Q&A: should we hold universities accountable for their bad courses?

Hi there, I love it when my readers share interesting stories they have read with me in the media and I felt so strongly about one article that I have decided to do a post all about it given how it relates to a global problem that so many countries from China to the UK to South Africa are facing: youth unemployment. My reader Choaniki shared this story from the Observer which attacked PM Rishi Sunak for telling poorer, working class students that they should think more about getting apprenticeships rather than imagining that they simply must go to university to attain social mobility. The writer Martha Gill attacks Sunak for being elitist and argues that working class, poorer have as much right to dream about going to university, getting a degree in order to expand their minds and dream of a better, brighter future. However, there was one line that she wrote that I profoundly disagreed with and I quote, "if courses are failing to get people on the job ladder, they should be improved." My regular readers will know that I came from a very working class family but managed to attain social mobility in my adulthood, thus I am all for improving social mobility for the working classes; however when Gill placed the responsibility on university courses to make sure that they do get their students good jobs, that's when I think she is quite unreasonable. Given that youth unemployment is such a massive global problem today and that I've talked a lot about the theme of further education on my blog, I think this would be the kind of topic that I can shed a lot of light on, since Gill was talking about how those working class students (like me) could and should access social mobility. 

Can you really place the onus on the university to get students good jobs? 

It is completely unfair to place the burden on the university to make the courses so good that employers would be lining up to employ these graduates - the only universities where that actually happens would be those at the very top of the league tables like Oxford and Cambridge, but allow me to speak both as a business owner as well as someone who has been a gatekeeper for companies in the past, companies want to hire the very best people for the job. We don't have the time nor inclination to look at the details of the course that the applicant has studied in detail, we're not here to evaluate how bad or good the course has been - we simply want to know something far more basic than that: is this applicant stupid or clever? Hence the most common way we would ascertain that is by looking at the position of the university on the league tables, now just to illustrate how easy it is to do this, I know that my friend went to the university of York but I don't know off the top of my head where it sits on the league tables. So I did a Google search and it took me exactly 24 seconds to find out that it currently sits in 17th place in the UK universities league tables ouartt of 130 universities - a decent, respectable position. The rule of thumb we use is based on the principle that an intelligent student will have the grades to get into a good university whilst an incompetent student would end up in a university at the bottom of the league table. So the universities languishing at the wrong end of the league table would be struggling to educate students with poor grades whilst the universities like Oxford and Cambridge barely have to do anything with those students as they are already attracting not just the brightest students in the country, but in the world. In short, we use the university admission criteria as the measure of the calibre of the student and we certainly do not expect the university to 'cure' stupidity. To put it very bluntly, if you sent a stupid student to Cambridge as some kind of social experiment to give a working class boy a chance to have an elite education, he would not be able to keep up with the rest of the brilliant students there and would certainly fail all the exams. Even a great like Cambridge cannot magically turn a dumb student into a brilliant scholar - all they're doing is simply working with a cohort of students who have already proven themselves to be super intelligent. So if you were to ask the University of Buckingham (ranked 127 out of 130) why their graduates aren't earning as much as those from Oxford, the staff there would roll their eyes and say, "do you realize the quality of students who apply to our university. Like seriously what kind of miracles or magic do you want us to perform here then?"

But surely there is a valid point about improving the quality of teaching at universities? 

Not really, as it is a moot point. Undergraduates do pay a lot for their degrees so they are looking for good value for their money, so for example, a science undergraduate would be looking to have access to a very well-equipped, modern laboratory and all that costs a lot of money. But imagine this rather unreal situation if a rich sponsor decides to give the University of Buckingham the best equipment and facilities that money can buy, the students walk onto the campus and think that they have just stepped into the most luxurious five star hotel, complete with a world class golf course and health spa which they can all access for free. The catering is also sponsored and the meals there are better than the most exclusive restaurants in London. On top of that, the university is willing to hire the best experts in all the subjects to work there, by offering the best salaries for their teaching staff. Would all that money invested turn the University of Buckingham into a world class university that can compete with Oxford and Cambridge? No, it wouldn't make much difference at all as long as the students who apply to that university are still those with terrible results. The best case scenario is that you create an expensive university that is the carbon copy of the exclusive "public" schools in the UK - oh the name is so ironic as Eton College is one such public school but it is so prohibitively expensive that it the fees excludes anyone who isn't ridiculously rich. However, wealthy parents send their kids to Eton not in pursuit of academic excellence, rather it is a status symbol to show how rich they are. Prince Harry was one of their most famous students and he a terrible student - he left Eton with two A levels, a B for art and a D for geography, only to be revealed that he cheated for his art exams as the teachers were so afraid that he would fail it that they helped him complete part of his course work. With those grades, he would have probably ended up at a university at the bottom of the league tables, that's why he went to join the army instead after Eton. Prince Harry had the best of everything money could buy at Eton, yet they had to resort to cheating to help him pass his A levels? So the bottom line is this - you simply can't polish a turd.

