David Craig, on August 20th, 2022weekend blog
This weekend’s blog is based on this week’s news stories and my book THE GREAT UNIVERSITY CON:
Predictable media fake drama?
Just as predictable as Christmas, this week we had all the mainstream media interviewing A-level schoolchildren (mainly girls in slightly revealing clothes) while they nervously opened their exam results and then leapt about in joy hugging each other and screaming stuff like “OMG! OMG! OMG!”. Quite why these kids were nervous is a bit of a mystery. After all, the pass rate was an astonishing 98.4%. Though this was a drop from an even more astonishing 99.5% last year.
I seem to remember that, back in prehistoric times when I took my A-levels, there was a genuine possibility of some people failing. Now that seems to be impossible providing you just manage to turn up for the exams on the right day and write your name in the correct place on the exam paper.
Will I get to uni?
Then there was the big question of whether the kids’ grades would be sufficiently high for them to go to uni (what we used to call ‘university’ in the days when young people could spell words of more than a couple of syllables).
Again, here there shouldn’t have been too much worry. After all, over a third of students (36%-37%) got A* or A grades:
There’s no way so many got A grades when I did my A-levels.
Our economic competitors – China, India, Japan, South Korea, the EU, the US etc – must be terrified to see so many highly-intelligent, highly-qualified young people being produced by our world-class education system.
As to whether the students would be accepted by their university of choice. Again there shouldn’t have been too much worry. Here are the grades of students accepted by universities in 2010:
An astounding 51% of A-level students got to university with below three grade Ds. I doubt things have changed much since then.
Will I get a good degree?
Then we have the question of how many of these obviously brilliant young people will achieve a top-level degree at uni. Once again, no need to worry. The percentage getting a first shot up from just 7% in 1994 to a wondrous 21% by 2015:
It’s probably even higher now.
Our degree factories
Our universities have become a massive scam on and betrayal of our young people. Our universities will take pretty much anyone just to increase their own profitability and the salaries of their supposed academics even though our cynical, money-grabbing universities know full well that many of their students will leave university with debts of £50,000 or more and no chance of ever repaying those debts. Partly this is because many students will be on Mickey-Mouse courses like Gender Studies and Creative Dance and suchlike where there is no possibility of getting a well-paid job. But even in a supposedly ‘serious’ subject like Law, our universities are cynically churning out far more graduates than there are jobs available:
Over the last couple of years, I have found several law graduates working in call centres as there was never any chance of them getting a training contract.
A glimmer of sanity?
However, this week I noticed the first sign of some sanity. This came from an institution called Roehampton University. I’m not sure if Roehampton University is a real university or just a jumped-up poly pretending to be a university. I’ve never studied there. But I know it as it’s only 100 metres or so from a block of flats called Fairacres on Roehampton Lane were my mother used to live.
Anyway, there has apparently been fury and outrage at this great, admired centre of learning. Roehampton University’s senior management have just announced their plans to put 226 members of staff at risk of redundancy, and close down and make cuts to multiple programmes. These programmes include, but are not limited to: Anthropology, Classical Civilisation, Creative Writing, Philosophy, Dance, and Play Therapy. The university’s management justified this by stating their commitment to graduate prospects in regards to employability. Basically, the university’s management seem to have realised the questionable morality of encouraging students to rack up massive debts studying worthless pretend subjects.
The as ever furious and outraged students claim “Closing down these courses would be a great loss of access to education, and so we call on the Senior Management of the university to reconsider these plans and allow our lecturers to continue educating students in these fields.”
Closing down these useless courses seems like a good idea to me.
Let’s hope other unis have the courage to follow Roehampton University’s example. Then we could get rid of thousands of fake academics and stop conning and exploiting tens of thousands of young people with worthless degrees in non-subjects with absolutely no job prospects. After all, not everyone with a worthless degree in total nonsense from a poly pretending to be a university can get a job as a Diversity, Inclusion and Equality Manager in the NHS, RAF or BBC.
