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Thread: It must be spring...

  1. #41
    Formerly known as DavidJames David Bailey's Avatar
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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by stewart38 View Post
    What relevance is a joint economics / georgraphy degree to the real world
    The defence that universities have always used, is that they teach people how to learn - that's the historical defence they've used when someone asks exactly that question, usually when applied to courses like philosophy as I recall.

    I'm a bit cynical about that - they would say that, wouldn't they? - but there's probably some element of truth there.

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    Commercial Operator Rocky's Avatar
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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidJames View Post
    And taking my own advice
    Maybe we have all learnt something in the last week or so....


    Quote Originally Posted by DavidJames View Post
    Another example - a CTA qualification would obviously be valuable if you're looking for someone to work as a MJ dance teacher. It'd be much less useful if you're looking for someone to work as a nallroom dance teacher. And it'd be almost completely irrelevant if you're looking for someone to work in a non-dance role.

    So I've concerns about relevance.
    However, if the CTA (it doesn't, by the way..) were also to include experience in venue management, customer relations, marketing & PR and team managerial experience, then it's value would be relevant in related, or even non-related industries. By the way 'nallroom'? I suggest you cheque your posts more carefully in the future...

    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    So in principle, to get people working in McDonalds, Network Rail (or anywhere else that takes this up) ahead in life, it has a lot of merit.
    I agree, and actually the whole thing would become self policing. If McD's or whoever, produce a qualification based training program that produces useless graduates, then the market would understand that fairly quickly. If this were to be the case then it would become a 'Micky'Mouse' (or, should that be, Ronald McDonald?) qualification and then it would be perceived as having no real value outside of the organization that created it. Bit like an MBA... http://www.managementsite.com/459/Do...-managers.aspx

    That's why, IMO they would hard at it to make sure that they get it right. This combined with the real World experience it conveys, I think could lead to a valuable qualification.

  3. #43
    Formerly known as DavidJames David Bailey's Avatar
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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by Rocky View Post
    However, if the CTA (it doesn't, by the way..) were also to include experience in venue management, customer relations, marketing & PR and team managerial experience, then it's value would be relevant in related, or even non-related industries.
    Good point. But even then, there'd be a trade-off. If it's too broad, it has less immediate value to the business - for example, a 5-day CTA course with only 1 day spent on teaching, and the rest on those other areas, wouldn't be so useful.

    If it's too narrow, it has less long-term value for the person in question - as in my previous example.

    Quote Originally Posted by Rocky View Post
    By the way 'nallroom'? I suggest you cheque your posts more carefully in the future...
    Good thing I can go back and alter my posts at any time.

  4. #44
    Commercial Operator Rocky's Avatar
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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidJames View Post
    The defence that universities have always used, is that they teach people how to learn -.
    They also teach people how to become work shy, get drunk, use drugs, freeload, get into debt and how to 'moon' people effectively whilst wearing someone else's pants on their head...

    University degrees, and most education for that matter, teaches people how to learn and to absorb knowledge. They don't teach people common sense, nouse and how to deal with people in the real World. They also don't generally teach people on academic courses how to usefully apply that knowledge in a creative or entrepreneurial way. And IMO anything that promotes the latter two instead of the former, is far more useful.

    Granted, this is a blanket statement on the problem with education in this Country, but I'm sure you know what I mean.
    Last edited by Rocky; 30th-January-2008 at 01:23 PM.

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    Commercial Operator Rocky's Avatar
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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidJames View Post
    Good point. But even then, there'd be a trade-off. If it's too broad, it has less immediate value to the business - for example, a 5-day CTA course with only 1 day spent on teaching, and the rest on those other areas, wouldn't be so useful.

    If it's too narrow, it has less long-term value for the person in question - as in my previous example.


    Good thing I can go back and alter my posts at any time.
    I agree with you in that it is narrow as a stand alone qualification. But maybe there should be additional modules that people could take during their career that could lead to a broader qualification? I think we're onto something here..... no wait.... If we give them ALL the skills to run their own venues successfully, they may just start up in competition..

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidY View Post
    {snip post}
    A university makes money, in so far as it does so, by teaching people for a fee and - assuming the students meet the required standards - awarding qualifications, such as a degree.

    Some degrees are considered to be worth more than others - a degree in Applied Mathematics from Cambridge University would be more highly prized than a degree in media studies from the University of Central South West Croydon. (Even for a career in the media, probably.)

    If a university had shareholders (which I daresay many do not) then the interests of those shareholders will be served by ensuring that the quality of the qualifications is raised and kept high by, e.g., monitoring the quality of the intake and providing the best possible teaching resources, including teachers.

    None of those apply to McDonalds. It makes its money by selling fast food. I don't veiw that as being a promising circumstance for providing A level quality tuition.

    Other people, of course, will disagree. I cannot think of circumstances in which I would recommend somebody to go and work for McDonalds to help them get an A level.

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidJames View Post
    Here:

    Bloop!

