it I can’t even be bothered to make explicit why it is a stupid idea. I’m sure all my readers can figure it out