Too Many People go to University

ladies and gentlemen the um motion for this debate as you now know is too many people go to university if you look at this bunch of people in front of you they have all gone to university or are going to go to university except me i thought i would just mention this that people born in 1924 tended not to go to university because there was an attractive alternative you got called up um my university connection is actually more impressive than most other people here in that i've been a director of a university on three occasions and on the first occasion i was not in the electorate rectangle but i was mobbed by the staff when they found out that i could wear a peter's nose gown and they didn't have to make a new garden for the new rectangle uh the way we are playing this tonight is that um the fours were sitting on my left will begin are they not sitting on right now they're sitting on my right the four sitting on my right will begin and they will speak for eight or nine minutes but no more and when they have done their piece it is up to you to ask questions let us commence with um claire fox who will speak for the mission okay will you make your way there sorry [Music] [Applause] evening everybody i am one of those egalitarians who since going to university from my bog standard comprehensive was determined to storm the ivory towers and allow ever greater numbers to enter the hallowed halls of academia i haven't changed my mind and yet i'm going to argue that too many people are going to university why not because i have a rose-tinted sentimentality about the good old days because what more and more people are being given access to today promiscuously labeled as higher education is a pale imitation of what university was or is ideally and the degrees being awarded too often and merely credentials not worth the paper they're written on context is all what has been the basis of this massive expansion of higher education how did so many young people become equipped to deal with knowledge at a higher level was it the school leavers magically became brighter or the educational standards are rising and schools getting better well i don't believe in magic and the evidence from the schools is fairly dubious the latest ofsted annual report says that more than half of all secondary schools are failing to provide children with a good education and parents are so desperate to get a place in the few good local state schools that do exist that they lie about where they live and a location near a top performing secondary school can add up to three hundred thousand pounds to the value of your property in london well maybe i'm being cynical what about the evidence of the league tables and the increased gcse and a-level passes well i don't believe it it's been recently revealed that nine out of the ten most improved schools achieved their higher ranking because their head teachers entered pupils for the easier emasculated vocational qualifications so that the health and social care qualification was given the equivalent of four gcse passes it's called cheating let's be honest you don't need an a level to work out that a levels a what they used to be 1965 to 1980 there was a steady pass rate of 68 the following 25 years it zoomed up to 96 percent the question is not is there great inflation rather the question is how can this not be grade inflation when i hear that half of scotland's universities are forced to offer remedial classes to new students you realize that the opening up of universities doesn't necessarily mean better educated school leavers but maybe i'm being cheap to quibble about schools maybe the expansion of universities is happening in circumstances of unprecedented commitment to intellectual pursuits scholarship and academic rigour maybe we live in a society where there's a renaissance in the cultivation of the mind and a new respect for knowledge oh but what that what's that i hear a recent education minister charles clark telling us that knowledge for his own sake is a bit dodgy what's actually unprecedented is the official philistinism of education policy rather than a celebration of education as a valuable end education is sold merely as a means to a variety of non-educational ends we have a narrow functional attitude to knowledge now incorporated into the purposes of universities today if you look at any new report on universities the leech report the new hefty report the role of universities is we are told to make the economy more efficient to make students more employable universities are told to close forge closer links with employers they're told to act as skills brokerages and i can't even say that word it's so jargon written and they're told that they must meet the skills priorities of the local workplaces and students are told they should go to universities as a requirement for getting a job so the glittering prizes being offered today are merely credentials for work and it's no surprise of the popularity of vocational courses such as media studies academic standards are only valued as a proof that that they are proof of worth in the job market and for employability in 2000 the then education minister baroness blackstone said that all courses should make their standards explicit and this is a quote as a key part of ensuring that graduates are prepared for the world of work which meant that professors of literature i know were forced to work closely through their curriculum to prove that they contain employability and at one point somebody told me that a close reading of poetry was actually good evidence that reading company accounts could be achieved in the future now seeing university as a root to a job is very different from the atmosphere of the past after my a levels was great excitement in my home it meant i could get a good job in the bank i was disdainful and in fact i rebelled i didn't want a job i dreamed of ibsen and shakespeare i went to university in defiance today there's no room for such irrelevant and arcane pursuits of knowledge today's dreams are more limited today i'd be told to go to university as a way to get the job in the bank when the university of strathclyde and paisley announced that it was issuing laptops to undergraduates the dean of faculty explained the aim quote to equip those with cross-disciplinary skills that make them extremely appealing to employers less dreams more utilitarian nightmare this credentialism i think helps breed an anti-scholarship ethos in universities and even justifies laziness frequently students want to know how the recommended readings or the lectures or the essays or the books contribute to their final degree it's hardly their fault because they're read on an education system that sees education only as a means to an end so they only embrace what they need to get them through their degree anything beyond is seen a waste of as a waste of time maybe i'm being unfair because there's more to the government's enthusiasm for mass higher education and utilitarianism around skills and employability the education secretary there was and god knows there's a lot of them as this speech indicates and but anyway david blunkett when he was in he claimed quote widening access to higher education is a key priority and critical to tackling social exclusion but the politically correct language of social exclusion and inclusion is just as instrumental as the skills language this is social engineering and it's not about giving working-class kids eaten like school education so that they can get a university education in fact it's very it's actually opposed to such a meritocratic ideal the role of universities as social includers treats educational priorities with contempt and instead its main aim is correcting social inequality funding for universities has been reorganized over recent years to give those universities who take the socially excluded from lower social economic groups financial incentives and top universities have threatened that they will have to take poor students or have their millions of pounds in their budgets cut the proposal of the working party of aim higher a government body is that c grades for disadvantage should be counted as equivalent as a for others social inclusion is also used to justify emasculating assessment and curriculum standard essays and exams and traditional academic subjects are considered to be too exclusive and elitist for the masses in the past ambitious working-class students might have been rare but at least they were judged on their own merits and their own abilities as intellectual equals and now working-class students are patronized as though they need differential treatment as though they can't handle the demands of academia unless they're watered down on their behalf now going to universities is either an extension of school on route to a job or to enhance people's social standing but it's treated almost as a routine and that's the thing that's most dangerous there is an expectation and often viewed indifferently by the young that they will go to university whatever they're bound to in the past students had to compete for university and in such an environment students had to stretch themselves intellectually and prove their worth now it's universities who have to prove themselves and compete to recruit school leavers faculty meetings are more like marketing meetings people sit around and discuss how to make courses more attractive appealing sexy they discuss advertising and brand loyalty one of the consequences of this is that academics treat universities like they're being selling wares and students are turning to consumer and buyers and with the exception of a relatively small number of privileged universities it's a buyer's market it's turned education on its head students are no longer the would-be apprentices who have to demonstrate that they deserve to be accepted by the most advanced minds and researchers in the field is rather students who are the masters who now must be flattered and conjoled cajoled by humble lecturers and now that students are paying fees this consumer model is institutionalized baroness deech the independent adjudicator for higher education who deals with student complaints explains that fee paying students now view going to university as a service provision and quote she says it's like joining a gym you pay me you pay merely sorry you pay and they provide the facilities and the trainers from the point of view of service provision the customer is always right but how disastrous in an academic ethos but it might well explain why there's degree uh grade inflation lecturers who are friends of mines are exhausted