On University funding and arts

Truth of the day: The Student Loan system is a racket which needs reform before it is expanded. Excerpt:

It is not commonly appreciated the extent to which the Student Loan system is based on lies.

The first deception is that the system is progressive. This is untrue. Wealthier students either opt out of it, with the help of “bank of Mum and Dad”, or repay early, with help of large City salaries. Below them is a cohort of people who earn enough to be constantly required to repay while in employment, but never enough to repay the liability. This particularly effects women, who take career breaks for childcare, or those in caring professions like nursing or medicine.

As The Great University Con spells out this is very true, we are saddling a generation with unrepayable debt for a lot of useless degrees. I agree with that book's author that we need to get rid of the idea that you need a degree to be a nurse, police officer, etc, and scrap the 50% of students going to uni goal. If we get back to 25-30%, then rather than as the Reaction piece author suggests- 

restore tuition grants to certain critical professions, such as nursing, medicine or engineering and encourage employers to offer scholarships and other support. 

We should just abolish fees, provided we abolished any useless/woke course (basic rule- anything with 'studies' in the course title. 

Related, this old post from Unherd asks Who gains from the great university scam? One short answer is the Vice Chancellors...

Finally, the Spectator last week explained Why universities are bad for the arts. This is very true:

the current, unprecedented sprawl of university arts degrees has failed to produce the promised renaissance in music, theatre, art or literature. In fact, the cultural relevance and overall artistic accomplishments of these forms has never been lower.

and

Studies have shown that architecture courses make architects actively incapable of designing buildings accessible to or reflective of the needs of the average person. Great musicians, too, are rarely made by universities – if they were we’d have better music now than ever before in history. Is anyone really willing to make that claim?

No. It is clear that the expansion of universities introduced by Blair has been a disaster financially, culturally, and artistically. Ideally along with the drop in places I proposed earlier I'd like to see at least a quarter do to the wall, to be replaced mayve with vocational/technical colleges. 

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