Give up on ‘skills’

Stop funding teachers

With the Prime Minister lacking any clear governing philosophy, the Sunak ministry’s policy output was a bizarre jumble of reactionary assaults on the liberty of the nation’s youth. The culmination of these attacks was the National Service pledge to enslave the nation’s 18-year-olds for a weekend every month to volunteer for the NHS, fire service, and search and rescue. This stood in bizarre contrast to the Conservative Party’s previous position on the capacity of the untrained for productive work. The school leaving age was raised for the first time in forty-one years to seventeen in 2013, and then again to eighteen in 2015. Last year, Sunak still deemed our ‘human capital’ insufficient for a modern economy, and sought to raise the age at which one can stop learning maths to eighteen. Despite this insistence on the importance of education for productivity, the Conservatives have maintained the period during which one does not obtain full legal employment rights upon signing a contract at two years. If their ‘skills’ treatments are so effective, why are companies allowed a two-year trial period with their products?

Jobs such as policing and nursing now require diplomas that did not exist at the turn of the century. Yet through his National Service pledge, Sunak has shown himself happy to inflict hundreds of thousands of completely untrained workers upon these services to do menial labour. The intention of Sunak’s policy was probably that some unspecified ‘skills’ would rub off on the teenagers. This seems similar to how the educational establishment likes sitting the smart children next to the dim ones in the hopes that the latter would learn something from the former by osmosis. Having dealt with work experience kids, I can tell you that they are pleasant and keen to make a good impression of themselves, but ultimately, they are well aware that this is an exercise in CV filling, and they intend to learn very little.

So why does our governing class harbour such an obsession with taking ever-older citizens out of legal personhood and confining them to education or training? The justification for this madness is the idea that Britain’s ‘productivity puzzle’ can be solved through improving our ‘human capital’; the ‘human capital’ itself is improved through providing more education to Britain’s youth.

The human capital theory of education is simple. You place someone in a classroom and teach them new things; this, we are told, makes them a more valuable employee. It would be ridiculous to suggest that there is not some truth to this claim in certain cases. Clearly, teaching someone to rewire a socket makes them more valuable to someone looking for someone to rewire a socket. However, knowledge that is directly applicable to paid work is a tiny proportion of what is taught in schools and universities. There were nearly 300,000 entries for GCSE History last year. Knowing about history makes you a slightly more interesting person, but the number of jobs in which this knowledge is of any value to anyone is tiny and nobody is complaining of a lack of history teachers. Almost all of those who directly financially gain from this knowledge are themselves teaching the subject; a kind of ouroboros of self-justification. For anyone outside of this group, the practical value of the history of Early Elizabethan England is close to non-existent.

There is also the question of how much of what is learned in a formal educational setting is actually retained. A good place to start with this is modern foreign languages. All children in Britain are expected to undergo training in a modern foreign language from age seven to fourteen, with many taking a GCSE afterwards; to put it bluntly, almost none of the outputs of this system can speak the foreign language they have been taught for many years. The most commonly spoken foreign languages in Britain are Polish, Romanian, and Punjabi — none of which will have ever been taught in a school classroom. We direct all children to spend seven years learning how to be a good Europeans, and yet remain the most monolingual country on the continent because they go to France aged seventeen and find that the French know what ‘lager’ means anyway.

For Nicholas (17 ans) reading this, the value of your educational experience will not be zero, at least on a personal level. I am not going to be a complete miserabilist about university: it is fun. You get to spend three years in an environment where everyone else is your age; you have minimal responsibilities; and, thanks to grade inflation, it is very difficult not to succeed in getting a 2:1. You will not be able to live in such a wonderfully homogenous, youthful, and consequence-free environment ever again, so please do enjoy yourself. Please ignore everything that the post-liberals say: do not skip university to ‘learn a trade’ and join a ‘local community’. It sounds awful, and none of the electricians I know are part of their ‘local community’ anyway.

The value of education to the individual is substantial, but this is less because they learn anything of great import, and more because it is a societally accepted way of signalling that you are a smart and competent person. If you cannot finish a three-year undergraduate course during which you are not required to show up to any lectures, instead only rushing out a few essays at the end of the term, you are probably a misfit that one should not employ. For society as a whole, however, this exercise is extremely expensive for what it actually provides.

A much faster and cheaper way of finding out who is smart and who is not already exists. The American SAT is highly predictive of academic performance after admission to college because the scores are a proxy for IQ. It takes four hours and will tell you with reasonable certainty who can be taught complicated concepts. The Americans, in their infinite wisdom, attempted to abolish the use of this test after the pandemic and the death of George Floyd; however, this experiment is proving to be a disaster and is now slowly being reversed.

If you evaluate what students actually receive from universities, it is astonishing that anyone could defend the idea that their training is of any value. Most universities supply humanities students with twelve contact hours per week for around ten weeks a term (and often less in the Summer term), which seems an incredibly light level of instruction if the teaching is what is adding the value to the future employee. A greater curiosity is that Oxford and Cambridge, the best universities where students are presumed to be learning the most, manage this with even fewer contact hours and even shorter terms. All of this is baffling unless you just accept that Oxbridge students tend to be bright and are able to submit lots of essays in a short period of time, rather than assuming that Oxbridge professors must be wizards.

Over the last year, nervous academics have frequently sounded the alarm that universities are in financial crisis, and may even be on the brink of bankruptcy. With home student fees falling in real terms over the last decade, universities have relied upon ever-increasing numbers of foreign students to plug the financial hole, much assisted by the introduction of the Deliveroo graduate visa. This strategy has began to fall apart for a number of reasons. Firstly, Sunak recently barred university students from bringing their mothers to Britain as their dependants, an insane immigration loophole introduced in 2021. Secondly, Nigeria’s currency collapsed, leaving many Nigerian international students unable to pay their fees.

Universities should not be this exposed to risk: they have a fixed income from domestic students that could sustain their rather light levels of teaching work without needing to gamble on huge (and increasing) numbers of international students to finance their growth. Recently, the Financial Times published a case study of the University of Essex in which the mere existence of negative rhetoric from the government towards international students was deemed sufficient to jeopardise their customer base. This is absurd. Rather than gambling on property deals and visa sales, the universities should have made cuts to service provision, or alternatively, lobbied for increased fees for their domestic students to deal with the erosion of their fee income via inflation.

To take an anecdote from a student at a ‘ring road university’ (his words, not mine), the students submit essays generated by ChatGPT and are not caught; the competent staff have all been fired in cost cutting exercises; there are vast developments of student housing filled with foreigners; and the new students and often even staff have a questionable grasp of English.

Evidently, the problems with our existing academy are vast. There are billions of pounds of public and private funds being allocated to unproductive enterprises that benefit nobody due to a collective action problem wherein nobody wants to stop signalling. This is not an easy problem to resolve democratically, as nobody wants to see their child be the first to lose access to the signalling; nor does anyone want to admit that their ‘fond memories’ of x or y university mostly involved getting high. But we should at least come to a new starting point for our discussions: this is almost all a waste of time and money, and we should cut it wherever we can. Let the children leave school at fourteen, and find something useful to do with their time.