Category: 
Not sure about closing down a course on Classical (i.e.presumably Ancient) Civilisations, since perhaps if our mainly over-indulged and self-indulgent young were to know a bit more about how these erstwhile advanced civilisations evolved, developed, then ultimately largely brought about their own demises through complacency and hedonism, our own Western civilisation might stand a better chance of survival! However, that comment apart, an excellent blog. Mainly our “unis” are now doing little other than preparing young people for disillusion and unemployment. I see it daily in the grandchildren of friends, yet the obsession with the necessity of squandering 3 years for little more than “Teams” lectures and a debt of £50K plus persists. What the UK DOES need of course is more home-trained dentists and doctors, yet I read that available places at medical schools have been reduced by 3,000 this year, from around 10,000 to 7,000. A large number of these, more than 50% now I believe, are female, so once their training and immediate post-graduate couple of years have passed, will probably never work full time. Where is the logic in reducing the number of medical school places? At a time of desperate shortages of medical staff, WHY does the Government evidently not wish to see more able and motivated 18/19 year olds embark on the 5 years’ minimum hard graft required to become a doctor? Why are equally able young people not able to obtain places to train to become dentists? Regardless of whether the NHS continues as a free-for-all service or is edged ever more toward privatisation, the current desperate need for medical and dental practitioners will remain. Indeed, it will increase in the face of the rate of both legal and illegal immigration.
Everyone knows this Uni lark is a con to keep lazy opinionated overgrown teens off the streets.
It also keeps rather a lot of 6th rate so called Academics off the street who pretend to teach them.
It also keeps thousands of so called admin people off the streets who have to administer this merrygoround and shuffle paper about which achieves nothing..
As for the £24k foreign students, this is just a con so that they later get to byepass immigration rules and get to stay here.I have seen this 1000 times.
What I object to is that these students never make any attempt to pay back the fees, so it is a tax funed holiday for a bunch of losers whom expect to be treated as an elite and are as thick as mince..
The fees should be paid by a bank loan at normal rates and if there are no commercial lenders, then too bad, no more gender studies for you Tristian. Where parents are still alive, parental guarantees must be put in place to cover the lenders.If the parents die, the loans come off the estate.
As a reasonable, middle of the road, type person, I believe that anyone who abuses the system shoul be put in a camp and forced to learn by rote.I believe a degree in “The Beatles” is still available for those who hurry.
In reply to Stillreading, I agree that it would greatly benefit our narcissistic yoof to learn about the rise and fall of previous civilisations. But what I would question is whether the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education (now pretending to be a university) really is one of the world’s leading authorities on classical civilisation or whether a real university like Durham or Oxbridge or even Bristol might be a better place for students interested in classical civilisations.
I suspect the main problem with education at all levels is that the educators have no experience of life outside the education system and it is getting worse. I went to grammar school and didn’t feel I was getting anything from it, so I left at 16 and started an engineering apprenticeship, which in those days involved day release and evening classes at technical college. The change in the level of teaching was astonishing. This was because all the lecturers had worked in engineering first. I later went to university and it was the same there. One of the mathematicians I worked with retired early to take up teaching, probably around 2000, and he found getting into teaching too frustrating and he gave up. Basically the schools didn’t want him because he made them look stupid.
My interpretation of the education system is that they are more concerned about meeting government set targets rather than providing an education. They have become government propaganda machines obsessed with equality and diversity. But there is no diversity of thinking which is what we really need. It is surely becoming obvious that there are too many universities and there are not jobs that require that level of education. The funding is just a Blair farce, with many not paying back the loans. My understanding is that many universities are short of funding which is why they want so many foreign students paying higher fees and why research is funded by government and businesses to meet their needs which diverts universities away from critical thinking. We have one big university – the university of woke.
What also concerns me most of all is that the specialisation needed today seems to result in people who haven’t the slightest idea about issues outside their own area and are far too trusting of other experts. I can’t understand how the climate nonsense has such a grip when there are physicists who must know the claimed science is not valid and cannot even see that the empirical evidence does not support it. It is just the same with Covid, most of the medical profession have forgotten the oath to do no harm.
I have seen a Thomas Sowell comment repeated a few times recently – “We are living in an era when sanity is controversial and insanity is just another viewpoint – and degeneracy only another lifestyle.” The revealing clothes proving the last point. I’ve seen prostitutes that look like grannies in comparison.
David, when my post went through I noticed your comment on ancient civilisations. Surely, it cannot be right to think that only 2-3 universities have the ability to teach this. My opinion is that if there are only a small number of people who are “authorities” on a subject then they will probably all have the same view and it might not be correct. It also suggests that nobody else can have a valid opinion and if you want the “yoof” to know about ancient civilisations then they cannot all go to these 3 universities, or even study other subjects. I’m surprised that you made this comment because it suggests that none of us can understand anything other than what we have been taught. The challenge is to have a lifetime of learning on as wide a range of subjects as possible.
