I am coming to think that with all the lazy analysis in articles in 'The Guardian' newspaper that I should top reading it. Then again, it is proving to be an excellent prompt for my postings here and without that I would lose out on the contentment I get from blogging. What does strike me, though, is that I post only in the evenings and in my other spare time. The resources at my disposal are only what I can locate on the internet and the occasional newspaper. I assume (possibly wrongly, but I do not think so) that anyone writing for a national newspaper even just as a columnist has access to more research resources than me and they are paid to do it, rather than as a hobby. This is why I call the analysis 'lazy' because they simply do not bother to bring together the information necessary to produce a well-informed article or column piece.
The focus of my irritation today is an article entitled 'Students have been sold a lie' (31st January 2009) written by Decca Aitkenhead. You would assume it was an article about the fact that graduates are gaining less of an advantage from receiving a degree that university and government publicity promised. However, instead you have a very snobby article denigrating the so-called 'new' universities. Before going further, it is worthwhile exploring the different designations of UK universities, the changes in which are part of Decca's complaint.
'Ancient' universities, i.e. pre-late 19th century: the medieval ones - Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and the 'latecomers' (i.e. in the 1820s-30s), St. David's, University College London, Kings College London and Durham.
'Redbrick' universities established in the 19th century: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle (famously featured in the Channel 4 documentary series 'Redbrick') and Sheffield. The term 'redbrick' in common usage expanded in the 1960s to cover any university in a large UK city. An oddity in this category is Keele built in 1949 between the Victorian and 1960s expansions but generally now grouped with these earlier ones. Wikipedia wrongly puts it in the 'plate glass' category.
On Wikipedia I came across a term, I had never heard before: 'plate glass' universities, though apparently it was coined by Michael Beloff in 1968. These were built in the expansion of the 1960s. In my youth they were called the 'new' universities and then were lumped in with 'redbrick'. I suppose this new term is to distinguish them now from the newer 'new' universities, the post-1992 ones. Anyway this grouping includes: East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Lancaster, Sussex, Warwick and York. They were on the edge of medium-sized towns/cities but on greenfield sites, for example East Anglia is on the fringes of Norwich, Sussex close to Brighton and Warwick next to Coventry. Beloff actually neglected many other universities that came in the 1960s expansion but that which we would include in this category: Aston, Bath, Bradford, Brunel, City, Herriot-Watt, Loughborough, Reading, Salford, Southampton, Stirling, Strathclyde, Surrey, Ulster. Again they fit the pattern of the ones above, e.g., Brunel on the western edge of London, Surrey in Guildord, Aston on the edge of Birmingham and Bath, Bradford, Salford, etc. in medium-sized cities. Some universities seem to be left out of these lists, notably those making up the University of Wales.
'New' or 'Post-1992' universities. For the history of these we have to go back to the 1960s with the expansion of higher education. Alongside the universities being built at the time were polytechnics. These were also higher education institutions but with a focus on technical and vocational subjects. They were often run by local authorities, which meant that they could be seen as simply extensions to local secondary and further education. This was despite the fact that many had origins dating back to the 19th century, such as London Polytechnic, established in 1838. They tended to offer 'ordinary' (as opposed to 'honours') degrees. The application process to them was separate to that of universities and people were able to apply to 5 polytechnics and 4 universities simultaneously. Polytechnics offered degrees at all levels including to doctorate. Unlike the universities which monitored their own standards of degree awards all polytechnics were monitored by the independent Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) which ran from 1965-92. Despite this the polytechnics (in contrast to institutions named this in France) were looked down upon as un-academic and inferior. In 1992 all the polytechnics became 'new' universities, though this term was applied more broadly. Those that had been polytechnics are: Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham City, Brighton, Bournemouth, Central Lancashire, Coventry, De Montfort, East London, Glamorgan, Glasgow Caledonian, Greenwich, Hertfordshire, Huddersfield, Kingston, Leeds Metropolitan, Lincoln, Liverpool John Moores, London Metropolitan, London South Bank, Manchester Metropolitan, Middlesex, Napier, Northumbria, Nottingham Trent, Oxford Brookes, Plymouth, Sheffield Hallam, Staffordshire, Sunderland, Teeside, Thames Valley, West of England, Westminster and Wolverhampton. Others were formed from colleges (particularly art or religious colleges) and institutes: Abertay Dundee, University of the Arts, Bath Spa, Bedfordshire, Bolton, Buckinghamshire New, Canterbury Christ, Chester, Chichester, Cumbria, Derby, Edge Hill, Gloucestershire, Glyndwr, Liverpool Hope, University of Wales - Newport, Northampton, Queen Margaret, Robert Gordon, Roehampton, Southampton Solent, Swansea Metropolitan, University of Wales Institute, West of Scotland, Winchester, Worcester and York St. John. From 1992 they could all award their own degrees whereas previously they had often awarded degrees monitored by neighbouring universities.
Post-1992 the new universities have had very varied experiences, some proving very successful, others, notably Thames Valley University and London Metropolitan University (previously North London Polytechnic) facing grave problems (it did as polytechnic anyway). People tend to forget that Kingston and Westminster universities were ever new universities whereas Queen Mary, University of London gets lumped in this category despite being around since the 1880s.
Aside from these designations, the universities have grouped themselves into organisations which have become more important than which category they have put themselves into. The two most prominent groupings are the Russell Group of 'research intensive universities' including parts of the University of London (marked here [L]): Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Imperial [L], Kings College London [L], Leeds, Liverpool, London School of Economics [L], Manchester, Newcastle, University College London [L], Nottingham, Queen's University Belfast, Oxford, Sheffield, Southampton, University College London [L] and Warwick. There is also the 1994 Group which seems pretty similar in purpose ('to promote excellence in research and teaching') it also has ancients and parts of the University of London: Bath, Birkbeck, Durham, East Anglia, Essex, Exeter, Goldsmiths [L], Royal Holloway [L], Lancaster, Leicester, Loughborough, Queen Mary University of London [L], Reading, St. Andrews, School of Oriental and African Studies [L], Surrey, Sussex and York.