Instead of improving the quality of the courses, do you have a better suggestion then to the situation?

I do actually. We need to begin by accepting that there is a pecking order when it comes to every cohort of students when it comes to intelligence, there will be those who are the most intelligent ones, they go off to Oxford and Cambridge down to the most stupid ones who really shouldn't bother with a degree in the first place. Sorry if that sounds blunt but that's just the way things are.in that you cannot expect the university to perform magical miracles in curing stupidity. What you can do however, is to make sure that intelligent students from working class backgrounds do not fall through the cracks in their earlier education - throughout primary and secondary school, so they are identified as above average talents who are given all the help they need to go to a good university. So if you wanna help those poorer kids attain social mobility, invest in primary and secondary education so that smarter working class students will have a better chance to attain the grades they deserve. What Gill was suggesting was utterly stupid, you have students who end up in these universities at the bottom of the league tables and she expects them to perform miracles? Let's ask an important question - why did these students end up there in the first place? It is because they have suffered the consequences of a poor quality primary and secondary education, there are massive gaps in their training and knowledge which have led to them performing so poorly in their A levels and thus you cannot expect the university to fix those problems which they didn't even cause in the first place - no, we need to go back to the root of the problem and solve them back at primary and secondary level education. In the UK, the rich parents can afford to buy the quality of education that they want for their children but for the working class kids, it is the luck of the draw as they just go to the local school, hope for the best whilst expecting the worst. So if you want working class kids to attain social mobility, you have to start the moment they enter the education system at a very young age, not wait for the chronically underfunded education system to wreck years of havoc on them and then somehow expect the university to perform magical miracles to somehow fix everything. 

Gill attacked courses like French and English literature, given that you speak French and actually do use French in your work, do you think her criticism was fair and justified?

I don't wanna say, "French is super useful, I've made a lot of money with my French language skills so you must study it." No, for me, I have a unique talent and ability to master foreign languages and that is why I managed to master French in short period of time to the standard where I can use it in the context of work to make a lot of money. You should pick a subject that you are not only very interested in but you know you're going to excel at. There's no point in saying, oh engineering degrees are useful, only to find that you not only have no interest in it but totally suck at it. Furthermore even if you could speak a language like French fluently, it doesn't guarantee that there will be companies lining up to hire you. I use French in the context of investment banking; now that's not what I studied at university but instead, I had taught myself everything I needed to know along the way after working for so many years in this industry. Likewise, I'm also fluent in Spanish and my Spanish is totally self-taught. In reality, there is little difference in my French and Spanish in that I'm fluent in both languages; whilst my accent may give away the fact that I'm not a native speaker of either languages, you can't really tell that I studied French at university whilst I have never ever had a lesson in Spanish in my life. Once again, Gill has been totally unrealistic in what she thinks students should expect from their degrees. Being able to learn French at university gave me the confidence to go on to acquire other skills that I found useful in my career; in any case I wasn't passively sitting in my French classes like a dummy waiting for the French teacher to explain everything to me. I was doing a lot of my own reading and research, I was watching French films, traveling independently around France, even getting part time jobs where I could use my French - at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what subject you're studying at university as long as you go through that process of independently acquiring the knowledge to master that topic. So once you have done that you have the tools to go on and acquire any kind of knowledge you need in the future.

Well then what's even the point of going to university if you're just talking about just teaching yourself stuff? 