to mark positively told that if there's not enough two ones or first in their department it's the problem with their teaching rarely with the students because the customer is always right and or else it explains i think as well a growing complaint called you in higher education and the fact that students are increasingly litigious and use appeals uh to challenge marks which they don't think they deserved they want better as though they just bought a dodgy tv again it's not students fault institutions now use routinely student satisfaction surveys and student feedback forms to ask students to judge the merits of courses and lecturers the least educated people in the university and now judging the quality of that university and any lecturer with a reputation for running difficult courses or being hard a hard marker or not supplying ready-made pre-prepared lecture notes is unlikely to thrive in this consumer human consumerist orientated campus environment certainly the evidence is that students are shying away from hard subjects 70 university science departments have closed or been restructured over the last seven years if if academics are student service providers then of course it's not their job to question or criticize the tastes values or opinions of potential customers but actually academics should be in the business of educating their students taste of encouraging to question their values and challenging their opinions indeed one of the most distinct and significant dimensions of academic pedagogy in an act intellectual activity is precisely that this customer is not always right in this new world where what matters is competing for students is that my one minute sir just a minute i've got a minute thank you no repetition i couldn't resist in this new world where what matters is competing for students and keeping them satisfied any degrees that attract students can pass muster regardless of their intellectual merit i know a new labor type you argue against my dumbing down these this boasts that larger numbers are studying music no the conservators trials aren't bursting to the seams with state pupils studying classical music he means there's been explosion of popular musical degrees you can now get a degree in e-music on podcasting youtube and itunes coventry university apply now southampton solents university's new degree in standup comedy might sound like a joke but actually because it's attracting lots of students it must be okay and shockingly even anti-rational quackery the antithesis of reason is now acceptable in the ivory towers there are now 42 degree courses in complementary medicine i'll make my final point if you don't go to university it's not a disaster but it is disastrous if more and more people go to universities where they're unable to distinguish quantity from quality of course it's not happening everywhere oxbridge is okay but what's on offer to the majority the many the many is dumb down third rate rubbish vote for the motion thank you very much [Applause] yeah thank you to oppose the merchant uh we have onora o'neal for nine minutes [Music] why would anyone think that too many people go to university that's the task i set myself why do they think it i suspect because they hang on to a cozy obsolescent view of what universities are are for go back 50 years they were mainly for those of us who really loved reading and studying there were lots of ways into professions and top jobs where you didn't need to go near a university lawyers didn't need degrees accountants didn't successful business people certainly didn't the pupils of illustrious schools maintained and independent didn't send all their pupils to university if universities were still what they were 50 years ago then of course it's quite plausible that too many people are going there but these are different institutions and nobody should be taken in by the continuity of the word people go to them for good reasons and one is to enter professions and management and get a good job and there are vast changes in our economy that make this a very big enterprise figures are not usually part of debates but i thought if we're to get real you need to know just a little bit the number of he enrollments in the united kingdom and the figures 404 5 and 056 are now available 2.3 million up to that's five six up two percent from oh four five a million of them are part time forty five percent are doing science subjects science is rather generously interpreted so nursing will come out as science and some other things there's an incre huge increase and it's continuing so why are people against it well one thing is some people think that's competition i don't like competition it will make it harder to enter professions walks of life i like too much competition for top jobs isn't a happy thought if one aspires to one but it's just nothing new when few of us went to university there were many fewer such jobs it was still hugely competitive and trying to choke off the competition by limiting the places is probably not a particularly attractive let alone popular move other thought people have is not that it's too much competition for me but that too many of those who go to university think are leaving it unqualified for any job top or other well i think there's several points to be made some of them even if they're not well qualified might be more educated three years of study never was a serious meal ticket and most professional jobs of course require additional qualification skills and entry was and it's going to be competitive now is the good evidence of unemployable graduates not very good at present one would expect a system in which jobs are not centrally allocated to have bits of over and under supply and that the less competent would be shown up and they'd fail their degrees or fail to get the sort of employment they really want one it would expect university courses to spread out the talent if some people are going to be really really successful others will be less so that happens but unemployable graduates on a mass scale is not the evidence we have another thought you might have which might make you in favor of the motion is you might think oh well it's all at the expense of real skills that's code for something what people may be worried about may not be that their own prospects are less rosy in a mass age or their children's prospects but that we aren't getting training enough people in technical skills not enough plumbers not enough competence in foreign languages not enough numeracy true all of it true but it isn't because the people who have refused to gover plumbing are languishing in the universities it is because too many leave school wholly unqualified don't stay after 16 take those famous undemanding options at secondary school and are heavily incentivized to avoid skills we need to do better the number of unskilled jobs likely to fall fast in a global economy but we really wouldn't uh do ourselves a good turn by reducing the university intake we need to persuade people who give up long before university looms to take themselves and their futures more seriously the fe bill now before parliament does address some of these issues whether successfully i'm not sure then there's the thought which is again a public spirited thought the trouble is there are sub-standard degrees and this is probably true although many who say this do no more than gesture at a university or subject that they suspect of sin it's almost certainly true because the he sector is huge and although it is closely inspected and assessed the inspection is often too formal and the content that isn't uh taken seriously enough and of course we know that the applicants haven't always been well taught and we know that the examination system a levels for example are not really any longer fit for purpose so to anyone who says there's a great deal that is substandard i suggest look for the evidence try to quantify the evidence look at the amount of failure but don't start out from a false premise that the system is trying to be an inflated version of what we had 50 years back and if anyone says well nevertheless even if it is something different failure should be eliminated and inadequacy is intolerable i would say get real consider the amount of the system size of the system consider whether it would be possible to run such a system into entirely adequate standards another thought people have is well given what's happened to the system the degree isn't value for money for the student this is rather a popular complaint now because when we got the so-called top-up fees by which students contribute a bit of the cost of their degrees retrospectively some people started to say well students have become customers i think that's ludicrous when someone else pays most of the tab one doesn't think one's really a customer the new fees are very modest they don't cover the cost of the degree they don't cover the cost of some degrees by a really long way payment is postponed until after graduation even then it's income contingent interest rates are zero in real terms if you earn very little the loan's eventually forgiven can anyone think of a better bargain a more serious thought might be well it's a jolly good bargain for the students but it's a lousy bargain for the taxpayer the taxpayers are still contributing a huge cost of everyone's degree however much they're going to earn however much their parents do earn and we can all think of degrees that we'd be awfully keen not to subsidize but would you be prepared to argue for a differential subsidy for different sorts of degrees that may happen finally what about the 50 target yes the target is absurd but the reason it's absurd is that setting targets for things you don't manage and can't control is absurd going to university is something people choose to do to do this subject that subject and so on the target culture past its prime but dying slowly pretends that these things are centrally managed so universities are greatly afflicted with bizarre targets but remember scotland is past 50 already are they really so much brighter than those who live down here england is far below it still and nobody's going to be sure whether the target's met because it's a target for 18 to 30 year olds how do you measure it perhaps that was the one intelligent bit of this target so i would urge everybody to get real and vote against the motion [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the next speaker for the motion is german nicholas if you look at your song sheet you will find she's described simply as a pupil of symbols girls school um to be a little more adequate uh what she would