Now Aitkenhead whines that potential students are being mislead by the suggestion that all universities are the same. Thus, she feels that the 'very people who are being targeted by university access expansion are those with the least chance of knowing what they are getting'. This is incredibly patronising, especially as even Oxford and Cambridge have made efforts to expand their intake. The average 13-year old regularly access Wikipedia as do their parents and if I can find information about the different standings of universities, does she think that someone considering going to a university (let alone parents who will spend thousands sending their child to university) will not take just a few minutes to Google the institutions they are considering? Even if they do not do that, she seems oblivious to the discussion that goes on at the school gate or in the Years 12 and 13 common room. We are all savvy consumers and will spend even more effort looking at universities than we would buying a car, a house, an ipod or a holiday. Aitkenhead misses the fact that whilst we have moved from the elitist system last seen in the early 1990s when only 6% of 18-year olds went to university to a mass-delivery system in which over 40% go, the expansion has been minimal into the lower social classes, it has simply been among the middle classes who whereas in 1985 might have sent one of their three offspring to university now see all three going. To think that anyone from any social class goes to university without care is a false assumption. In the 1980s you wrote away for printed prospectuses nowadays you simply access the pdf copy, but the choosing has not got any less careful.
Aitkenhead feels that universities are presented as all the same, but that shows how poor a shopper she is. Of course every university presents it best side. No university is going to say that 'we are in run-down 1980s buildings'; 'you will be living out in run-down Victorian terrace that is badly maintained' though that is an experience across the university sector. Portraying the University of Oxford accurately you would have to say, 'many of the rooms are medieval, the floors slant and there is no disabled access'; 'the central library' is poorly lit and cramped; there are few computer points and every time you step out you have to tackle crowds of tourists'; try using the London School of Economics Library and finding even a desk to work and the ground floor is noisier than a railway station.
At all universities there is bad teaching and poor courses as well as good ones. Aitkenhead bemoans of the 22% drop-out rate and this shows her poor research. Has she made any effort to look back to the 1980s or 1960s? Even then some courses were losing 30-40% of their students. Some universities such as Bristol were renowned in the 1980s for setting first term exams so hard that 10% of the students were removed before Christmas. She entirely neglects the fact that with 40% of 18-year olds going to university many more with mental health and other challenges are now arriving at university and finding it difficult to continue.
The thing that Aitkenhead seems to feel are only the problems of post-1992 universities are more widespred than she thinks. First she acknowledges that some of these universities are doing well, such as Manchester Metropolitan, are doing very well, and she could easily add Middlesex, Oxford Brookes and Leeds Metropolitan. However, she neglects that many Russell Group and 1994 Group universities have problems too. Her reference to violence (and 'town-gown' violence dates back decades, even centuries) neglects the fact that many old and new universities share the same town, Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan; Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam; Oxford and Oxford Brookes have campuses within sight of each other; Winchester and Southampton Solent have sites within a few minutes' walk parts of Southampton. These are just ones I have driven passed personally. The students of the different institutions live in the same streets, shop at the same shops and socialise in the same pubs and clubs, so face the same risks from crime and violence. This is more about the issues facing our cities as a whole than particular universities.
Aitkenhead says '[i]f middle class sons were dealing with fights outside their halls, their parents would be up in arms', they do and they are. This complaint makes a number of errors. First, all universities have middle class students. There is are some which have more and some which have more working class students, but there is no strict segregation. Students go where the course they want is run and where they can afford to travel to/live. Increasingly students from all classes are not travelling so far from home to attend university. Second why does she imagine working class parents are more passive on behalf of their children than middle class parents? Her whole article has this fantasy of cow-like, forelock-tugging working class people, blinded by the wonder of getting a child to university to the extent that they make no complaint. Perhaps she just thinks they are not articulate enough to complain. Has she been to any school recently or even read any education articles? All schools and universities face challenges and demands from parents, often very vigorous ones, and again there is no distinction in class for this intervention. Surely Aitkenhead must have read the articles about how much more involved parents are in their children's education; universities now put on special events and produce publications for them, something they never did in the 1980s. People are up in arms about these issues. Aitkenhead: ave you never even bothered to access any parently discussion boards? Have you heard of researching an article? It consists of more than sitting in a pub listening to friends whine.
Aitkenhead's snobbery continues. She speaks of a student from a photography course facing £25,000 of debt. There are students from all sorts of courses and all sorts of university with such debt. I have been discussing the problems that that brings on this blog on and off for the past two years and Aitkenhead could have found references to it from her own newspaper amongst many others let alone from online and broadcast sources. In fact if you go to a more upper market university you could find yourself spending more. Students graduating from Oxford do not escape such debt. Of course for Aitkenhead that kind of debt is worth it '[i]f university was giving [students] ... the kind of social and cultural incubation I enjoyed'. Again she neglects the fact that this happens, but students are no longer part of an elite system so they mix with a wider range of people like themselves rather than gaining access to elite groupings. In the UK, getting access to so many of our professions is still about who you know rather than what you know. Even if you go to Oxford and Cambridge if you associate with the type of people you would have met at the school you came from then you are not going to get the leg-up that you would do if you came from Eton or Harrow schools or are now able to associate with such people. Added to this is British xenophobia which means they stay mixing with Britons being hostile to mixing with the increasing number of students from Beijing or Berlin, so actually cutting themselves off from the 'social and cultural incubation' that would help them not just get a job in the UK but across the world, but of course to Aitkenhead, that would be no benefit (and it seems many British students, no matter what their social class, share that view).
There is a huge difference between universities (and between different courses within each university) and no-one believes otherwise. These terribly naive people who Aitkenhead feels have been falsely sold a course that gives them no social or economic benefits are very small in number. Her suggestion that their children should work their way up through the ranks of some profession is incredibly dated. You do not even get to begin working your way up these days until you have the entrance ticket of a degree.
