Mintball wrote:Mentioned before, but worth reiterating here. Huge increases in tertiary education are, for some reason, a plank of neo-liberalism, as explained by Ha-Joon Chang in 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism.
In the last couple of decades or so, even Switzerland, which had a very small tertiary system but obviously was a successful, advanced economy, has started vastly increasing tertiary education. So it's certainly not unique to the UK.
Possibly it's partly because, once you remove grants etc, it increases education as a business, both in terms of domestic and foreign students?
It fits the ideology of unburden the state and open it up to the markets.
Mintball wrote:
But it's also linked to or been helped by moves over the last 20-25 years by many employers to demand a graduate, irrespective of the degree subject, for jobs that do not really require a degree.
For that I blame the rise of the HR department. In the late eighties, the factory where I worked employed three thousand people and had a personnel department of about five. I work in a similar sized establishment now and they have a whole floor of people who spend their days dreaming up Apprentice style tasks for potential recruits.
I also share a desk with an extremely bright recent graduate who recalled going to a recruiting day for a large organisation. She was told that they were looking for two recruits out of a couple of hundred people. She waited till the first break and then headed for the car park never to return!