That's right - as an undergraduate, you are expected to function very autonomously, in sharp contrast, the young children in kindergarten need the teachers to explain everything slowly and clearly to them. Thus if you're completely capable of figuring stuff out on your own and have the discipline to do what I did when I became fluent in Spanish without the help of a teacher, then you should not bother with university at all! Save yourself some precious time and money and get on with your career. In any case, let's remember that when you enrol for a French degree at a university, the university is responsible for teaching you French rather than helping you get a job upon graduation. If you're really smart but feel that you don't want to spend all that time getting a degree, then just drop out having made your point that you're clearly smart enough to gain entry to one of the world's top universities. But of course, you need to then focus on all those other activities that make you very employable and attractive in the job market without worrying about coursework and exams. If you want to go into a career like medicine or engineering, then you really need the degree or you won't be licensed to practice. But if you're doing something to do with languages, then what the hell do you need a degree for? You can either just get on with learning the language on your own (without the help of a university) or better still, just do a degree in something more useful than learn that language in your free time. I do agree that it is a very bad idea to do a degree in anything to do with languages because you can master a language without a university course. My friend Nadia is from Italy, she is 100% Italian, she speaks Italian as her mother tongue and nobody is going to ask her to produce a degree to prove that she is fluent in Italian - any employer would simply test her Italian to ensure that she is indeed completely fluent if it is an important component of the job. I have been roped in on several occasions to test if a candidate is indeed as fluent as they claim to be in French and Chinese. When I worked for a Peruvian company, they never once asked me to produce a single piece of paperwork to prove that I was fluent in Spanish - paper qualifications are so totally overrated.

But surely a degree would help considerably in the job hunting process, no?

How quickly you get a job, the kind of job you eventually get and how much you get paid for it, now all that depends very much on the individual and often it is those individuals who get a lot of help from their rich parents who get the best results whilst the working class students who get little or no help from their parents are left figuring all this out for themselves and thus struggle a lot more to get a decent first job. The degree the university gives you is only one part of a much bigger equation and Gill has completely ignored all the other vital factors involved in this equation. Of course, I have seen some very resourceful young people figure all this out for themselves - there's this young lady in Singapore who really impressed me. Let's call her Ms Wang, her parents moved from China to Singapore to give her a brighter future but they couldn't even speak English and were stuck doing some very poorly paid working class work to make sure she could go to university. They could only do that much for her and then the rest was up to her - she was super ambitious and understood the power of having the right connections. That was why she made a genuine effort to network with anyone and everyone who might be in a position to help her, I ended up crossing paths with her some years ago when I was doing some business in Singapore; back then, she was just an undergraduate but when I explained to her some of the business development plans I had in Singapore, she actually managed to introduce me to some very good clients and I never really figured out how an undergrad could get to know senior directors in the banking sector like that, but that's exactly the kind of privilege that a rich kid would have if daddy or mommy was a senior director at a bank and the parents would be able to call in a favour or two to help their child get an internship or job there. Ms Wang did so much networking, she also learnt French to a very high standard, she did loads of part time work to beef up her CV; she had done so much on top of what her degree demanded of her, there's a lot we can all learn from her. She was realistic, she understood that having a degree was simply not enough to land her a good job and thus she was prepared to do whatever it took to get her career off to a flying start - she didn't want to end up poor and working class like her parents. 

Do universities have a careers service or office to help their graduates find jobs? 

Yes, practically all universities will have a department like that but they don't have a magic wand to wave - they will tell you a lot of things that you already know like the importance of having some part time work to gain work experience or how useful it would be to speak a second or third language. But what the student does with that information is beyond their control - imagine if the student is told, "I can see you did Spanish for a few years at school, why don't you spend free your time at university working on it to ensure that you will become fluent enough in Spanish to use it in your future jobs?" A student may just end up doing absolutely nothing with that piece of advice whilst a caring parent will be in a position to apply a lot more pressure on the student to follow through on that advice, by sending them on a work experience placement in Spain for three months. A university cannot force a student to do something like that whilst a parent probably can. This is why students with parents who are both rich and caring are in the best position to get good jobs upon graduation, whilst in the case of Ms Wang, it was not like her parents didn't want to help her, they simply weren't educated enough to even begin to figure out how they could help her. So if Ms Wang went to her university's career services office, she would just be yet another student seeking help. They would tell her that an internship would be rather useful but they wouldn't try that hard to get her one as they're not that motivated to her help - the onus would be on her to find her own internship. Now, contrast that to a caring parent who is committed to making sure that sure that their child does indeed get the best possible internship. There is simply no comparison and that's why people like Ms Wang are at a huge disadvantage - the odds were set against her and she had to work far harder to get to where she is today compared to the other young people who had rich well-educated parents who offered much help with this process. 

Should 'useless degree courses' be scrapped then? 