In adopting this snobbery, wanting her low-quality institutions relabelled, Aitkenhead misses the whole point about the restrictions on social mobility and progression in British society, the true impact of adopting a policy of mass higher education and the costs of such education to individuals (which seems to be being realised though not explicitly, surely 'non-repayable' funds are beginning to look like the grants of old). No university is going to say it is a poor place to study, it would be suicidal to do so. However, universities cannot isolate themselves from the problems facing the cities that they are located in. Consumers of all things, including education, are both knowledgeable and demanding. Information both official and unofficial about all universities, is easily available, there are a plethora of league tables which undermine any misselling that Aitkenhead believes is so prevalent.
The first part of her article goes on about students not paying attention to lectures and the fact that you can buy essays. Neither of these things has changed in 20-40 years, they are probably just more visible. The inattention of young people is a problem right across the years and society, it is not an aspect of attending any particular university. It stems from children knowing that adults are so hemmed in by regulation that they lack sanctions to demand attention. Conversely, any student wasting their time in a lecture or class is throwing away their (or more likely their parent's money). We hear a great deal about students demanding things for their fees, but effectively then fritter it away. However, we could be back at 1930s Oxford and seeing youth that was inattentive and frittering away their money and their gifts. For Aitkenhead it seems more offensive because these are ordinary people rather than an elite. Buying essays is nothing new either, it is just in the age of the internet it is more visible and easier,though conversely, using software that is available in all UK universities, far easier to detect. She neglects to point out how many students are thrown off courses (and in the case of subjects like Law, banned from working in the profession) for cheating or copying.
Aitkenhead says that the photography student will never get the job he wants. Of course many people never end up with the job that they want, no matter which university they attended. In fact the UK has always had this, in the 1980s, more managing directors of UK companies had History degrees than any other subject. Whilst there is an emphasis on 'employability skills' and courses for work, university is still about developing thinking, adaptable people who can turn their hand to many things. In one office job I had where there were a lot of musicians and writers working a colleague complained that it was 'the hall of lost dreams', I contested that saying the people were in good jobs which thus allowed them to pursue their musical and writing interests more fully than if they were trying to scrape by on them alone. You do not have to be on the road or in a garret all the time to perform in public or get a novel published. A good degree prepares people for work. Some people will get their dream job, some will not, but there are many other factors than simply the course you took. For example a student graduating from a course in 2009 will find it far harder to get any work, let alone their dream job than a student coming from the same course with the same grades would have done in 2008 or 2007.
What Aitkenhead effectively wants is a return to the elitist university system in which intellectual middle class students simply mix with intellectual middle class students on leafy campuses cut off from the world, without having to pay for anything and then get a job easily at the end of it. This was never the true pattern: anyone who has visited buildings of the University of Oxford one of the most elite and privileged of the UK universities will know that even they do not escape reality however hard they might fight it. This journalist missed an opportunity and instead simply banged out her ill-informed prejudices about universities and offers no suggestions for solutions. She bemoans (working class) people's ignorance, when those people do not exist. There might not be a working class consciousness, but people from all strata of British society are skilled, critical even aggressive consumers who pride themselves in not having the wool pulled over their eyes. She pities her imagined passive working class families' pride in small gains without noting that in the UK, a small gain in a generation is all that society permits us to get. I attended a good university and got a good degree but have never had a job that lasted more than four years and am certainly not my dream job. I am the first and last person in my family to go to university. The issue of the lack of social mobility that holds back so many graduates would have been far more worthy of Aitkenhead's attention. Saying that, any poorly-researched article like this one was, is probably a waste of time.
P.P. - 05/04/2009: I was stunned to read that Decca Aitkenhead has received an award for interview with Alastair Darling. I can only think it stemmed from her 'scoop' about the severity of the recession as in my mind she has never shown any particular journalistic ability and is very lazy in her research. I suppose one should not be surprised at a newspaper who actually employs Tristam Hunt to interview people, a man whose ego fills two-thirds of any article he is connected with.
Showing posts with label higher education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label higher education. Show all posts
Thursday, 5 February 2009
Thursday, 11 September 2008
UK Social Divisions Hardened By Education
If you want to know where Britain is going in terms of its social structure it is always worth reading the Education pages of websites like the BBC. Their stories, as is suitable for a website, are usually tightly focused, but it only takes reading a few stories to begin to see an overarching picture. I have commented before about how higher education is becoming closed off to children from both middle and working class backgrounds because of the huge cost and the debt it throws people into. The fees on study in England are likely to be uncapped in the coming years. Already students leave university with debts of £15,000 (€18,900; US$26,700) and this expected to be up to £17,000 this year. There are bursaries available, but actually you have to come from poor backgrounds to qualify for these and while they are not negligible to the poorest students, they leave out a large chunk of the population.
The government has been driving to increase the number of people going into higher education for over a decade now and they are succeeding, though the rise has slowed down since 2002 and it has still benefited middle class people more than working class. We are getting simply more people from the class that was the one which sent their children to university before. Public spending has risen on higher education by 48% 2000-2005. The UK is now about the OECD average for attendance at university which is 56% of school leavers going into higher education. This fits a common trend. Countries with smaller populations such as Australia (about 16 million people) and Iceland have seen the largest jumps and the highest level of participation. Poland, Finland and importantly the USA have seen larger jumps than the UK and have higher participation. The UK does lead EU rivals like Spain (which has recorded a fall in university students since 2000) and Germany as well as Japan. However, it is clear that this shift in the UK is having other collateral effects that might not have been anticipated. It is actually reversing rather than improving opportunities for social mobility.
I have noted before how a degree is almost becoming like a baseline qualification for people to get any kind of decent job. Reports on the BBC have shown that as a consequence the gap between those people who have degrees and those who do not, in terms of income, is actually widening. In 1997 graduates were likely to earn 53% more than non-graduates throughout their careers, now the figure is 59%. To some degree this is unsurprising, given the vast debts students now incur they will press for salaries which will help them pay this back. It is not only a an issue of income, but also the range of jobs to which you must have a degree to gain access. This situation has been worsened by the government cut-back of funding into 'lifelong learning', i.e. people going back to take new courses and/or retrain when they are in their 30s-60s; the number of people doing this kind of learning has fallen by 1.5 million compared to 2006. The UK is in danger of becoming even more like France, where if you have the misfortune to have trained in an industry which has become obsolete you find it almost impossible to get into another profession because of the training requirements. Basically, the UK is moving to a 'Brave New World' pattern. Rather than being categorised at 11 as used to be the case, it will now come at 18 and those who get a degree go into the 'Beta' class (most of us cannot get into the 'Alpha' class even with degrees because of the engrained position of wealthy families and privilege in the UK, you are categorised into that or not, at birth) or the 'Delta' class or even 'Gamma' class.
