Jeff Randall Gets It Wrong

If someone like Randall can't even get simple HE policy right, then what chance for other commentators.

In today's Telegraph, Randall has an entertaining knockabout pop at education policy, and comes out with the depressingly common fallacy:

Yet Labour clings to its ludicrous target of driving 50 per cent of British school-leavers into university

Setting aside whether an HE participation target is 'ludicrous' or not, as any fule kno, that's not the policy.

Once again with feeling,

The policy is not to 'drive 50% of school leavers into university'.

It's for 50% of 18 to 30 year olds to have had some experience of higher education.

Jeff Randall is an experienced and influential journalist, and here he is reciting a popular, simple factual error that any graduate could have researched in a couple of minutes.

Yes, the standard of critiques of education standards remains depressingly low.

Internships

The National Internship Scheme is the name of the proposal for companies to offer three month internships to graduates having trouble in the labour market this summer.

As yet, details are a bit scanty. The companies named actually already offer internships. Does this mean that they'll be paid to do what they were going to do already, or will they add more interns?

Is three months long enough for graduates to gain useful skills (I think so, but will the employment market)?

What about other, established internship schemes? Will they be getting money? Who will administer these schemes, and how will students get onto them? Will it be limited to certain institutions (either purposely or effectively)?

And when the recession is over, will the companies then start to claim they can't offer internships without public money? This is the question that bothers me.

That said, I'm glad that John Denham and his departmnet are actually thinking about the situation that students will find themselves in and trying to do something about it. Let's hope they've got this right and the graduates benefit.

And finally (for today)

Stuff on internships for later.

Just a note about the Telegraph's coverage of the internship idea: 400,000 people get HE qualifications of some kind or other in a given year. About 270,000 people will get first degrees, and I'm sure the Telegraph didn't mean to imply anything else.

...and there's more

You wait months for a decent set of posts here and then a shed-load come all at once.

One point made by one of the arts and social scientist graduates interviewed for the Guardian is worth bringing up.

An unexpected, but entirely logical consequence of recession is that students will be finding it increasingly difficult to find the term-time employment they need to fund their studies. That's something that needs to be very seriously considered by policy-makers and institutions and I suspect it was never really taken into account when fees were set. It does suggest to me that the chance of the cap on fees being raised in the near future is pretty small.

What I think it will mean is that not only will loan repayments fall as fewer graduates earn the money required to pay them back, but more students will also drop out because they can't afford to pay their way. What's to be done about that?

Generation Crunch (Slight Return)

The supplementary article has some good points and a lot of opinion which may or may not be correct, but there is one quote which is, to put it mildly, contentious.

The expansion of higher education, driven by the government's target to put 50% of young people into it, has happened too quickly for the labour market.

Oh, has it? Unfortunately for this exciting assertion, the facts and research into the field say otherwise, as documented ad nauseam by this blog. There is a more subtle point, though, which is iterated by Professor Peter Dolton.

"When you have rising graduate unemployment, the effects are felt worst by graduates of non-vocational subjects and graduates from less prestigious universities. That's going to get even worse in recession."

That's true. The big rise in university numbers has come through non-vocational qualifications which will be hit hard by the coming recruitment downturn. The kind of jobs which will be less in evidence will be many of those that require a degree, but with no particular discipline preference. These were perfect for the likes of the large number of psychologists and similar subjects who are leaving university. It will be much harder for them, and we need to help them.

But Dolton is then attributed as saying this:

According to Dolton, the government's target of getting 50% of adults into higher education was based on influential research looking at adult earnings over an entire career.

I sincerely hope he didn't say that, because it's rubbish. I suspect he didn't say that at all. Maybe the Government's conviction about earnings (and hence their evidence for the introduction of tuition fees and the level at which they should be set) was influenced by this research, but anecdotally the 50% target was not set in that way (I'm not going into what I know and how I know it, but really, it doesn't seem to have been that rigorous), and the imperative for getting more people into HE comes from a series of reports about the future structure of the labour market, the most recent of which is Leitch - emphatically not a piece of work dealing with the financial impact of degrees on future earnings.

Unless Dolton is arguing that we need a lower proportion of the population with degrees than comparable economies (and I doubt he is), I think he's actually giving evidence about something else. His later quotes suggest that. Dolton and Vignoles do a lot of research on rates of return and know their stuff (certainly better than I do), and I think it is now clear that the rate of returns on degrees were oversold in the 90s, but that does not mean that fewer people should be going to university as that is a different argument.

It is left to Richard Reeves to make the point. A degree is still going to be important in this labour market, because the simple fact is that the more skills you have, the better off you will be when it comes to looking for work.

These articles do serve one purpose - they warn that the job market is difficult and if it prompts students to start applying now, all the better. But if it puts people off applying for jobs when they are actually there then you have to question what good these pieces did.

It would not have been difficult to point out that the industries most seriously affected are a fraction of the total employment market.

It would not have been difficult to point out that most people stress that there are still jobs available, but that it might not be as easy to access them.

It would not have been hard to find people who graduated in the last recession (HELLO! I'M HERE!) to tell how they fared during the recession (badly - that's why I'm worried now) and afterwards (not so badly).

The problem is that, as I pointed out below, there are actually two separate but related problems which have been conflated as one. The first is the likely shortage of jobs next summer. This is serious and all that we can do is try to keep as aware of what is (or isn't) happening.

The second is the profound lack of confidence that students have in the employment market, and that isn't directly related to the number of jobs that are available, it's related to the number of jobs that they think are available. We can, and we have to, work on that - not by pretending all is well in Happy Sunshine Land, but by telling students about those opportunities that still exist and assuring them that their years of effort have not been for nothing. That's just got a bit harder.