JamesM

You would all be amazed at how many girls Hooters has supported through University in the US and Canada.

JonboyE

Bits of paper can be very important if you want someone to pay you. My richest client didn't make it past grade 4.

When I was of that age most of my contemporaries considered university as an opportunity to doss about at the state's expense for three years. The most useful thing half the students learned was their tolerance level of various types of narcotics.

Nowadays people treat a university education as vocational education. It is not done to advance knowledge but to increase future earning power. As such, I think it is perfectly reasonable to have to pay for it.

Oink

The only Hooters that I used to frequent regularly was in Tennessee and it seemed there that stripping supported them through Hooters.

MarkG

Your kid had better be the world's best hod carrier if he expects to compete against 3D printers and robots.

Jericho79

Except that it's not just the individual who benefits from higher education- the whole society does. Germany, Denmark etc have already realised this.

MarkG

So has America. Last I looked, student loans were the biggest single source of new credit in the US economy, which is why the government keep pushing kids to borrow lots of money to blow on a Tarantino Studies degree. Keeps them off the unemployment figures, too.

Oink

And it acts as rationing system that keeps the smelly kids out.

JonboyE

I don't have an issue with free education. I approve. I don't approve of people expecting the state (i.e. other people) to subsidize their future superior income.

JonboyE

Except for those that smell of money.

ExKiwilass

why?

dbd33

You have the wrong end of the stick. I'm not arguing that one should aspire to be hod carriers just that since there are loads of people with degrees and no jobs, a degree is necessary to be an hod carrier. (Note that hod carrier here is not intended to refer literally and only to hod carriers but to any unskilled or semi-skilled work).

The lack of a degree is a handicap to finding work just as the lack of a leg is a handicap to finding work. I understand that a degree is as relevant to hod carrying as a leg is to accountancy but it's something employers except one to have.

dbd33

The acquistion of any skill may stimulate intellectual curiousity so being able to write is of potential benefit there. The lack of skills commonly held is a social disadvantage so illiteracy, albeit in the limited sense of not being able to read or write documents created by hand, is a disadvantage there. The presumption that children need not be able to deal with traditional written forms because they'll always have an electronic device to hand and will have no interest in source documents seems to me presumptuous; what if the child wants to be an archivist?

My analogy remains the use of a knife and fork; it's not strictly necessary to be familiar with that technology but I'd certainly prefer my children to have mastered it; even if they're living in Canada. I don't think anything is lost by being able to use real cutlery as well as a spork or chopsticks and I don't think any skill or knowledge need be sacrificed in order to learn to write.

MarkG

And my point was that that may be true today, but won't be for kids reaching university age in twenty years, because 'work' won't exist in the current form for most of their lives. We're living in the tail end of the industrial era, and jobs will go with it.

Most of our ancestors didn't 'work' in the current sense (i.e. doing the same thing all year for someone else), and most of our descendants won't, either. Modern work is a product of the centralization of economic production in the industrial age, and won't last long as production becomes increasingly decentralised and automated.

Probably about the worst thing a kid born today could do is decide they want to be a doctor, borrow huge amounts of money to spend ten years taking a medical degree, and graduate in 2045, just in time to be replaced by a robot. Even Hooters may no longer be hiring humans by then, if they can just clone girl-bots instead.

Steve_

The whole thing in the U.S. seems to me to be because schools there in many areas are totally awful so they have to go to college to get any sense of an education at all.

Not that the UK is immune, I remember when everyone was complaining about how A-levels were getting to be "too easy" and then when they interviewed these kids with fantastic results most of them seemed to have A-levels in things like art or drama which weren't even available when I was in school.

The purpose of education which a lot of people seem to forget is to learn something useful, not whether it impresses the person interviewing you for a job.

There's this thing in the U.S. and Canada where you see people with master's degrees working photocopiers.

Well, I'm not surprised, because I've hired people for clerical jobs and I've had people submit résumés with a master's degree in microbiology for example. What use is that in an office job? Or I had one once with a master's in religious studies and psychology I think it was. Yeah, we often use Latin around the office.

Get a degree in something that is actually useful, like accounting or business administration. Or if you're going to be an engineer, get a degree in engineering etc. Don't be surprised if you can't get a job after doing a degree in art history or something like that. Prince William can pull that off, you can't.

MarylandNed

If you think the UK has good social mobility, you need to go back and do some research. According to the OECD, the UK has the worst social mobility in the western world.