The split is not even. With women making up 56% of university students, there is going to be an imbalance with more female Betas than male ones. This is already happening and is clashing against a system in which women still earn 17% less than their male counterparts in the UK. Either this 'ceiling' will be broken or it is another way to keep down salaries as more of the Beta class is come to be made up of relatively cheaper women, so again keeping even skilled and well-educated people away from the decent incomes of the Alphas, the super-wealthy. The other thing is that it is very racially imbalanced. The fact that more people from Asian backgrounds go into medical professions compared to Caucasians who are the most numerous racial group in the UK, has long been a trend. However, in other reports, the continued challenges of advancing children from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds is still being noted. The blame seems to be levelled in turn at institutional racism, that schools give up on black children from the start and at youth culture among Afro-Caribbean children, especially boys, which glamourises crime and violence.
Personally I think both factors are to blame. However, I think this also neglects that actually all youth culture nowadays for whatever race the children come from glamourises a criminal lifestyle. This is as detrimental for girls as it is for boys as it suggests that it is good for them to become blond-haired, air-headed 'bimbos' who gain acceptance by complying with the demands of males and concentrating on fashion, binge drinking and drug-taking. For boys it is that they need to be tough, drink, take drugs, have lots of unprotected sex, carry a knife or a gun and buy credibility by being violent and carrying out criminal activities. This goes for white children, mixed-race children and Asians as much as it does for blacks. None of this is new, you can go back to 'West Side Story' of the mid-1950s to see similar views.
I agree that Britain like many countries in the EU suffers from institutional racism, but I think that on top of that is institutional class prejudice as well. It has long been recognised that teachers give up on working class children and it has been proven that intelligent children from such backgrounds fall behind less intelligent children from wealthy backgrounds almost immediately on entering school. This is because teachers privilege the language and culture of the middle classes and schools are dependent on the costly support for learning at home that comes through buying computers, paying for after-school classes, etc. that only middle class people (and increasingly only the top end of that bracket) can afford. As children are tested so regularly at school, the curriculum has become too large to accommodate in the school day and so it spills after school. The six-year old in my house is already doing homework, five years earlier than I started it. Homework increasingly needs an internet connected computer, a colour printer and has always needed a quiet spacious place. With libraries now noisy spaces with no room for study, those without sufficiently large houses are going to lose out. Problems identified in the 1950s are back with a vengeance. Of course Afro-Caribbean families are often working class and so suffer these issues twice over. Racial definition is too simplistic in the UK anyway, especially given how many mixed-race families there are and siblings and half-siblings with different skin colours actually get treated the same, not because of their particular individual racial characteristics, but because of the home context they come out of and how that is perceived by teachers.
So, even if there was not an active policy of hardening social divides, trends in British society, exacerbated by government policy are actually doing this. However, there is an added element which I picked up on in June and that is, that the privileged are beginning to bite back. Now more than even in the Thatcher years they are losing their shame about their positions and the benefits they gain. They seem to believe that the era of democratisation of the 1960s and 1970s is truly at an end, probably helped by the Blairite party having been in power and the Conservatives moving away from grammar school Thatcher and Major to Eton-educated, clearly elitist, Cameron. The statements of Rear Admiral Chris Parry in regard to keeping ordinary children out of private schools proved to be too rich, but it did mark a trend which it is clear is not going away and the privileged are becoming emboldened after his ranging shot. Vice-Chancellor Alison Richard, head of the University of Cambridge has said that universities should not be about social engineering. Effectively she was telling governments to back off and stop telling the elite universities to let in more ordinary people. Reports in July 2008 showed how there had been little improvement in the elitist approach to entry to all universities. Ironically Cambridge allowed in 59% of its students from state schools (which make up 93% of the secondary education sector) this year, the highest percentage since 1981. However, I doubt this level will be sustained. In addition, this figure also shows that by getting 41% of the places students from private education are effectively almost six times over-represented at Cambridge.
As I have noted before, Britain is moving to a very hierarchical society in which social mobility will be very limited. Education was once seen as a way to break such patterns but now it is clear it is simply reinforcing them. Any attempt from the government to challenge these things either economically (look how the windfall tax is being choked off by utility companies) or by policies is stopped by the ultra-rich and other privileged sectors of British society. After a few decades of having to keep their head down they feel their time has come and they are speaking openly about keeping back those (the majority) from other sectors of society and teachers are active collaborators in this. All are happy to have a youth culture that they can condemn but are actually please because it stops too many people questioning and challenging the hardening status quo.
The government has been driving to increase the number of people going into higher education for over a decade now and they are succeeding, though the rise has slowed down since 2002 and it has still benefited middle class people more than working class. We are getting simply more people from the class that was the one which sent their children to university before. Public spending has risen on higher education by 48% 2000-2005. The UK is now about the OECD average for attendance at university which is 56% of school leavers going into higher education. This fits a common trend. Countries with smaller populations such as Australia (about 16 million people) and Iceland have seen the largest jumps and the highest level of participation. Poland, Finland and importantly the USA have seen larger jumps than the UK and have higher participation. The UK does lead EU rivals like Spain (which has recorded a fall in university students since 2000) and Germany as well as Japan. However, it is clear that this shift in the UK is having other collateral effects that might not have been anticipated. It is actually reversing rather than improving opportunities for social mobility.