Yes and no. There is an element of 'buyers beware' when it comes to degrees - the onus is on the student to do their research about what they're getting into when they enrol in a course and this is actually just a straightforward business transaction between buyer (the student paying for the degree) and seller (the university providing that course). If both parties are entirely happy with the arrangement, then there is no need for the government to intervene to prevent that from happening, even if that degree course can be deemed 'useless' by some people. Allow me to give you an analogy to illustrate this point: my friend Howard took his children to see the new Barbie movie and his kids loved it, they then pestered him to buy a whole lot of Barbie merchandise - I took one look at that post on Facebook and just shook my head, I thought, "what a waste of money, three months from now, they're going to lose interest in it and all that expensive merchandise is simply going to disappear into a store room and collect dust for a long time until you decide to throw it out." Whilst I personally consider all that Barbie merchandise 'useless', should the government ban them? Should a third party intervene when Howard spends a lot of money buying all that to please his children? I don't think so - after all, it is a legitimate financial transaction between buyer and seller, Howard is very happy to spend that money buying those gifts for his kids and they are (for now) very happy with those gifts. The fact that I consider them 'useless' and 'a total waste of money' is not relevant nor is it a sufficient reason for anyone to intervene and prevent Howard from making that purchase. Likewise, I was in the supermarket and I saw a mother buying a huge packet of Haribo sweets for her son; I silently judged her for that bad decision Those sweets are full of processed sugar and her son was already quite obese, she really shouldn't be getting her fat son even more sweets like Haribo but would I go as far as to say that Haribo sweets should be banned? No, it would be a step too far, the mother buying those sweets is making a private business transaction and both the buyer (the mother) and the seller (the supermarket) are perfectly happy with the arrangement. Hence by that token, if a student enrols in a useless course then they have to take responsibility for that terrible decision.

But government intervention isn't something new - take the health warning on cigarettes for example.

At what point do you draw the line when it comes to things like that? People who want to smoke will just ignore those health warnings and smoke anyway. But let's take the example of the Haribo sweets -  the manufacturer is mandated by law to put very clear information about what the ingredients are, what the calorie and nutritional values are on the packaging in order for the consumer to make an informed choice. If they read that information and still decide to go ahead and consume a product like Haribo, then that is their decision and right to do so. Likewise, any student can look up all the information they need about a course at a university before applying as all the information they need is available in the public domain. As a consumer, the responsibility is on you to verify all the information on the product you're about to purchase before handing your money over; that principle is exactly the same whether you are dealing with a confectionary product like Haribo or a course at Buckingham University. The buyer needs to bear some responsibility when it comes to their decision to do that course and as long as the university is not guilty of false advertising, then there's no need for the government to intervene. But if a student is dumb enough not to have done sufficient research before signing up to a course at a terrible university, how's that any different from a fat person consuming even more Haribo sweets? A fat person consuming even more sweets is undoubtedly reflects bad judgment but at what stage should the government step in to save this person from making a terrible decision? Well, I work in financial services and I would expect the government to step in to stop fraud from happening - for example, if a salesman was misrepresenting a product and promising the investor returns that will never happen, in that situation, then please, we need the government to step in and stop that at once as it is a crime. But if a student wants to do a course in English literature at Buckingham university, that's not a crime even if it is a bad decision on the part of the student. I'll put that in the same category as a fat person eating too many Haribo sweets. I don't condone it but I wouldn't go as far as to ban it. 

Why do students still enrol in courses at bad universities then? Are they somehow misled or deceived? 

It would vary on a case by case basis but I would say that generally, the link between having a good degree and a successful career isn't that strong! Ultimately, it is because you need to be really good at exams in order to get into a good university and then graduate with top grades, but there really isn't a job out there where a company or organisation pays you good money to study like that. You are really young when you go to university, you could be as young as 18 and if your family is rich, then you can have the luxury of simply having those few years to figure out what you really want to do in life rather than putting all your eggs in one basket and counting on that degree to give you the means to get your dream job. Thus for some of these richer students, going to Buckingham University to do a very useless course like English literature is no different from Howard buying his kids loads of Barbie merchandise. Is it a good use of money? No, but they have enough money to spend on luxuries and they're not poor, so they really don't mind or care. Context is important: if Howard had spent his last £500 on buying the Barbie merchandise for his kids instead of say paying his rent or his wife's medical bills, then that will lead to some serious consequences. But if he was a very rich man with plenty more money in the bank, then he would not miss that £500 at all and if he could make his kids happy with those gifts,  he would think that it was worth it. So in a best case scenario, someone like Howard's daughter may do badly for her A levels, end up at a terrible university but he would still use his connections to get her a really nice first job. But in a worse case scenario, a poor kid from a working class family may pin all his hopes on his degree as a path to social mobility, only to find that his degree is just not good enough to be taken seriously by people like me. Now that poor kid from a working class family may end up as Howard's daughter's classmate at the same university, but the consequences for them are quite different and thus Howard's daughter effectively gets away with being a bad student, whilst the poor working class kid is punished quite harshly for the same 'crime'. And no, of course it is not fair but life has never been fair.

