Verbal

It's really beside the point - and a tad too much clutching at stereotypical straws. The correlation between rates of college/university education and prosperity exists because - in the main - graduates have developed their intellectual skills more than non-graduates in such a way - generally - that they are able to parlay these skills into new businesses, innovation, paying jobs, etc. It's a bell curve argument - and doesn't have a damned thing to do with your or my petty prejudices.

Frankly, you really are hoist by your own petard on this. If you complain about students' educational standards and then post punctuation-free paragraphs, you could easily be accused of not fully understanding the root causes of whatever it is you didn't like about them.

Sorry Nick but companies always used to bear the full cost of apprenticeships. Now they're just corporate welfare scroungers, cadging a few quid off of the taxpayer.

Since you raise it, it always amuses me when the 'where's there's muck there's brass' types start pontificating on here about the heroics of capitalists - because large numbers of capitalist wonderkids are utterly dependent on the public sector. PFI companies are one of the best examples. Another is the dependency of many companies on government to provide funding for apprenticeships. For heaven's sake, the cost is minimal (apprentices are cheap labour) - why the hell do business owners need to go cap in hand to the government to fund their schemes?

A sweatshop full of slave labourers can have high productivity. So no - you need the RMT to be as militant as possible for you to maintain a decent lifestyle. Union activity shares value around of course - leaving a tad less for employers and shareholders.

Dibden you're a sweetheart. Shame that's not my best side.

The socialist republic of chiswick.

And Delldays - life is too short to rummage through all your pithy one-liners, but if bankers went on strike - yes, I'd sack 'em. Replace them with you - and even I'd admit you'd do a better job.

You're afraid it's true, aren't you. Well guess what? It is! Not for the localised inconvenience, but activities that create a high wage economy - of which union action is one - helps sustain your ability to buy your Wii. Honest, it's true. Ask any decent economist, if that's not an oxymoron.

Try this. Instead of criticising them, stand back and applaud loudly. Without our obnoxious unions driving up wage levels, we'd slip back into being some kind of proto-East european low-wage, low-economic-activity dust bowl of an economy. The paradox of aggressive unions - and unions in general - is that we all benefit. It may not seem that way, but we do.

Tax evasion costs the exchequer ten times the amount benefit fraud does, and it's not worse?!

Ah, I see why you're 'special' now. Never mind. You'll wake up in the middle of the night and suddenly see the simple logic of my earlier post. When you do, let me know and I'll send you a welcome pack to Verbal's Universe. It's very nice in here.

Well if they're the brightest of the bright they go to Oxford and do 'PPE' (Politics, Philosophy and Economics), not economics. This trains them to see the world in a less disconnected way. Higher education, they'll learn, is both a public good and a private benefit. The public good is easy enough to see, because without it, this country would be about on a par with Albania as an an economic powerhouse. The country benefits hugely from the training and development of a kind of intellectual gene pool. There is a strong correlation between the percentage of people who have a university education and prosperity. (The US educates a higher proportion than us; a powerful tiger economy like S Korea educates 80% of its 21 year olds to university standard). But it's precisely because higher education has been seen as both a private benefit and a public good that there has never been a popular challenge to the idea of meeting many of the costs of universities out of grants from general taxation. Like it or not, the taxes you pay as non-uni goers actually helps you - among other things by not being stuck in a country which had fallen into a 1950s rot by idiotically defying the economic laws of gravity by dismantling its (extraordinarily good) university system. One of the corollaries of 'public good' is that universities should attract the brightest talents - whatever their circumstances. In other words, universities must be about equality of opportunity. The problem is, we live in a class-ridden society, so that's not easy. Working class parents, and their offspring, tend to view money owing as debt; middle class people do not. It's why for example middle class people tend to take out large mortgages, because they see it (sometimes very foolishly) as a no-lose investment, not debt. There is no right or wrong in this. A tax to you is a debt to someone else. It's an economically rational decision to make NOT to go to university and face what looks like a mountain of debt. Seeing it as debt is rational in another way. If the wonderful world laid out for you by a middle class, well-connected upbringing leads you to a 500,000 job, paying off a uni loan is no biggy. If however you bump along at 21,000, the marginal cost is much, much higher. And in a world now where every pennny counts, that's going to look very much like a cost you want to avoid. If you think this has NO consequences for social mobility - ie that the brightest have the best educational opportunities regardless of class or income - you are very, very wrong. So trousers, all you're proving with your exasperated 'why don't people see what I see' argument, is that you're deeply middle class. End - as they say in these parts - of.

Stanley Fish's demolition of Browne in the New York Times (the comments below the article are quite telling too.) http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/the-value-of-higher-education-made-literal/

One of the most impressive features of our zoological specimen loungers is their sense of proportion. What more balanced argument could there be than that hundreds of men and women should lose their jobs because one bloke can't get to a game of football in the way he considers the most convenient? Try as I might, I can't fault the logic.

I don't know whether your experiences are 'valid' or not (whatever that means). I was saying you can't generalise to a national picture from them. Were they so poorly taught that they weren't able to punctuate?

They already do. The number of film scripts I've been handed by station staff...

Yes, extrapolating from your personal experience makes all your generalisations true.

I see the mob has migrated. The indignation is so apoplectic it's quite funny.

It seems not. The games people play.

what?

All fair enough. But if this is the case, why aren't the Tories/Libs prepared to debate why this is a good thing? The Tories smirk at the prospect at having Oxbridge to themselves once more, and the Libs whiffle on about how they will socially engineer Oxbridge into behaving differently. They won't. Oxbridge and other good universities will be the ones charging near or at the max of £9000. These will increasingly be a rich-only purgatory. Other universities lower down the food chain will charge progressively lower amounts in fees. so what you'll have is a higher education system that very accurately reflects and reinforces class privileges and depradations. Who is saying this is a good idea? No one - because it would burst their bubble.

No dear. Now shut up and do the ironing.

It's a reasonable debate to have, and you may be right. But the reality is the debts are serious, and many have to be paid back quickly and/or at high interest rates compared to what will be on offer from the student loans co. This will have an effect on social mobility.

But no one is getting into debt trousers. There won't be anyone for them to hoover up. You can't have it both ways.