I have noted before how a degree is almost becoming like a baseline qualification for people to get any kind of decent job. Reports on the BBC have shown that as a consequence the gap between those people who have degrees and those who do not, in terms of income, is actually widening. In 1997 graduates were likely to earn 53% more than non-graduates throughout their careers, now the figure is 59%. To some degree this is unsurprising, given the vast debts students now incur they will press for salaries which will help them pay this back. It is not only a an issue of income, but also the range of jobs to which you must have a degree to gain access. This situation has been worsened by the government cut-back of funding into 'lifelong learning', i.e. people going back to take new courses and/or retrain when they are in their 30s-60s; the number of people doing this kind of learning has fallen by 1.5 million compared to 2006. The UK is in danger of becoming even more like France, where if you have the misfortune to have trained in an industry which has become obsolete you find it almost impossible to get into another profession because of the training requirements. Basically, the UK is moving to a 'Brave New World' pattern. Rather than being categorised at 11 as used to be the case, it will now come at 18 and those who get a degree go into the 'Beta' class (most of us cannot get into the 'Alpha' class even with degrees because of the engrained position of wealthy families and privilege in the UK, you are categorised into that or not, at birth) or the 'Delta' class or even 'Gamma' class.
The split is not even. With women making up 56% of university students, there is going to be an imbalance with more female Betas than male ones. This is already happening and is clashing against a system in which women still earn 17% less than their male counterparts in the UK. Either this 'ceiling' will be broken or it is another way to keep down salaries as more of the Beta class is come to be made up of relatively cheaper women, so again keeping even skilled and well-educated people away from the decent incomes of the Alphas, the super-wealthy. The other thing is that it is very racially imbalanced. The fact that more people from Asian backgrounds go into medical professions compared to Caucasians who are the most numerous racial group in the UK, has long been a trend. However, in other reports, the continued challenges of advancing children from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds is still being noted. The blame seems to be levelled in turn at institutional racism, that schools give up on black children from the start and at youth culture among Afro-Caribbean children, especially boys, which glamourises crime and violence.
Personally I think both factors are to blame. However, I think this also neglects that actually all youth culture nowadays for whatever race the children come from glamourises a criminal lifestyle. This is as detrimental for girls as it is for boys as it suggests that it is good for them to become blond-haired, air-headed 'bimbos' who gain acceptance by complying with the demands of males and concentrating on fashion, binge drinking and drug-taking. For boys it is that they need to be tough, drink, take drugs, have lots of unprotected sex, carry a knife or a gun and buy credibility by being violent and carrying out criminal activities. This goes for white children, mixed-race children and Asians as much as it does for blacks. None of this is new, you can go back to 'West Side Story' of the mid-1950s to see similar views.
I agree that Britain like many countries in the EU suffers from institutional racism, but I think that on top of that is institutional class prejudice as well. It has long been recognised that teachers give up on working class children and it has been proven that intelligent children from such backgrounds fall behind less intelligent children from wealthy backgrounds almost immediately on entering school. This is because teachers privilege the language and culture of the middle classes and schools are dependent on the costly support for learning at home that comes through buying computers, paying for after-school classes, etc. that only middle class people (and increasingly only the top end of that bracket) can afford. As children are tested so regularly at school, the curriculum has become too large to accommodate in the school day and so it spills after school. The six-year old in my house is already doing homework, five years earlier than I started it. Homework increasingly needs an internet connected computer, a colour printer and has always needed a quiet spacious place. With libraries now noisy spaces with no room for study, those without sufficiently large houses are going to lose out. Problems identified in the 1950s are back with a vengeance. Of course Afro-Caribbean families are often working class and so suffer these issues twice over. Racial definition is too simplistic in the UK anyway, especially given how many mixed-race families there are and siblings and half-siblings with different skin colours actually get treated the same, not because of their particular individual racial characteristics, but because of the home context they come out of and how that is perceived by teachers.
So, even if there was not an active policy of hardening social divides, trends in British society, exacerbated by government policy are actually doing this. However, there is an added element which I picked up on in June and that is, that the privileged are beginning to bite back. Now more than even in the Thatcher years they are losing their shame about their positions and the benefits they gain. They seem to believe that the era of democratisation of the 1960s and 1970s is truly at an end, probably helped by the Blairite party having been in power and the Conservatives moving away from grammar school Thatcher and Major to Eton-educated, clearly elitist, Cameron. The statements of Rear Admiral Chris Parry in regard to keeping ordinary children out of private schools proved to be too rich, but it did mark a trend which it is clear is not going away and the privileged are becoming emboldened after his ranging shot. Vice-Chancellor Alison Richard, head of the University of Cambridge has said that universities should not be about social engineering. Effectively she was telling governments to back off and stop telling the elite universities to let in more ordinary people. Reports in July 2008 showed how there had been little improvement in the elitist approach to entry to all universities. Ironically Cambridge allowed in 59% of its students from state schools (which make up 93% of the secondary education sector) this year, the highest percentage since 1981. However, I doubt this level will be sustained. In addition, this figure also shows that by getting 41% of the places students from private education are effectively almost six times over-represented at Cambridge.
As I have noted before, Britain is moving to a very hierarchical society in which social mobility will be very limited. Education was once seen as a way to break such patterns but now it is clear it is simply reinforcing them. Any attempt from the government to challenge these things either economically (look how the windfall tax is being choked off by utility companies) or by policies is stopped by the ultra-rich and other privileged sectors of British society. After a few decades of having to keep their head down they feel their time has come and they are speaking openly about keeping back those (the majority) from other sectors of society and teachers are active collaborators in this. All are happy to have a youth culture that they can condemn but are actually please because it stops too many people questioning and challenging the hardening status quo.
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
I am the Final Person in My Family Ever to Go to University
I was trying to think of a clear title, what this is about is not the unlikelihood that I would have ever gone to university but the fact that no-one after me will ever get the chance to do so. These thoughts came about from two sources. First I was sitting in a waiting room yesterday waiting for the people I was supposed to be working with and picked up a leaflet for a university close to where I was sitting. It was aimed at parents of students rather than students themselves and clearly aimed to reassure parents about what they were going to be sending their children into. This in itself, I feel highlights how concerned parents are about letting their children out of their sight even when they reach the age of 18. The second thing relates back to my post yesterday that I had found due to the stupid residence laws that some time last August I acquired a common-law wife and common-law stepson of my housekeeper and her son, without me having done anything. This boy is 6 years old, and he says he wants to be a scientist, but reading this leaflet yesterday it was clear he stands no chance of that even now.