like to do before she becomes prime minister is to edit the guardian um jenna [Applause] [Music] [Applause] good evening ladies and gentlemen fellow panel members chairman when i was asked to participate in this debate at such a historic venue and with such prestigious panel members i turn to my prime source of inspiration lewis carroll's alice in wonderland you may remember a point in the book where everyone is running madly in all directions at one point dodo calls out the race is over and they all crowd round him panting and asking but who has won the dodo sits for a long time with a finger pressed against his forehead trying to find an answer at last he says everybody has one and all must have prizes like the dodo tony blair's clarion call of education education education taps into the same philosophy that all must have prizes also the title of a book by melanie phillips on education this evening i would like to support the proposition that too many people go to university with three main points firstly government targets on entrance into university are merely a numbers game destroying the meaning and integrity of education secondly many students in university will be better suited to vocational training and thirdly too many graduates are entering the workforce without being able to find employment so to my first point government targets on entrance into university have become merely a numbers game a long long time ago in the 1960s going to university was reserved for a privileged academic elite drawn from approximately 30 percent of school leavers they entered into one of only 30 universities then available these students were literate and numerate and grammatical errors were the exception rather than the rule quite the country today we live in a post-modernist culture where subjectivism has taken the place of academic rigor and systematic teaching the me culture as it has been named has taken over we are working towards a government inclusiveness policy to get 50 of school leavers by 2010 into one of over 200 institutions now offering degree courses the problem is as a report by oxford university and newcast revealed freshman students have such poor skills that some courses are having to be extended by a whole year to redress the gaps in basic education in the name of egalitarianism and to make statistics look good all sorts of measures have been introduced a levels are too difficult no problem make them easier universities are elitist solution bringing a higher quality of students from state schools inadequate basic english and math skills no problem the universities will teach them inadequate learning skills and general knowledge easy lower the standard of university degrees to return to alice in wonderland give everyone prizes whether or not they merit them the emphasis on quantity rather than quality covers up the basic failure of the education policy it is in fact an exercise in deception to my second point many students in universities will be better suited to vocational training professors and business owners alike complain about the quality of university students and graduates we should perhaps therefore question the wisdom of packing ever more students into these institutions after all what is the point of university degrees such as surf and beach management tourism and golf course management what is the point of granting polytechnics the right to award degrees perhaps we should rethink our education policy entirely why not look to our continental neighbours in germany and switzerland as well as having trains that run on time children are separated at the age of 11 or 14. at this point they have the option of choosing a high quality vocational training program this is backed by government and industry with maximum flexibility to allow students to move from one pathway to another the academies introduced by the blair government are a step in the right direction but are still limited in their scope we shouldn't have to rely on eastern europeans for our plumbers and electricians what is so important about going to university anyway mr blair says that we must invest in human capital to survive in the global economy but alison wolfe professor of education at king's college london argues that university degrees are not necessary for economic growth she says switzerland is one of the richest economies in europe and yet has one of the lowest number of graduates and incidentally the highest number of cows there are after all many examples of successful millionaires who left school at the age of 16 richard branson and alan sugar to name just two to my final point too many graduates are entering the workforce without being able to find employment three possible reasons for this are firstly the number of university students around 2.5 million has risen by almost 50 percent over the past decade this inevitably means that competition for jobs requiring graduates is enormous and unemployment amongst them high secondly many graduates are a disappointment to employers a report published last year by the association of graduate recruiters found that almost half of the top 200 employers were disappointed by the caliber of these candidates and thirdly graduate skills are not what all employers are looking for philip green chairman of arcadia for example will prefer to employ 16 year olds he has found them easier to train than graduate students he says you don't have to have qualifications to have common sense this view is echoed by the owner of a large retail chain in the audience this evening i won't embarrass him by mentioning his name to conclude if england is to maintain its well-deserved reputation for providing excellent universities of a high standard it must not let numerical targets get in the way of those high standards we must crack down on the destructive assumption that a university degree is the only qualification that matters and invests significantly in vocational and apprenticeship training as a distinct alternative to achievement and pride in this way all will have prizes but the prize will match the talent capacity and skill of that person and will not be devalued to fit the philosophy i therefore urge you to support the proposition that too many people go to university thank you the second speaker against the motion is equally a student at saint paul's her name is cece marco giannis and when she leaves education the likelihood after being prime minister is that she will edit the times cece [Applause] [Music] [Applause] chairman ladies and gentlemen tonight i'm here to explain why it is that there are not too many people going to university and why we actually need more students emerging with degrees benjamin israeli once told the house of commons a university should be a place of light of liberty and of learning and although some may discuss whether all of today's universities match that description the university remains a vitally important symbol of civilization furthering knowledge educating and providing a vital stage in citizens lives they can learn enough to keep them thinking long after they graduate i will argue that we need more people going to university for three key reasons firstly because university gives individuals a chance to improve themselves secondly by improving individuals university creates improvements in society and economy but perhaps most importantly because knowledge and entertainment of knowledge should be valued by and for themselves i do not believe that the proposition would want to argue that no one should attend university or at all universities should be resolved and abolished like the monetary is under henry viii so in essence this debate is a numbers game aimed to discover if universities should be rationed whether we in britain can afford students and whether or not we need lots of educated people so just before i leap into the core of my argument i'd like to pose a question at what point would there be too many people going to university really for there to be too many we would need to be at a stage where university no longer better individuals or society and conversely caused more of a negative effect than a positive one society would have to be ridden with flexibly trained people the extent that it was oversaturated people would have to be too perfectly informed an understanding of the society in which they live we would have to live in a country where millions of educated people were stranded on oxford street holding cardboard banners reading will translate latin for pennies or will demonstrate complex mathematical proofs in exchange for sandwiches and we're not there yet a holder of a university degree and significantly more on average than a similar individual with two or more a levels and these higher earnings bring significant economic benefits not only in the higher taxes they pay but also in the jobs they create for others so with the numbers of celebrity big brother viewers rivaling native educated citizens i think it would be safe to say that we can afford a slightly more intellectual society there is still room for improvement and [Music] and room for those who value a degree going back to that word improvement it sounds very new labor actually it is very much what britain has been working towards since the start of the 20th century and it leads me onto my first key point university gives individuals a chance to improve themselves because university offers the chance for a better life and a more fulfilled one every person of every ability level deserves opportunity should they choose it to attend a university they should have a right to it we should not be trying to curb the education of the masses but conversely should be actively motivated in trying to ensure that everyone reaches as far as they can it is undeniable this country's class-dominated history has wasted great talent in the past through discrimination it was only relatively recently that the other 50 percent women were given the chance to really prove themselves since the suffragettes fight for political quality we've seen incredible achievements by women benefiting from education leaders of countries such as chile india germany argentina britain not to mention all the great writers scientists and business women education has made that possible also it was not so long ago that it would have been unthinkable for the child of working class parents to enter higher education and reach his or her full potential education has made this possible for the individual university is the surest route for upward mobility in order to promise the possibility of a better life there can never be too many individuals going to university socrates once