Are there any practical steps that courses can be improved in the short run then? 

If you have a degree from an elite university like Oxford or Cambridge, then employers will be lining up to hire you. But if you have a degree from a terrible university, then my question for you is this: why even bother? If I had such terrible A level results that I can't even get into a half decent university, then I'd not even bother with a degree and just start working immediately to have that 'too cool for university' accolade. There are so many useful things that every student can do to help themselves - learn a foreign language or three, get loads of work experience to prove that you can function in the real world, start networking and expand your network of professional connections, do loads of research about what your ideal career would be, step out of your comfort zone to grow as a person and develop your soft skills by engaging with people from a very wide range of social backgrounds rather than people who are quite similar to yourself. 

You're just placing the onus now on the individual rather than improving the system? 

You can wait forever for the unfair system to improve or you can take some concrete steps to help yourself today, trust me - the latter is going to be far more satisfying and rewarding than the former. You ought to take charge of the situation. 

How can you justify taking that stance? 

Ultimately we need to accept that there is a bell curve distribution when it comes to human intelligence, so there is a small number of people who are super intelligent and they are the ones who go on to become doctors, scientists, super rich businessmen or engineers who invent incredible things that make our lives better. Then you have the bulk of the population who are plain average and these are just the worker ants in our society who will not make much of a difference, they don't have that much brains but can be trained to do their jobs well enough to remain gainfully employed. Then you have those at the bottom of the food chain who are simply unemployable for most jobs apart from those which are the very simplest because they are, well, for want of a better word, just too stupid. That's the way our human societies have been for a long time and no, you can't take someone from the bottom end of the food chain and try to use education to somehow boost their IQ and turn them into intelligent scholars. Rather, a far more sensible approach to this issue is to make sure those doing the very worst working class jobs are treated fairly, such as by paying them a living wage and making sure their children get a decent education. You can call that a form of charity, I call that socialism - that's when we take some of the wealth from the rich in the form of various taxes and use that money to help the poor. Gill is barking up the wrong tree, by pointing the finger at the university and accusing them of letting the students down. 

To be fair, she isn't expecting miracles, she just wants these students to be able to find a job upon graduation.

But what is the difference between a course at Buckingham University and a course at Oxford? The course material that Oxford uses is in the public domain - it's not like the students at Oxford have to sign an NDA never to divulge the course material to third party. The key difference in the courses boils down to the prestige that comes with Oxford as well as the fact that you're studying alongside other extremely talented and intelligent students - you will be inspired no matter where you look on the campus on Oxford. Oh look, there's Malala Yousafzai on her way to her lectures. But for Buckingham university, they cannot replicate the prestige if they are constantly attracting only the worst students to their courses and there's no point in raising the bar of entry, as no straight A student would want to go to a university without that prestige factor. So there's literally nothing the staff at Buckingham University about this reputational issue and as for being surrounded by the brightest students, at Buckingham you will be surrounded by quite the opposite, those who failed their A level exams because they were either stupid or lazy (or both). Needless to say, you would be hard pressed to find anyone in that cohort to inspire you. There's really nothing the staff at Buckingham University can do to fix either problems as they are not related to the teaching style or the course content - it all stems from the quality of their students and therefore Gill is totally wrong when she places all the blame on the teaching staff at these universities. Let's imagine we conduct a social experiment, we swap the teaching staff from Oxford to Buckingham and so the students at Buckingham university can get Oxford-quality teaching - would this then solve the problem of making them unemployable? No, because even the best staff at Oxford can't give these students a degree from Oxford - you can only get that if you have earned yourself a place at Oxford University and these students at Buckingham have totally failed to do that. Even if the Oxford teaching staff manage to get Malala Yousafzai to come in as a guest speaker, that's just for one day and you still have that problem whereby these average students are not going to learn anything from each other.

So you're blaming the students rather than the universities? 

It's a complex issue but you can't even begin to solve such a big problem if you're blaming the wrong party to start with!

