An increasing number of us spend at least three years wasting our time doing it and in many countries around the world it can leave us in serious debt. Everyone seems to believe in it – and yet it offers poor value for money. It is called higher education.
It is simple really. If you were really capable in fields like IT, finance or business would you devote your entire career to teaching others or would you want to be out in private enterprise actually practicing your skills? Yet societies around the world all use higher education as a gateway to professional and executive jobs. Therefore those not skilled and intelligent enough to hold down jobs in industry, commerce – or even government – are charged with preparing successive generations of our most talented people. According to a review by the Economist academic costs are growing rapidly whilst at the same time standards are declining. Only one in four American college-educated citizens can be deemed literate and in one third of cases students were not required to read more than 40 pages of text per term.
But once everyone is convinced that a University education is the only way to get a decent job it is very difficult to persuade them about any more effective way to cultivate talent. Maybe the best route to reform would be to remove the tenure from all academic staff and phase them out in favour of lecturers drawn from industry? In fact, a sure way to drive down soaring administrative costs would be to privatize higher education and require employers to sponsor all students in a wide range of subjects? Universities should, after all, be managed and not administered. I should also like to see a system that forces closure of all Universities ranked in the bottom 15% of performance tables for three years in succession.
Of course, there will remain subjects that have no obvious commercial value – but are critical to our cultural heritage and the generation of writers and artists. Yet even here the best way to develop the gifts of students would be to expose them to the direct influence of contemporary creative people.