said and we shall begin by educating mind and character shall we not for the development of a whole person it comes not just from knowledge but from experience and the chance to be inspired by elders and peers the chance to be integrated into the community of university also teaches students valuable life lessons at a time when the community building roles of the church and military haven't really been replaced university can be seen as a transitional portal between a sheltered family life centered on the individual's instinctive needs and that individual taking their place as a full member of a wider society who takes responsibility and recognizes the consequences of his or her actions the late howard bowen former president of the state university of iowa and an authority on university education speaks in his thesis the investment of learning of universities as kind of industry within themselves the input being malleable willing students and the output being an informed individual ready to take their place within society and this leads me onto my second key point by improving individuals university creates improvements in society and economy important as the individuals benefits from university may be when looking at the wider picture the progress of individuals is progress for society both their economic value and their understanding of social practice a u.s study has shown that among nearly 2 600 people between the ages of 18 and 30 the lowest concentration of active voters occurred amongst those who had never attended higher education they should not be surprising given the privilege of living in a democratic country people should be allowed the means to fully utilize the influence they have over how the taxes are spent and this can only happen through education as school virgil noted half of the american people have never read newspaper half never vote for president one hopes is the same half [Applause] now we are also needing of university educated assistance not just for the sake of society but also for the sake of our economy some journalists and commentators have suggested that this is untrue but if you think rationally it is clear that the future will reward countries with an educated workforce by 2012 it has been estimated 50 percent of positions are most likely to demand university graduates although labour may be backing down on its ambitious gold 50 university rate the fact still remains that we need educated workers a few other countries have already reached a 50 university attendance rating and we're only at 43 percent university ready the next generation and when times and industries change rapidly we need to make like girl scouts and always be prepared the best bet to be prepared is to have a flexible workforce chameleon-like and its adaptability to changing circumstances and university education gives individuals that flexibility in case anyone fail to notice the world is changing we're leaving behind an industrial economy and progressing into the service and knowledge economies and size is catching up with us we can't expect to compete with countries on the scale of india and china in the assembly businesses if we're not careful we won't be able to compete in any business leaving educated staff either we're no longer the world's leaders in education we're not the world leaders in much anymore really and for the simple reason of size and numbers the numbers game doesn't work too well for us britain is a small country compared to india or china and will be lost if we don't realize that we too must develop instead of resting on the laurels of our past successes investing in the future means seriously investing in the people who run it the students of today be it feasible grants seem that there is no better investment and the only problem that i see is not enough money being put in not too many students now i'll come to my final point and the point that i feel is most important that university encourages the kind of knowledge value in society we want and that learning in itself should be raised on a higher pedestal than it is at currently even forgetting the future and the real-time benefits of university let's look to the past and the present i'm glad that socrates wasn't alive to hear pink floyd we don't need no education because we do we really do education gives us so much i'm glad that socrates isn't here now to witness the truly shameful position that knowledge holds in the priority pyramids of the masses crammed under the pile um of reality tv shopping money even success falls into that category sure a graduate's degree can get you the credentials for a great job get you a nice house a nice life help society help the economy all good things of course but it will also offer a currency that no one can deny you wisdom and knowledge and there is no greater thing than to learn for knowledge is power according to socrates himself the only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance so to get universities affected on the economy and on society if you wish just remember that university need not simply be a means to an end it can and should be a place of light of liberty and of learning today it would be a huge mistake deny a single person of the right to university if they wish to be given the chance so because university still has a lot to give everyone i beg you to oppose the motion too many people go into university thank you [Applause] the third and final speaker for the motion is anton konecki it's a very times oriented second half of the program but we welcome you for nine minutes [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well uh that last speech is a very hard act to follow i think you'll all agree uh but it's particularly hard i think for me to follow because i've got to make a confession which is that i disagree with my colleagues on the right hand side uh i disagree with for claire fox in the sense that i do have a rose tinted view of universities i'm quite in favor of social engineering and i'm not really all that much against dumbing down after all i do work for the times in tabloid form [Applause] [Music] and what's more than that i i have a little secondary career uh which is explaining economics to hedge fund managers so i can't say i've got anything against dumbing down on the other hand listening to this side of the table i've got to say uh that like baroness o'neill and even more eloquently cece i really do believe that knowledge should be valued in and of itself i like to live in an intellectual even a socratic society and actually also i think that everybody should have prizes like the dodo so what am i doing arguing on that side of the debate well normally i would be able to give a very simple answer which would be as i'm an economist after all which would be to say well that side paid me more than this site but i can't do that today because we all know this evening is for the benefit of saint paul's girls school uh so let me try and come up with some more cogent arguments well starting with uh some numbers as i say as an economist in 1900 when clement and i were just young children one percent of the population went to university by 1950 the percentage was up to three percent in britain by 1967 by the mid 90s 30 percent 40 percent now and by 2010 we have a target of of 50 now if any of you who know about economics financial markets and so on if you see a chart rising and then accelerating at this uh stratospheric economic exponential rate the first thing you do is start asking some questions the second is you put a good hand on your wallet because you feel you your one's instinct is to believe that there must be something wrong and excessive and speculative going on particularly when you look around the world and you you see as has already been mentioned that the rate of university graduates is now much higher in britain than it is not only switzerland but in germany france italy even sweden in america it's true that they send slightly more people into tertiary education but their system is clearly divided between four-year academic colleges like our universities and two-year community colleges which have no pretensions at all of offering academic-style degrees so does it make sense to have the 40 percent that we now have going to university and even more emphatically i would question this 50 percent target now the obvious question to ask as i say as an economist is is it wasteful well probably it is but actually who cares surely it is worth while giving people the opportunity to enjoy the university experience to uh sample the socratic intellectualism that we've talked about not to mention three years of sex drugs and rock and roll uh i'm all in favor of that and as a taxpayer i'm actually quite willing to pay for it my worry for others as well as for myself and my children my worry is not that these universities are wasteful but that actually it this rate of university expansion could be positively harmful both to the students and to society at large and what i'm going to do is just briefly talk about four potential harms that i think in fourth categories to the students themselves to the economy more broadly to universities and then to society as a whole well starting with students themselves dropout and failure rates are now as high as 30 percent in many new universities and former polytechnics now we have many complaints and i think we've heard we've heard already in this debate about the money wasted on university fees by dissolution students which are substantial sums now but these losses are a fraction of the real costs of are going to university for students who then don't graduate or who find that they're wasting the time the real cost consists of course not just of the fees but of the income and the time that they have forgone over three two or three years and that's usually at least 10 times what the fees cost them after all even a non-university graduate can expect to earn round about 20 000 pounds a year so a three-year university course potentially costs them 60 000 pounds even more importantly the personal discouragement that is suffered uh which is almost impossible to calculate by people who go to university and find that what they're doing there doesn't suit them worst of all is that universities can deflect people from occupations and lifestyles that actually suit them and they would find interesting and rewarding sports shopkeeping plumbing and divert them into activities which are often pointless and not rewarding at all for example sports sciences retail psychotherapy and human waste logistics that one i made up i've got to make those but if you think about it that's what