But staying with your 'experiment', surely it would benefit the students to have such Oxford quality teaching?

Not really. You're making the assumption that an excellent teacher can get any student to pass a really difficult exam but that doesn't happen in real life; the litmus test is if we could subject the students from Buckingham to an exam at Oxford - remember, we're dealing with students who performed very poorly for their A level exams. Would a few lessons with the very best Oxford lecturers allow them to fly through the hardest exams at Oxford university with flying colours? Of course not. They would fail miserably even if they had those Oxford teachers for three years. Let me give you an analogy, my father watches a lot of TV and that's all he does all day apart from his three meals. So once, I tried to establish rapport with him as I saw that he was watching a documentary about Korean pop culture on a Chinese TV station and so I thought oh I really like K-pop as well. So I watched it with him and when there was a commercial break, I asked my father what he thought about the programme that we had just watched together, my father really struggled to answer that basic question as he really wasn't paying attention. He was either half asleep or daydreaming (or both), he barely remembered that it was about South Korea but couldn't even remember anything about the interview with a very famous Korean actor that we had literally just watched moments ago. I was baffled at just how little information he gleamed from the programme despite the fact that we both watched it together - I learnt a lot, he learnt nothing. Just because my father watched the documentary doesn't mean he actually learnt anything from it, the same way just because a student attends a class doesn't mean they have actually learnt anything - that's why we have exams at schools and universities, to test if the students have properly understood the topic. Thus you can throw as many resources as you want at students from Buckingham University but will that actually lead to them passing more difficult exams? The answer is no. I have no doubt that the quality of the lessons offered by the Oxford teaching staff would be excellent but it's just that correlation between better teaching and these students actually being able to pass much harder exams that I find quite contentious. 

How does this relate to rising youth unemployment then? 

Too many young people are going to universities at a time when there simply aren't enough jobs for graduates out there, as a result many graduates end up doing jobs which they are overqualified for or simply end up taking a job that has absolutely nothing to do with what they studied. Thus for them, university was a waste of time, it didn't help with their careers - they are no better off with that degree. The only people to benefit from this situation are the universities who are providing these degrees that have totally failed their students - Gill's solution would be to put pressure on the universities to fix their syllabus or teaching methods so the students graduate with a much more useful degree. However I have already explained why this is virtually impossible, so the alternative is simply to get these students to seek alternative forms of further education that will lead to them being able to get jobs that do not need a degree. Would you rather be a gainfully employed electrician or an unemployed graduate? Now this should be obvious to most people, but the youth unemployment situation tells a different story. There is a complete mismatch of supply and demand in the labour market. 

How did we end up in this messy situation?

It is only natural that all parents want their kids to go into the very best jobs, so they want them to grow up to become lawyers, engineers, scientists, investment bankers and other well paid prestigious jobs but if too many students get an education for that kind of job without taking heed of the demand for graduates in those industry, then we have created a problem that we are facing today of oversupply of graduates leading to youth unemployment. So if you have a degree from Oxford and you want to become an engineer, no problem but if you have a degree from the University of Buckingham, then you're in trouble. So unless you can get a degree from a good university in this context, my advice to young people is simply not to bother with a degree at all. That's why the person serving you coffee at Starbucks may have a masters degree, now where do I even begin to dissect what went wrong there? Why were these people duped into getting a degree in the first place? But then, how is this any different from the morbidly obese man still consuming too many sweets and destroying his health? There will always be some people out there making irrational decisions that will be make their situations worse. Whilst some of us are lucky enough to have family members who will guide us away from these bad decisions whilst others are either left on their own to make these awful mistakes or worse, have equally clueless family members who are responsible for pushing them into these bad decisions. The issue is impossible to resolve as most people would think, "oh that's a shame, a graduate working in Starbucks but that would never happen to me (or my child) - that may happen to others, not me." The government cannot be expected protect people who choose to take that mindset; after all, that's a decision that they have to take based on what they think their chances would be when it comes to going down this path of getting a degree and what kinds of job that degree would give them access to. 

So there you go, that's it from me on this rather contentious topic, what do you think? What more can be done about these failing universities or is Gill simply blaming the wrong party? Why would a student sign up for a one of these courses at a university languishing at the bottom of the league tables then? Is there a need for government intervention or is this merely an agreement between buyer and seller on the private market when it comes to higher education? What more could be done to reduce youth unemployment today? Have you ever met a very highly educated young person who simply cannot find a decent job to match their degree(s)? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.