Now let us track back a bit. When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he said his slogan was 'education, education, education' and in contrast to the proceeding Conservative governments rather than trying to make the UK into a low-wage manufacturing base, like the 'Taiwan of Europe' to paraphrase a Conservative MP of the time, rather a better educated, skilled country like our European neighbours. The aim was for 50% of 18-year olds and many others to go to University. Well it started reasonably well. The University sector had been rationalised since my days there in the 1980s when there had been universities and polytechnics, the latter giving more technically-focused degrees and of course with typical British snobbery they had been looked down upon as second class. From 1992 they were allowed to become universities and some have been very successful. Anyway, the idea was to get more people to university especially from socio-economic and ethnic groups that were under-represented in universities. When I went to University in 1987 6% of the UK population turning 18 that year went, now it is 40% but the level of working class people attending levelled off in 2002 so further increases have just been mopping up more of the middle classes. In 1987 you could get a very good job with 2 'A' levels, now with 'qualification inflation' you need at least a BA/BSc or even an MA/MSc. I found when I graduated that having a degree actually made me unemployable in many jobs and it was not until 2000, 13 years after I had graduated that I broke through the £10,000 (€12,600; US$19,200) per year salary level and then that was because I had 4 part-time jobs. Anyway, things have changed a lot since then. Most universities have four times the number of students they had in the late 1980s, in many cases crammed into the same number of buildings as they had back then and class sizes are far bigger. In my day you had 10-14 people in a seminar now apparently it is something like 40-50 people, so the quality of teaching or at least the amount of attention each student gets from a tutor must have fallen or substituted by online stuff. Of course the increase in student numbers have not been made up just by more UK students. All universities have increased the students they take from abroad, who pay three times the fees UK students pay. They are wonderful moneyspinners for the universities and it is unsurprising they bring in more and more. Apparently China is the golden goose for such students at the moment, but is likely to fade and be replaced by India in the next decade.
Now one thing I have always admired about the USA (and there are very few things) is that they have always valued education and seen it as a way for people to improve themselves. Given how beholden the UK has been to the USA (note current plans for an Armed Forces Day just like the USA) especially Tony Blair, it is unsurprising that the UK moved in that direction and it seems to have worked, though to a lesser extent than had been hoped for, at least more people can go to university than when I did. However, reading this leaflet yesterday it seems that period, of, say, a decade is at an end or perhaps it was shorter lived than that, beginning to come to an end in 2002. Now, it is not that universities have made it harder to get in, it comes down to money and this brings me back to the leaflet.
The leaflet outlined what students have to pay in fees. Fees were introduced for English students in 2006. Scotland and Wales decided that local students going to universities in those countries would not have to pay fees. However a Scot or Welsh person coming to an English university has to pay as does an English person going to Scotland and Wales. Students from abroad have always had to pay. Though non-repayable grants had been phased out in the 1980s and replaced by loans from 1991 onwards, up until 2006 UK students did not have to pay fees to study at university (except at the private University of Buckingham). Now, they have to pay £3,070 (€3868; US$5894) per year. Students from those odd bits of the UK, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, all of which have their own governments have to pay £4,817-£19,267 as if they were foreign students. So, the cost of a 3-year course is now £9,210 (€11,604; US$17,683). Students can take out a loan to pay this and then begin paying it back once they earn more than £15,000 (€18,900; US$28,800) per year, which of course may not be the case for many of them given the average salary in the UK is £24,000 per year and in some regions like East Anglia only £19,000 per year, and 80% of the population earns this or less (which if 40% of 18-year olds are going to university, quite a few must fall into this category).
Of course the £9,210 only covers the fees. The fact that struck me in the leaflet was the living expenses. Now I know the university in question in in the expensive South-East of England, but they reckoned living expenses cost £5,500 for the first year and that is when the students are living in student halls with meals thrown in, let alone when they have to move out into rented accommodation (and all the scams landlords try with taking deposits, etc.). So let us say £5,500 for first year + £7,500 for second year + £7,500 for third year = £20,500 for living. Now, I know students work a lot more these days (when I was at university you were restricted to 6 hours per week, I have heard that limit has been raised to 20 hours per week), but let us say they do 20 hours per week at minimum wage (the kind of service sector jobs they can get in call centres, bars and shops) which is set to rise to £5.73 per hour (€7.22; US$11 - the minimum wage in USA rises to US$6.55 per hour this July; the price of fuel, food and clothing in the USA is far cheaper though, in 2007 the average price of petrol rose to US$3 per gallon [US$0.66 per litre] = £0.34 per litre, whilst by the in the UK you were paying £1 per litre), so paying £114 per week before tax and £5959 per year, before tax. Of course they can probably go up to 40 hours per week over the vacations and may be able to get pay above minimum wage, but this would probably at most add £600-£1000 to the income over the year, and all of this is before tax. With the loss of the 10p tax band it is those people earning around the £4000-£7000 per year mark and unable to claim tax credits (as most young students cannot because they do not have children) who are deemed to be worse off.
There are loans upons loan available and student can apply for a loan of £1,230-£4,510 for the total three years of their study to pay all these living expenses, but as even the university shows that that is not enough to live a boring life for one year at university let alone that this is yet more debt.
So, if students are lucky they can work enough to cover their living expenses, but never go on holiday or buy a laptop or a car or even drink beer as the leaflet's costs left nothing for socialising. Of course if they live like that they will probably do well on their course (though having a laptop seems compulsory for study these days). My bosses' son who went to university in the North-West of England so a cheap area, came away with debts of £10,000, which apparently is seen as two-thirds of what he should have expected. I do not know if that includes the fees debt as well, but I expect not. Once over £15,000 they have to pay back 9% of their income per year, so £1,350 per year on £15,000, meaning 7 years to clear that debt, let alone whatever they owe to the bank.