plumbing is from an act from a from an academic standpoint so the students themselves not all not the majority but a significant number of students themselves i think are harmed by going to university not to mention the anti-intellectual attitudes that actually that will generate in those who go to university and find that it's completely unsuitable for them and has not prepared them for the lives that they're seeking next what does it do to the economy to potential employers and to the customers to to the people so to the consumers so people on both sides of the economy well university has become a system of sifting rather than education now that's actually nothing new in fact even when i was at university uh my tutor told me uh you know just just um after i'd done my third year uh my final exams uh before i got my results he said well don't you realize i said well you know have i been educated adequately have you done enough to teach me uh to get a decent degree and he said don't you realize you're not here to be taught you're here to be sifted and i think that was always true but the problem is that when you get to a sifting point of 40 or 50 percent what you are doing is is sifting people on the basis of high level analytical skills or numerical analysis which is simply inappropriate for deciding uh the 40 percent of the population who have to go or who who most of whom will will go into occupations that don't take advantage of those skills whether it's retail management fire fighting or even social work police army officers it's not clear that they need the kind of academic skills that universities are designed to teach moreover there's a serious risk of the creation of over of an over qualification syndrome it's actually made it harder for our society to train nurses primary teachers veterinarians sports coaches personal trainers increasingly even plumbers and gardeners that has all been made more difficult by the creation of these new tiers of skills it's been estimated by alison wolfe who's already been quoted that between 25 and 30 percent of the jobs that are now confined by law to graduates only have have experienced no changes at all in the level of academic skills required to do them there's been this proliferation of qualifications uh two years ago you may even have read the story about the headmaster of westminster who is not allowed on his retirement who is a mathematics teacher through for 40 years career at westminster who was not allowed after his retirement to teach mathematics in a comprehensive school when he felt he wanted to give something back to society because he didn't have the appropriate bed qualifications and many of the skills that are in shorter supply in our society today are actually non-intellectual which isn't to say that the people doing them are stupid or are likely to be underpaid in america the occupational category uh as defined by the department of employment in a survey done about two years ago which they reckoned had the best employment prospects and the highest income growth potential over the next 15 years was personal training plumbing gardening catering elderly care all these are increasingly important occupations but they don't necessarily benefit from book learning uh sorry i've i've run out of times you can see i didn't go to a school for rhetoric either my third point was which i'll be very brief about is that universities themselves have also suffered from the mass production mentality from the decline in academic salaries as obviously facilities have had to be expanded to deal with larger numbers but frankly i think that's the argument one hears most of and i care least about because we're not here to uh create more privileges for university teachers the fourth and most important of my argument for which i have no time but i'm going to encroach anyway is what it's done for education and society first of all there's the diversion of resources to university teaching from the rest of the of the educational system the fact is that the real failures of britain's british education have not been in universities not even in the grammars and comprehensive they're in the education of the bottom 10 or 20 percent of the population the underclass and these are precisely the people who are becoming ever more disillusioned than even feral as the education system increasingly abandons them and the opportunities for manufacturing manual non-academic kind of labor dwindle now this is bad enough when you've got 40 going to university but what will happen when 50 percent go what symbol i think the symbolism of this is crucial when more than half the when when more than half the population as at present attempt the universe attend the university of life instead of oxford they can regard themselves as the normal success successful respectable middle while the academic minority is a small subgroup of society albeit a privileged one but once the academic minority becomes a majority what signal does this send that there are that those who do not go to university are social rejects and failure that they are a minority oppressed by the privileged upper class nothing could be more divisive more damaging to social cohesion and destruction of human initiative and talent human enterprise and talent are infinitely varied trying to squeeze half the population into a straight jacket of arbitrary academic uh education is the surest way of destroying this infinite diversity of talent enterprise and hope thank you very much [Applause] the final speaker against the motion marianne seaguard [Music] thank you let's start with a very quick experiment can i please ask you to put your hand up either if you didn't go to college or university and you don't regret it a bit or if you're of school age and you're sure that you don't want to go to university or any other college thank you well as i suspected a very very small minority of this audience and the rest of you know about the great benefits that you got from going to university or if you're still at school you look forward to them and who are we to deprive anyone else of that benefit as long as they have the ability to gain from it now my oldest in both centers of the word friend bill deeds is still at the venerable age of 93 saw about the fact that the crash of 1929 bankrupted his father and deprived him of the chance of a university education only the other day he told me about going to a job interview at the times when he was a young man which college were you at was the first question put to him by the interviewer who was used to being surrounded only by oxbridge alumni poor bill slunk out of the room luckily the daily telegraph wasn't so intellectually snobbish and has had the benefit of bill's wonderful writing for the last 75 years but the times still expects its graduate trainees to have won a first-class degree from a first-class university and our workplace is just a microcosm of the wider economy jobs that used to be filled by school leavers have become more demanding and now call for graduates an airplane that used to be able to be mended with a screwdriver and a spanner now has highly complex systems and technology that can be mastered only by a technician with an engineering degree our economy is changing fast it needs higher level skills than it used to if our schools and universities don't produce enough highly skilled people we're all going to lose out there are fewer and fewer unskilled jobs these days and fewer manual jobs as our manufacturing industries are overtaken by lower-cost competitors like china in today's globalized world a high-wage country like britain can compete only if it has a highly educated workforce doing challenging jobs now i find it odd that we're even treating this as a contentious issue look at the most economically successful nations of the past decade ireland india and china what do they have in common a highly educated workforce we may be increasing the proportion of people who go to university but we're not doing it nearly as fast as our competitors a recent oecd study found that the uk was slipping fast down the league table which measured the percentage of people getting degrees in 2000 we were second by 2003 we were eight between 95 and 2003 our participation in higher education rose by 20 and the rest of the oecd the average rise was 38 in other words we're increasing participation at university only half as fast as our competitors are if anything we're being left behind now you might say that universities are teaching the wrong things as some of our opponents have said and you might be right in fact the opponents of this argument tend to use just two words and then sit back and smirk golf studies they say but actually very few people do a degree in gulf studies and of those who do all of them get jobs in our in our aging and increasingly prosperous and bourgeois society there is more money to spend on golf and leisure and more demand for intelligent people to run these leisure facilities learning how to run a successful golf course and its associated businesses is just like doing the first half of an mba with a particular emphasis on one section of the leisure industry actually we ought to be offering more vocational degrees what are often known as foundation degrees like the community colleges in the us do for it's here that the biggest skills gap exists these two-year degrees won't have the same cachet as the full three-year honours degree and that's quite right they're doing a different job we need to keep our centers of excellence our oxfords and cambridges and london's but for the bottom third of students we should redesign what is a rather clunking 20th century model of university education to offer degrees that are shorter cheaper more flexible and closer to home so yes i agree with claire that universities need reforming but that's not the same as saying that too many people go to them in fact there are two cast iron measures of determining whether too many people go the rate of unemployment of graduates and the pay they get after they graduate if too many people went to university there wouldn't be enough jobs for them to enter afterwards and in fact i'm afraid to say jen is quite wrong about this graduate unemployment is minuscule it's just 2.7 which is less than half the non-graduate rate of unemployment and if too many people went to university their salaries after graduation wouldn't be high enough to compensate them for the costs of three years study in fact the premium earned by graduates over what a non-graduate would expect to earn is well over a hundred thousand pounds and it's the highest in the oecd particularly for women poor