Yes, but what do you do about it?
Here are some possibilities:
1. Tell them not to. But how are you going to know if they are complying? A Reform government is not going to have the personnel it can trust to do this.
2. Make them fully independent. End grants, abolish student loans. You could even remove their Royal Charters. There’s going to be a hell of a backlash. But if you can get through that they should get back to education again.
3. Make university education less attractive. I’ve heard it said that people need degrees because IQ tests are illegal. Is that true?
4. Declare all universities “indoctrination centres” and remove all funding until proved otherwise. If they bleat about “independence” then you can say they’ve got what they wanted. The proof could be in the form of each member of academic staff being asked for their opinions on communism and DEI. Could produce some interesting results.
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@Patrick Crozier
There is a fifth possibility:
5. Invent a technology that makes the large majority of university education worthless.
Of course we have that technology, it is called the internet. For the most part (outside of some specific professions) universities provide students with four things: an education (Which is now no longer relevant since you can learn anything 1% of the cost by other means), a certification, which surely we can legally circumvent by setting up a skills based certification system (though see below), networking opportunities which only really matter at very high end and lower end universities — the majority in the middle do not provide value here, and a fourth, letting the kids PARTY. Presumably kids can have a really good time elsewhere too.
The certification is the big issue, but surely there are other ways to prove one’s skills? Certainly in my area of expertise I’d rather have someone as a Certified AWS architect than a poncey degree from Harvard. That is a cultural change though, and I think it is coming. But in truth AI and robotics is going to largely eliminate jobs in this middle part anyway.
I say let them die their natural death. One easy fix? Eliminate student loans and payments and let students bear the full cost of their education while keeping the government out of the “student loan” business. That’d shake things up PDQ.
As I said there are exceptions, people with highly specialized training like Medical doctors and lawyers.
Those are much broader than suggested, though. When I did my chemistry degree, lab work was a large and indispensable part of the course. The internet as a learning tool won’t substitute for the hands-on experience of using gas chromatographs, HPLC, NMR, mass spectrometers, x-ray crystallography setups, high intensity lasers, vacuum lines and similar equipment, and it won’t give you experience handling hazardous chemicals, dealing with reactions involving radioisotopes, planning experiments to support or disprove hypotheses and actually carrying those out, critiquing experimental designs from all angles, and dozens of other skills.
Chemistry isn’t alone among the sciences, either; biologists in training won’t learn microscope technique from the internet, nor breed fruit flies selectively, learn biohazard handling, etc. Undergraduate students in physics, electronics, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, and more–they all get lab time, and the hands-on experience in their specialised devices and techniques isn’t something we can replace with “the internet”.
By all means deal with the multitudinous problems of the universities, but don’t pretend that it is only a handful of professional disciplines which need to teach things beyond what’s found in online courses.
Option 2 (get rid of government funding – including the “loans” that have made tuition fees go into outer space, subsidy programs always do that with costs) – but go back to promoting from within an organization, rather than having “graduates only” policy for higher positions in an organization.
It did not use to be the case that someone needed to a university degree to get into a senior position – it used to be the case (in both Britain and the United States) that people worked their way up by experience and merit – which is how it should be.
A liberal-arts university degree is, in reality, a thing this is nice to have – but does not really make you a better businessman or administrator, or whatever. And that is when liberal-arts were NOT the mutant-form of Marxism they have become – even subjects such as English literature have been systematically ruined.
anon – yes the physical sciences resisted longer than the liberal-arts, due to the basic nature of the physical sciences.
However, even the physical sciences in universities are starting to be influenced (corrupted) by leftist doctrine – the situation is not good.