I’m not sure what we can learn from ancient civilisations because so much changes. One factor being talked about is the collapse of confidence in the Roman currency due to coin clipping. Now we have banking systems all interlinked with the ability to print worthless money. There are some who think that money printing has come to an end an we will see a collapse of the banking system. It is the same idea but different conditions so what can we learn? The people who should know about the past (and present) economic conditions are the bankers and the governments, but is there any sign that they do?
The universities seem to be doing a good job of trashing all traditional beliefs and re-writing history to match their latest narratives, aided by the media. This results in another issue discussed by philosophers – we know longer know who we are or what is the purpose of life.
51% with ‘below 3 grade Ds’ is dreadful – 50 years ago (most of the limited number of proper) universities required As & Bs, with Cs sometimes only accepted after interviews.
£1000s in debt to learn nothing of value – I guess the little scamps just see it as three years of partying!
You are right of course David. I too doubt whether Roehampton whatever-it-is is the best institution to run a degree course on Classical Civilisations. I have a friend a generation younger than I, an Oxbridge graduate in Classics with a Cert Ed in addition and qualified therefore to teach Latin and Greek and the history of the civilisations around which these languages evolved as well as being equally able to teach two modern languages, French and Italian, up to “A” Level standard. This friend has been consistently unable to find a post in England in which any of these abilities are required. Modern languages are being reduced in many State secondary schools to no more than “token” subjects – e.g. the ability of the student to just about stammer out a request for a coffee or a loaf of bread when on a 3-day school visit to Paris or Rome or Seville. Very little hard grammar seems to enter into the learning process as far as I can see. As for the Classics – Latin or Greek (ancient or modern) forget it. Dumbing down? Never? Innit!
The quality of a university education from our top universities, Oxford and Cambridge, is being chronically undermined by diversity and inclusion.
We should all know by now that diversity and inclusion is being applied on behalf of black people from Africa and the West Indies. The other ethnicities are able to hold their own as well as us or better than us in our chronically dumbed-down education system.
Our degenerate deeply resentful white woke folk clearly have it in mind to replace us with black people – the people with the least cultural accomplishments and the weakest history. As anyone can see on television.
There can only be one reason that they have not chosen Indians, Chinese and other Asians for this purpose that have real ancient cultures. It is because they want to ridicule us as much as inhumanly possible. If it isn’t real then fake it. Books are being published and used in schools that teach faked black history.
There are several videos about this aberration on Simon Webb’s YouTube channel. Here is a link to one of them:
British universities rig their admissions system to try and allow in more black students –
Stillreading is also criticising Roehampton as not being fit to run a course in classic civilisations. Then he/she goes on to talk about an Oxbridge qualified classics graduate who is having trouble find a teaching job in that field. I don’t understand these views. The only place they will find teaching jobs is in other universities running those courses. They might get jobs in museums and in the media. I imagine that many get jobs in other fields and might even take other degrees. Boris studied Classics and look what he achieved.
There might be more universities than we need but I can’t accept that new universities cannot be created. This has happened continually since the first ones were established and there must be a need for them in less developed countries, if not here. Surely, the most important aspect of knowledge is that it can spread everywhere through education and that is what civilisation has done for us.
“What the UK DOES need of course is more home-trained dentists and doctors”, yet I read that “available places at medical schools have been reduced by 3,000 this year, from around 10,000 to 7,000.”
If this is correct and I see no reason to doubt it, am I stupid in wondering if there might be something sinister about this unfathomably crazy decision ?
The number of inhabitants in England increases steadily, every day, mostly brought about by dinghy-paddlers who seem to lose their passports en route to Dover (not that these misfortunes will delay the swift ride to a **** or a ***** hotel). But the glaringly obvious fact that an increase in population automatically demands an increase in doctors, dentists (where are all the NHS doctors for heaven’s sake ?) more nurses, more teachers, more police etc. Is this incomprehensible for MPs ? Is it not time for MPs to be qualified in something ?
As for the “involuntary imports” – many of these talented people seem to have learnt how to capture the long-sought secret of “eternal youth” although, oddly, immigration scribblers cannot notice the phenomenon. Maybe the ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS hold recognisable and respected medical and or dental qualifications as well ?