liners please note what's more now that people have to pay out for their own higher education we can easily measure whether they feel it's worth it why would you spend 9 thousand pounds on fees plus another fifteen or twenty thousand pounds on living expenses if you didn't think you could more than recoup that some in higher earnings and these decisions are not just being made by eighteen-year-olds a million undergraduates about 40 percent of the total a mature student studying part-time they must have calculated that a degree is worth their while or they wouldn't be doing it or paying for it and if all this sounds rather dryly economic and materialistic then let's look at the more human benefits of more people going to university those of you who've been yourselves will know that university broadens the mind education for education's sake as cece said is it worthwhile good in itself it's good for society too surveys show that graduates tend to be more involved in society they volunteer more they're more socially liberal and they're more tolerant so if we hate what's been going on on celebrity brig brother we should support more people going to university and on top of that university graduates are in general happier and healthier they live longer they're less of a burden on the nhs what's not to like and if we want this for ourselves and for our children which we all do then we shouldn't pull up the drawbridge to less deprived sorry more deprived but just as intelligent children at the moment universities are a middle class enclave 75 of 18 year olds from the top three social classes go and only 15 of the bottom two now you may believe the iq distribution is skewed towards the top end but it can't be that skewed if we want more bright but poor children to have the leg up that university offers we have two choices either our children have to make way for them no thanks or we expand the university intake to provide places for them i know which option i'd prefer and if you believe that too many people go to university as the opposition claim you've got to be prepared for entry to become much more competitive with the chance that your own children will lose out so to sum up university education is good for the economy in fact it's absolutely necessary for the economy it's good for the people who go and expansion of the numbers creates a fairer and more meritocratic society but best of all it's a civilizing influence on society we should have more of it not less if you would vote for shil pachetti rather than jade goody you should vote against the motion [Applause] thank you very much on arrival you were asked to imply how you would vote before you had the debate and the result of the roughly 800 people who were here was that 458 were for the motion too many people go to university 144 were against and 120 didn't know but i'm pretty sure we'll know now um we are going to have questions which can be either directed to individuals of this top table the table which is wonderfully comprehensive in having an age range of 65 years between the eldest and the youngest which is unusual although as as you say um age is unimportant i mean my my favorite proposal used to be will you come upstairs and make love to me and now i have to say one or the other i would like to ask people when they put their questions to preface their questions with whether or not they have been to university so perhaps when you wave and somebody with a microphone will come along and let you speak you will begin by stating your name and saying been or not been the being being university uh our microphone ladies ready yeah change sex but ready um questions sir blue church in the middle hang on a moment until my friend gets to thank you my name is dante malegrino and i'm italian i've not only been at university i've also got a phd so my question is for people in favor of the motion now you've mentioned quite a few times people doing doing low-skilled jobs like people from eastern europe and so on uh how do you what's your comment about people like myself who are clearly not great and come to england because there is a there's a need for people with high qualification graduate people to do these type of jobs would you represent this i'm happy to take it um our education secondary and university is very defective particularly in uh the teaching of uh foreign languages consequently we have to do a lot of importing the european union is fantastic because it makes it easy to do this but it's a bit shaming yes i think i think the question i i think he agrees with you anyways i think the question was directed to us uh i think uh the the i think the the fact that britain brings in all these people uh is simply a reflection of the uh wide distribution of talent around the world and uh however good our education system is and actually at the top at the elite level it is extremely good still by uh but by any standard certainly compared with the university system in the rest of europe according to the you know most of the league tables of uh international universities there are only three universities in europe that are graded within the top 20 and they're all in britain uh but however good our education system is we are not going to find and train the most brilliant people in the world most of the most brilliant people in the world live in the rest of the world we're only two percent of the population and so if we have an economy and particularly a business community particularly financial community that's open to that that's uh that increases its strength so i don't think it reflects on the education system yeah most europe most european plumbers i uh east european plumbers and builders i know have got phds and the thing that's uh fascinating is they're treated like dirt as immigrants which is terrible and uh and end up taking uh um those kind of jobs in some instances but i just wanted to say something about this increasing tenancy in in some of the contributions which is that there are people who are naturally uh the type of people who should do vocational courses and we all know who we mean right and i just think who do you mean i mean the idea that 11 or 12 or 13 or 14 you can decide that somebody is going to be a vocational type effectively means abandoning educating them and what i would suggest is that we should educate people in good faith for as long as possible and what's happening is that you're going to university now and not getting that education you're actually getting vocational skills training and that is not education all plumbers should be educated as well as any philosopher everybody deserves a decent education but they're just not getting it just because they're going to university we shouldn't be conned [Music] uh do we have a microphone upset hello another question we'll have it in the aisle here who would like to be the next one after this get a microphone to the work yes i was selfishly going to ask anatole calendar yes i was going to ask anatoletsky to give us the benefit of the censored bit that he was unable to deliver before because i enjoyed it a great deal and i wanted to hear more about it wait for my summing up back hello uh graham archer um yes university far too long i'm another one of these unpopular phds everyone hates people with phds i don't know why i'm completely in favor of the motion i thought claire fox in particular was fantastic and as a statistician it strikes me that it's difficult to be in faith against the motion and not willfully wish to decrease the quality of the further education if you accept that there's a natural variation in people's ability in any particular discipline and you increase the number of people who are being admitted to study that discipline i don't think you need induction i think it's fairly deductively obvious that you're going to have to decrease the standards of the education that you give them otherwise you have to accept that everyone's getting bright and brighter all the time and i just don't just very quickly miss seeker asked us to put our hand off if we didn't have an education and my partner keith here was one of the very few people who had the honesty of the nerve to put us outside of university education he then said um we need people with qualifications from universities to do things like bm engineers for aircraft and stuff keith's a very brilliant engineer and he learned how to do that through 16 years in the royal air force i don't think that three years at the university of north london studying whatever would have made him a better engineer nor do i think we could have been better as a society had he done soon [Applause] uh good evening chairman and very distinguished members of the panel now no one could attract me or my applause no one i'm no fan but i i take my hat off to all of you and particularly uh you know this wonderful creature claire fox and i really mean that sincerely i ain't no fan let me ventilate this for you could we have your question this it's so simple thank you chairman you'll get it very decidedly um right now here and now let me tell you to your face i had the misfortune to be at cambridge what an ordeal and when i was living in the albany chambers up the road here with my mother and that hideous note dropped through the door saying that i'd want a place at cambridge my edward edwardian grandmother said there's only one thing to do with it tear it up in a thousand pieces which we did but i fortuned to be at cambridge and during the time that uh the little pigeon-toed snake who the cambridge uh lord snowden and lord owen and they and i'm telling you now education is only for the few and hey definitely not and as mighty tongue said to these proud academics grab a hoe and till a little bit of the soil that's what they should be doing the next question [Applause] as long as it's not contagious my name is i did go to you in a manner um my question originated at the opponents of the motion um there's a lot of talk about skill and what people would learn and be up what they learned at university what my question is aren't there other places where people can learn an awful lot does it have to be university uh no it can be either at um further education colleges or at university but these new two-year foundation degrees vocational degrees are actually um very good for equipping people with the sort of level of skills that our economy needs these days and um you know claire says oh we shouldn't be teaching vocational skills at university how snobbish is that why shouldn't we [Applause] i'm a member i'm a graduate of the open university and i would like to know what the panel thinks about distance education and