This is fine for well off families like that of my boss, but coming back to the 6-year old who wants to be a scientist (and science courses can be more expensive, costing a third as much again as a humanities course), where is his mother on £10,000 per year plus tax credits going to find the money? In fact he is better off than if he was my son, because bursaries kick in for families earning less than £38,000 per year, but even this pays only £2,765. So local authorities give loans for families earning less than £30,000 per year and universities are supposed to pay bursaries of £1000 for those on less than £21,000, but how long is this going to last when you have to find housing deposits of £2000?
So, someone from a working class or even a middle class background is going to find themselves with potentially £19,720 of debt when they leave university, and that does not include overdrafts and credit cards and all other kinds of debt that they are facing. Now, they will then be under pressure to get a mortgage and to pay living expenses, all these high rents and utility bills. I earn £34,000 per year and I am having trouble paying this. How can a recent graduate with this much debt even earning the top of the average salary of £24,000 immediately after graduating, afford to pay back all of this money. What do they get in return? They have spent this money for something that now 4 out of 10, 21-year olds will have. It hardly marks them out in the labour market.
The other thing is that loans are fine, paid work is fine, but so much money is needed upfront and even my whole household would lack the money if the 6-year old was now 18, we could not afford to pay his deposits or help him feed himself through the weeks while he sought work. He could not even give up his job when the exams came up for fear of being evicted. So, it might be about education for all, but it soon becomes clear than unless your parents are earning double the national average salary each year, going to university is nearly impossible and even if you risk it, you could be burdening yourself with debt well into your 30s. No wonder so many people are going bankrupt and those turning up for university study is falling.
Of course my brother has no children and lives in Belgium anyway where things are very different. I have lost contact with my three cousins, but they all have 2-3 children each and it is unlikely given that they are predominantly farmers and gamekeepers than any of their children will ever be able to afford to attend university. Even my pseudo-son, it is clear, 12 years before he could even go, will never be able to fulfil his dream of being a scientist and probably will not even be able to afford a course to become a plumber or an electrician. The rhetoric has been about widening access, but when you begin to dig, you find in fact it is just about the same control of society as always. The rich can still study, the poor are increasingly kept out, not by visible barriers but by less visible economic ones. Of course that is just the way the super-rich of the UK want it. They do not want an educated population that may question their grip on power. They want people to be excluded from education so they can remain the cheap, flexible labour force dreamt of by the Thatcherites in the 1980s. Even those they let into universities will be so shackled by debt that they have to buckle down and accept the work they can get rather than trying to shake up the system. Unsurprising for Blair, under his populist rhetoric he has actually engineered another tool of societal control, an additional element in his desire for an authoritarian UK. No wonder people from the North of England are buying houses in Scotland. What we have seen with higher education is an expansion but so that more wealthy middle class people can go and Britain can draw the most intelligent and rich from across the world to come to the UK, rather than what Blair seemed to promise in 1997 which was an education system which provided a decent chance for anyone with the intelligence. In the 1970s with grants and no fees, there was actually a better chance for people from poorer backgrounds and certainly average middle class ones than there is now, even with limited numbers of places. Nowadays intelligence does not come into it, it is all about money.
Now let us track back a bit. When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he said his slogan was 'education, education, education' and in contrast to the proceeding Conservative governments rather than trying to make the UK into a low-wage manufacturing base, like the 'Taiwan of Europe' to paraphrase a Conservative MP of the time, rather a better educated, skilled country like our European neighbours. The aim was for 50% of 18-year olds and many others to go to University. Well it started reasonably well. The University sector had been rationalised since my days there in the 1980s when there had been universities and polytechnics, the latter giving more technically-focused degrees and of course with typical British snobbery they had been looked down upon as second class. From 1992 they were allowed to become universities and some have been very successful. Anyway, the idea was to get more people to university especially from socio-economic and ethnic groups that were under-represented in universities. When I went to University in 1987 6% of the UK population turning 18 that year went, now it is 40% but the level of working class people attending levelled off in 2002 so further increases have just been mopping up more of the middle classes. In 1987 you could get a very good job with 2 'A' levels, now with 'qualification inflation' you need at least a BA/BSc or even an MA/MSc. I found when I graduated that having a degree actually made me unemployable in many jobs and it was not until 2000, 13 years after I had graduated that I broke through the £10,000 (€12,600; US$19,200) per year salary level and then that was because I had 4 part-time jobs. Anyway, things have changed a lot since then. Most universities have four times the number of students they had in the late 1980s, in many cases crammed into the same number of buildings as they had back then and class sizes are far bigger. In my day you had 10-14 people in a seminar now apparently it is something like 40-50 people, so the quality of teaching or at least the amount of attention each student gets from a tutor must have fallen or substituted by online stuff. Of course the increase in student numbers have not been made up just by more UK students. All universities have increased the students they take from abroad, who pay three times the fees UK students pay. They are wonderful moneyspinners for the universities and it is unsurprising they bring in more and more. Apparently China is the golden goose for such students at the moment, but is likely to fade and be replaced by India in the next decade.
Now one thing I have always admired about the USA (and there are very few things) is that they have always valued education and seen it as a way for people to improve themselves. Given how beholden the UK has been to the USA (note current plans for an Armed Forces Day just like the USA) especially Tony Blair, it is unsurprising that the UK moved in that direction and it seems to have worked, though to a lesser extent than had been hoped for, at least more people can go to university than when I did. However, reading this leaflet yesterday it seems that period, of, say, a decade is at an end or perhaps it was shorter lived than that, beginning to come to an end in 2002. Now, it is not that universities have made it harder to get in, it comes down to money and this brings me back to the leaflet.
