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It
had to happen. Graduates, poor darlings, are finding it tougher to get jobs.
Cost-conscious companies are clamping down on recruitment, prompting a 4 per
cent drop in vacancies for graduates this year. But just as demand is falling,
supply is rising: there was a 5.4 per cent increase to 358,000 in the number of
people taking up full-time university courses last autumn. This disequilibrium reflects the Government's view
that all job-seekers would be better off with degree certificates. So we're now
pushing young people into further education who, quite frankly, should not be
there. The upshot is a boom in joke subjects at third-rate institutions - a
cruel trick on the teenagers who sign up for them. These candy-floss courses are
invariably blighted by a mix of high drop-out rates and low employment
prospects. Students who last the distance often end up heavily in debt, but their
smoke-and-mirror qualifications do not fool employers. It takes most personnel
officers a nanosecond to work out that a double first in maths and physics
from Cambridge is preferable to a
dodgy third in flower arranging from Toxteth University (previously an
inner-city college for reformed shoplifters). In America, which has hundreds of so-called universities (some are not
much more than minor technical schools), blue-chip employers learnt a long
while ago how to rank them by quality, creating a premier division that
includes the eight Ivy Leaguers and 30 to 40 other five-star colleges. Many UK
companies are now doing likewise, concentrating their recruitment drive
primarily
on graduates from the Russell Group (Britain's top 19 universities from a total
of nearly 100) and then sifting them further by weeding out applicants with weak
results in flaky subjects. I'm dismayed to
learn that while the number of students starting courses in chemistry and civil
engineering dropped sharply in September, those taking media studies rose by
22 per cent. For parents whose offspring have just left home to embark on a
media studies degree, there's no easy way for me to tell you this. I've spent
almost my entire career in journalism - the BBC, Sunday Business, The Sunday
Times and The Sunday Telegraph and I have yet to meet anyone with an
editorial job whose first degree was in media studies. I really do mean nobody. Instead of squandering time and money on university courses with less
substance than a soufflé, many young people would be belier off learning
traditional manual skills, the demand for which has not been eliminated by
technological advance. In Greater London, you've got more chance of meeting a
yeti than finding a high-quality roofer with time on his hands who's not going
to nick the contents of your shed when you leave him alone for 10 minutes. And
guess what? Pay rates reflect that. Britain needs an
educated work force, but there has to be a purpose to higher education. Creating
a generation of burger-flippers with bachelor degrees in bun filling and
portion-control is a criminal waste of scarce resources. Jeff Randall
(Business column, Jan 2002) |
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