its value and what they think about it please thank you who would like to answer this nobody i will think i think the open apparently is the most wonderful institution i'm i'm a great fan of the open university as well but the only thing that i would say is that a lot of uh university teaching now is quite distant and because actually um [Music] first of all everybody's kind of into teaching via um new technology and so there's this idea that you kind of don't have to have face-to-face contact on the one hand and there's kind of a big fuss about um how you don't actually need to new ways of learning and so on that's not to get at the open university um but i just think that we should bear in mind that the open university itself has started to go down a rather illiberal route and are talking about being business facing teaching skills and so on so even the wonderful open university i'm afraid has fallen for the recent orthodoxies um we'll have a question over here now hello yes thank you um i've been to four different universities i'm an ex-secondary teacher and i also now teach in higher education and i wonder whether the question shouldn't be about the inflation of qualifications and whether the motion shouldn't be is university any longer enough because certainly in the postgraduate sector it's no longer enough to have one degree and in many occupations you need a degree a master's level degree and then further qualification and study after that and i wonder whether either side of the panel might comment on that that's a good point anybody well i i think actually that's a symptom of the uh widening of universities that we've been talking about i mean the fact that a first degree no longer qualifies you for an academic or in fact even a scholastic teaching profession i think is an indication of how the what a first degree is per se has been diluted it doesn't mean that all first degrees have been diluted i think the degrees of the elite universities are still probably as demanding as ever uh but it does mean that a universe a degree in human waste logistics as i was talking about is not the same as a degree in classics or mathematics uh hello good evening i didn't go to university and i'd like to ask the people speaking against the motion to comment on the dropout rate which is people speaking four have commented is reaching 30 certainly in some london institutions surely that is the clearest evidence that too many people are going to university i would say this the very few institutions they are mainly in london with that sort of dropout rate this is a completely anomalous one there are other universities where the dropout rate is extraordinarily low by international standards right down to one or two percent it is definitely the case that it is new universities with a higher dropout rates now does it mean that it is all without value the americans who pioneered mass higher education would say no even the person who does a year may gain a great deal from it though they don't go as far as a degree and i've known people who for all sorts of reasons often health family finance reasons didn't get to the end of a degree but would say that they got a lot so i find it hard to generalize but i think that institutions with that sort of dropout rate have got a problem and it's no good setting targets to improve it guess what that incentivizes thank you questions with some leap on their hand grab a microphone over there uh thank you uh my name is uh alan murray jones and i am a uh i am a university graduate uh from uh from australia as it happens uh i just like there are loads and loads of arguments on both sides but it's like to touch on the economic argument that uh miss seahart used uh or one of the economic arguments was that um the lifetime income of graduates will be a hundred thousand pounds higher than uh than the lifetime uh income of non-graduates on average just asked to like to ask mr kalecki if i spend ten thousand pounds on going to university and i incur additional costs of 60 000 pounds in income foregone and i do that between the ages of 18 and 20. am i better off getting another 100 000 over the next 40 years well i i i think you've answered your own question you're not uh but i i think to be fair to marianne i think the kind of calculations that she was quoting uh what i i think they they actually conclude that even taking all those factors into account uh the present value as it were of the additional income generated over a lifetime is the hundred thousand pounds i think i think you're perfectly right that if all you could get is a hundred thousand pounds in cash uh in total over a 40-year working lifetime by going to university it would be very bad value from an economic point of view although as i said i still have a rose tinted view and would say it's well worth it if uh you can enjoy the intellectual life and the sex drugs and rock and roll but uh question over there we can't hear you perhaps the microphone would be a help it would be a hell uh i went to art college not to university um but it would probably be a degree course now if you talk to a lot of graduates undergraduates who are doing art courses at university they're very bored they only have about seven or eight lectures a week and i wonder whether that might be something to do with a high dropout rate what does the panel think well i i think there's there's a degree of boredom i think now that it's not we don't want to get into the numbers game either in terms of how many hours you get there's just been a big report which sort of tries to say that the best universities teach more hours and i think that's treating university like school i think that though going to university now is boring because people aren't being intellectually challenged and in fact it's interesting that when you talk to a lot of young people today there is a real indifference about university life there's a kind of like oh it's all right it's like it's almost like is this it then is this the glittering prizes no wonder there's a kind of oh god you know it's tiresome it's boring it's routine it's banal it's contracted out it's not the exciting intellectually stimulating place of the socratic ideal that people keep talking about the only places where that exists is at a very small number of universities and what we're in danger of doing now is effectively saying well you know oxbridge and london are all right and everybody else can go for two-year foundation courses everywhere else and they'll be all right won't they so actually what we've got now is a less a much more elitist anti-meritocratic anti-egalitarian atmosphere disguising itself as anti-elitism with all the self-righteousness of people who say i want everyone to go to university but oxford and cambridge and london are all right for those special subjects for my children and everyone else can go to the dogs and it's not good enough and it's intolerable to hear people use the term uh university so promiscuously because it does nobody a favor and it's actually against the intellectualism that we would want universities to encourage [Applause] and you're next i find myself very confused as to what is meant by university both sides seem to be using it in a way that suits their case particularly those against the idea of people going to university seemed to be talking about further education as if that was university and surely there's a big distinction between university and further education not only to generalize the government what is it because the i mean i have been to university myself but i don't understand the the terms in which you're talking there's a mixture of idealism uh apparent reality a blend of statistics which we don't know exactly where they come from and one ends up very confused as i'm sure a lot of young people are today about whether they go to university or not i think the government has done his best to make everything that is not a super casino a university did you want to say i think you've rumbled the debate uh you're right that uh and uh we shouldn't spend too long disputing about terminology but what is offending a lot of people is that institutions that are not the sort of institutions they went to they want their children to go to are being called universities and that lots of institutions that have long delivered important good vocational training have been either incorporated into universities art colleges are a good example or affiliated with universities offering foundation degrees i think there's a good thought experiment if you think that fewer people should go to university how far would you like to pull the label back do you want the label to go to two percent of institutions that tertiary institutions so that post-school institutions and your own children probably won't get there five percent 15 just see how far feels attractive to you how far feels safe uh thank you we'll have one question from upstairs then we'll come to you thanks um i'm claire jackson i also went to art college and i just want to comment on what claire fox was saying about the lack of rigor in universities i i know an awful lot of students undergraduates i work in education fully supporting the government's aim higher policy which has been tremendously successful and there is enormous rigor in the universities i have two daughters who are undergraduates they're very particular about deadlines and standards and it's grossly unfair to um dismiss the work the excellent work that's going on in our universities and i'm not just talking about london university or oxford cambridge we have many we have many excellent universities doing a superb job with very high standards thank you [Applause] my name is jeffrey lloyd i did not go to university and my question is directed primarily to the proposes of the motion implicit in the motion is the idea of going to university at the age of 18. i wonder if those supporting the motion would modify their views if it were possible to enable many more people to go to university when they're older when perhaps they were more mature and have gained some experience in the world of work [Applause] uh one more question yes over here hello i i didn't go to university but i'm an employer and i would like to ask marianne segut what she would say to a graduate who goes to a second or third class university and comes out with a second or third class degree and who can't find a job what would you say to him or her about their expectations well i think i think you'll find that very very few of them are in that situation actually as i said it's only 2.7 and personally i still think they will have benefited from the three years