The leaflet outlined what students have to pay in fees. Fees were introduced for English students in 2006. Scotland and Wales decided that local students going to universities in those countries would not have to pay fees. However a Scot or Welsh person coming to an English university has to pay as does an English person going to Scotland and Wales. Students from abroad have always had to pay. Though non-repayable grants had been phased out in the 1980s and replaced by loans from 1991 onwards, up until 2006 UK students did not have to pay fees to study at university (except at the private University of Buckingham). Now, they have to pay £3,070 (€3868; US$5894) per year. Students from those odd bits of the UK, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, all of which have their own governments have to pay £4,817-£19,267 as if they were foreign students. So, the cost of a 3-year course is now £9,210 (€11,604; US$17,683). Students can take out a loan to pay this and then begin paying it back once they earn more than £15,000 (€18,900; US$28,800) per year, which of course may not be the case for many of them given the average salary in the UK is £24,000 per year and in some regions like East Anglia only £19,000 per year, and 80% of the population earns this or less (which if 40% of 18-year olds are going to university, quite a few must fall into this category).
Of course the £9,210 only covers the fees. The fact that struck me in the leaflet was the living expenses. Now I know the university in question in in the expensive South-East of England, but they reckoned living expenses cost £5,500 for the first year and that is when the students are living in student halls with meals thrown in, let alone when they have to move out into rented accommodation (and all the scams landlords try with taking deposits, etc.). So let us say £5,500 for first year + £7,500 for second year + £7,500 for third year = £20,500 for living. Now, I know students work a lot more these days (when I was at university you were restricted to 6 hours per week, I have heard that limit has been raised to 20 hours per week), but let us say they do 20 hours per week at minimum wage (the kind of service sector jobs they can get in call centres, bars and shops) which is set to rise to £5.73 per hour (€7.22; US$11 - the minimum wage in USA rises to US$6.55 per hour this July; the price of fuel, food and clothing in the USA is far cheaper though, in 2007 the average price of petrol rose to US$3 per gallon [US$0.66 per litre] = £0.34 per litre, whilst by the in the UK you were paying £1 per litre), so paying £114 per week before tax and £5959 per year, before tax. Of course they can probably go up to 40 hours per week over the vacations and may be able to get pay above minimum wage, but this would probably at most add £600-£1000 to the income over the year, and all of this is before tax. With the loss of the 10p tax band it is those people earning around the £4000-£7000 per year mark and unable to claim tax credits (as most young students cannot because they do not have children) who are deemed to be worse off.
There are loans upons loan available and student can apply for a loan of £1,230-£4,510 for the total three years of their study to pay all these living expenses, but as even the university shows that that is not enough to live a boring life for one year at university let alone that this is yet more debt.
So, if students are lucky they can work enough to cover their living expenses, but never go on holiday or buy a laptop or a car or even drink beer as the leaflet's costs left nothing for socialising. Of course if they live like that they will probably do well on their course (though having a laptop seems compulsory for study these days). My bosses' son who went to university in the North-West of England so a cheap area, came away with debts of £10,000, which apparently is seen as two-thirds of what he should have expected. I do not know if that includes the fees debt as well, but I expect not. Once over £15,000 they have to pay back 9% of their income per year, so £1,350 per year on £15,000, meaning 7 years to clear that debt, let alone whatever they owe to the bank.
This is fine for well off families like that of my boss, but coming back to the 6-year old who wants to be a scientist (and science courses can be more expensive, costing a third as much again as a humanities course), where is his mother on £10,000 per year plus tax credits going to find the money? In fact he is better off than if he was my son, because bursaries kick in for families earning less than £38,000 per year, but even this pays only £2,765. So local authorities give loans for families earning less than £30,000 per year and universities are supposed to pay bursaries of £1000 for those on less than £21,000, but how long is this going to last when you have to find housing deposits of £2000?
So, someone from a working class or even a middle class background is going to find themselves with potentially £19,720 of debt when they leave university, and that does not include overdrafts and credit cards and all other kinds of debt that they are facing. Now, they will then be under pressure to get a mortgage and to pay living expenses, all these high rents and utility bills. I earn £34,000 per year and I am having trouble paying this. How can a recent graduate with this much debt even earning the top of the average salary of £24,000 immediately after graduating, afford to pay back all of this money. What do they get in return? They have spent this money for something that now 4 out of 10, 21-year olds will have. It hardly marks them out in the labour market.
The other thing is that loans are fine, paid work is fine, but so much money is needed upfront and even my whole household would lack the money if the 6-year old was now 18, we could not afford to pay his deposits or help him feed himself through the weeks while he sought work. He could not even give up his job when the exams came up for fear of being evicted. So, it might be about education for all, but it soon becomes clear than unless your parents are earning double the national average salary each year, going to university is nearly impossible and even if you risk it, you could be burdening yourself with debt well into your 30s. No wonder so many people are going bankrupt and those turning up for university study is falling.
Of course my brother has no children and lives in Belgium anyway where things are very different. I have lost contact with my three cousins, but they all have 2-3 children each and it is unlikely given that they are predominantly farmers and gamekeepers than any of their children will ever be able to afford to attend university. Even my pseudo-son, it is clear, 12 years before he could even go, will never be able to fulfil his dream of being a scientist and probably will not even be able to afford a course to become a plumber or an electrician. The rhetoric has been about widening access, but when you begin to dig, you find in fact it is just about the same control of society as always. The rich can still study, the poor are increasingly kept out, not by visible barriers but by less visible economic ones. Of course that is just the way the super-rich of the UK want it. They do not want an educated population that may question their grip on power. They want people to be excluded from education so they can remain the cheap, flexible labour force dreamt of by the Thatcherites in the 1980s. Even those they let into universities will be so shackled by debt that they have to buckle down and accept the work they can get rather than trying to shake up the system. Unsurprising for Blair, under his populist rhetoric he has actually engineered another tool of societal control, an additional element in his desire for an authoritarian UK. No wonder people from the North of England are buying houses in Scotland. What we have seen with higher education is an expansion but so that more wealthy middle class people can go and Britain can draw the most intelligent and rich from across the world to come to the UK, rather than what Blair seemed to promise in 1997 which was an education system which provided a decent chance for anyone with the intelligence. In the 1970s with grants and no fees, there was actually a better chance for people from poorer backgrounds and certainly average middle class ones than there is now, even with limited numbers of places. Nowadays intelligence does not come into it, it is all about money.
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