education they'll have had at that university well i should think it's extremely likely they will end up with a better job than they would have had had they had they gone into work straight from school thank you um we we are now 12 minutes away from the end of the debate and each person this top table i'm sorry it's too late we'll do a one minute or two minutes summing up um i think we will do it in the opposite order to which we began one of the uh questioners down there was kind enough to uh ask what else i might have said if i had a few more minutes uh that's precisely yeah yeah precisely what i want to do uh because actually does uh touch on i think your the mys is the most important point uh in this debate which is that uh the question of uh social mobility and are we actually promoting or uh damaging social mobility uh by the decision to teach vocational skills what are i think have generally been agreed many of these are purely vocational skills in the university environment and this isn't just about plumbing when we talk about vocational skills i think a number of comments from people at art college gave a very good example a lot of people go to art college in order to learn to be artists in order to paint to do sculpture to do graphic design they don't go to art college in order to write essays about what it's like to be artists and that is the trouble with teaching art in a university environment if we intellectualize all vocational studies whether it's art or garden plumbing golf catering and so on if we demand that a waiter must get a degree in catering studies in order to become a sous chef or a chamber made must study hospitality science to have any chance of becoming a hotel manager then we're actually denying ever more opportunities to people who are less intellectual or may simply be temperamentally uninterested in theoretical learning but they may well be very good at charming customers inventing delicious sources or taking business opportunities and i think that is what we're losing by redefining vocational education in this socratic university context [Applause] [Music] nobody's suggesting that chambermaids or sous chefs should go to university they're still we're only saying that half the population should there are still half the jobs left in the economy that won't demand degrees and i'm afraid to say that whether they mean to be or not the supporters of this motion are really snobs at heart well what they're saying is oh we don't want these ghastly vocational degrees at our universities we only want philosophy at our universities well why shouldn't universities teach vocational subjects they're saying claire said oh we don't want students to be consumers perish the thought well i could they shouldn't fill in forms saying if their professors are any good or not i can remember when i was at university my tutor used to pride himself in being in giving such boring lectures that he drove everyone away by the fourth week of term so after that he simply had to turn up check the room was empty and he could go back to his rooms again well i would quite like to have been given a chance to comment on that personally and and most of all what they don't want perish to thought is more working-class people going to university because after all if they no no no i mean it if you want fewer people to go to university which is what the supporters of the nation say they want fewer people to go to university who are going to be the universities will become completely dominated by middle class children we all know that they are already now in in 1902 when the balfour act was passed the great debate in the country was where the working-class children could even benefit from secondary school now i'm afraid we're having that benefit all over that debate all over again we're pulling up the drawbridge and if you disagree with that and you don't feel that you're a snob then please vote against the motion [Applause] let me just explain that um it's too late people are voting as you speak um it's too late to get your vote back um jenna i think we must remember the point on our side we're not saying that vocational training shouldn't be allowed we're saying that universities are not the place for this vocational training to take place so it's it's in the polytechnics that we've already got rid of and also that the government targets on trying to get more and more people into university is actually destroying the education that should be given to all people and that this the education and this knowledge that we want for everyone this should be done in schools we shouldn't have to rely on people to have to go to university to get this knowledge from that yeah thank you [Applause] i think where this debate has gone slightly wrong is that it's become about choosing quality or quantity and although at present it seems that we can't have both and have a good system that works but what happens if we if we choose quality if we choose quality then we're going to be having to deny certain people of the right university and then who do we deny thank you the last time i was called a snob an elitist and accused of pulling up the drawbridge from the working class was with a bunch of people in the media who were arguing that tv is now democratized the ordinary people are now given an opportunity to be involved in tv and anyone like me who argued against it was a snob and an elitist and so on and so forth guess who those people were they were endemol they were the makers of big brother and guess what by the way they went to eaton and oxbridge right they think that what ordinary people are like or the people that they put in big brother and what ordinary people deserve is big brother they treat us with contempt ordinary people should whether and i love that you're a snobby um but sheamus chambermaid and shoe chest we don't want them to go to university i do just not to study catering and making beds but to discover to study medieval history and philosophy and anything else as arcane and as intellectually rigorous as possible and finally i'm shocked by laura o'neill who seems to imagine that all we want to do is to go back to the universities of the past i'm going to show you i want to go back to where i came from but anyway that's not the point the point is i am talking about an ideal of the university if i'm told that pragmatism means i have to choose what is facing me today that is the abandonment of the notion of an ideal and abstract ideal there is such a thing as an abstract idea of the western university we throw it out at our peril and we do a disservice to working class middle class ruling class every class and what's worse is we destroy education in the process please don't do that i don't care what way you vote this motion might be a bit of a joke but what's that the heart of it is deadly serious i don't care whether you vote for me just agree with me thank you [Applause] just remember that universities have been changing for hundreds of years and they've always included a lot of vocational work what's law what's theology they were vocational studies and engineering some people may feel uneasy about certain contemporary vacations i would myself the remedy surely is to try to draw some lines to try to distinguish things but not to say we want to pull the drawbridge up and keep you lot whoever they may be out to keep out all but two percent probably doesn't appeal to many people here possibly not even declare to keep out 30 percent well all but 30 percent seems to appeal to quite a lot of people think about it what would be the consequence of doing that do you care more for the definition of a word and which institutions are called universities well perhaps you do but if so i'm afraid we gave that pass away probably in the 1960s when there was the great expansion from which many people in this room have benefited if we don't care about the word if we care about the substance then it's about making the quality of what goes on good and if possible better and that's not done by keeping people with aspirations out [Applause] i was as i think is written on your song sheet director of the university birth of dundee and sinandrews and we had a rector is like a speaker chairman we had on one occasion a physics graduate who came to us the court of the university with a complaint he had in his final physics examination been given the question how would you gauge the height of a skyscraper using a barometer and he had said that he would attach a barometer to a piece of string take it to the top of the skyscraper and lower it when it reached the ground he would measure the in-app string and that would be the height of the skyscraper he was failed for showing a total ignorance to physics he complained to ask the court of the university on the grounds that he had been asked a question given an essentially correct answer and received no marks which were crucial to the quality of his degree and we thought he had a point and allowed him to take that question again we appointed an external examiner and when he arrived before this man he said well you've got plenty of time to think about it what's your answer he said it isn't as simple as that i have been thinking about it i could take the barometer to the top of the skyscraper and drop it and with an accurate stopwatch time the descent and bearing in mind that g equals 72 feet per second per second i could get a pretty good idea or this what you might have had in mind i could take the barometric pressure at the top of the building and then again at the bottom but on consideration what i would do would be to go to the caretaker and say [Music] and say if you will tell me the height of the skyscraper i will give you a barometer [Applause] i have before me the result of your vote you will recall that before the debate 450 458 people were in favor this number has slumped to 453 those against have increased in fact doubled 144 to 280 and three people still don't know i'm sorry about that thank you all very much for coming you

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 130,225

Keywords: Intelligence Squared, Debate, great oratory, Intelligence Squared debate, speech, top debates, best debates, most interesting debates, educational debates, intelligence2, intelligencesquared, is debate, iq2, iq2 debate, iq squared, education, university, learning, school, career, college, Clement Freud, Ceci Mourkogiannis, Claire Fox, Jenna Nicholas, Mary Ann Sieghart, Baroness Onora O'Neill, Anatole Kaletsky, mportance of education, etabedytisrevinu

Id: zyr5kk-oLFo

Length: 99min 31sec (5971 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 01 2013