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidJames View Post
    Well, yeah. And spending hard-earned money on ineffective training is definitely not a good way to do this.
    One could say exactly the same about our current Government educational institutions, for similar reasons.
    Not really, because the business of one is education and qualifcations and the business of the other is selling fast food.
    Barry, to clarify - are you against the whole concept, or is it just that McDonalds is an easy target?
    I'm against the whole concept of commercial organisations being able to offer external qualifications. (commercial organisations defined as excluding educational institutions)

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    So in principle, to get people working in McDonalds, Network Rail (or anywhere else that takes this up) ahead in life, it has a lot of merit.
    Yes, that's true.

    I just don't think it's a good way. There's a book by - um - Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth, IIRC, called The Space Merchants, in which advertising companies ('space' merchants...) control access to interplanetary travel ('space' merchants - geddit?) and commercial enterprises run everything that we now think of as being the job of the state to provide. It is, of course, a dystopic vision.

    I don't like outsourcing; I used to visit hospitals as part of my job and the difference in cleanliness from before to after Margaret Thatcher's actions in forcing hospitals into putting cleaning out to tender was - startling. All of a sudden I would see blood marks on walls, and stuff like that. I think it makes more sense to acknowledge that all human systems and procedures are necessarily not 100% efficient, and deal with that rather than assume that commercial enterprises can bring any more efficiency to bear on - to take a current example - helping the unemployed back to work than can a government agency.

    You don't have to work for large organisations for long to spot that they are inherently inefficient and wasteful, just like government departments and agencies. The only difference is they have to turn a profit by the end of the year.

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by Rocky View Post
    I agree with you in that it is narrow as a stand alone qualification. But maybe there should be additional modules that people could take during their career that could lead to a broader qualification? I think we're onto something here..... no wait.... If we give them ALL the skills to run their own venues successfully, they may just start up in competition..
    It'd be quite interesting as an intellectual exercise to draw up a "proper" MJ training programme - there are so many different skills involved, a comprehensive training programme would have to involve a lot of useful skills.

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    Commercial Operator Rocky's Avatar
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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidJames View Post
    .... there are so many different skills involved, a comprehensive training programme would have to involve a lot of useful skills.
    What, like participating in Forums? Hmmm... I don't think I'm likely to be asked to run that course...

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by stewart38 View Post
    We must get away from trying to send everyone to university

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by stewart38 View Post
    We must get away from trying to send everyone to university
    Good point, I missed that one.

    Labour's target of 50% becoming university graduates is completely arbitrary - it's just a figure they plucked out of the air because it sounded good. I'm unaware of any studies backing this figure up as the ideal percentage for a modern economy - and I'd be highly suspicious of any studies that did come up with such a conveniently-round number...

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidJames View Post
    Good point, I missed that one.

    Labour's target of 50% becoming university graduates is completely arbitrary - it's just a figure they plucked out of the air because it sounded good. I'm unaware of any studies backing this figure up as the ideal percentage for a modern economy - and I'd be highly suspicious of any studies that did come up with such a conveniently-round number...
    It's self-defeating, isn't it?

    What is good about university education? It turns out highly educated people with a strong ability to use their intellect. Why does it do that? Well, at least partly because the people at university are already well educated and capable of using their intellect. Why is this? Because universities select against the candidates they don't think will make the grade. Other people will go straight to a career or job, or to a technical college, or polytechnic.

    What happens when you set a target of 50% 'at university' and then immediately redefine 'university' by letting all the techs and polys call themselves a university? You simply dilute the worth of 'a university degree'. It's devalued. So instead of having (don't know the statistics) 10% of people getting to university and gaining a qualification that is pretty much unilaterally prized by commerce and industry, you have a situation where commerce and industry has to undertake its own investigations to determine whether, eg, John Moores University produces candidates of equally high value as UMIST.

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    Registered User stewart38's Avatar
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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by Barry Shnikov View Post
    It's self-defeating, isn't it?

    So instead of having (don't know the statistics) 10% of people getting to university and gaining a qualification that is pretty much unilaterally prized by commerce and industry, you have a situation where commerce and industry has to undertake its own investigations to determine whether, eg, John Moores University produces candidates of equally high value as UMIST.

    So its a good idea that the bugger bar caters for the 90% who are not good eneough to attend ???


    You cant have it both ways

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by Barry Shnikov View Post
    It's self-defeating, isn't it?

    What is good about university education? It turns out highly educated people with a strong ability to use their intellect. Why does it do that? Well, at least partly because the people at university are already well educated and capable of using their intellect. Why is this? Because universities select against the candidates they don't think will make the grade. Other people will go straight to a career or job, or to a technical college, or polytechnic.

    What happens when you set a target of 50% 'at university' and then immediately redefine 'university' by letting all the techs and polys call themselves a university? You simply dilute the worth of 'a university degree'. It's devalued. So instead of having (don't know the statistics) 10% of people getting to university and gaining a qualification that is pretty much unilaterally prized by commerce and industry, you have a situation where commerce and industry has to undertake its own investigations to determine whether, eg, John Moores University produces candidates of equally high value as UMIST.
    I largely agree with this, with a some exceptions.

    An undergraduate degree these days, sadly, has about the same value as an A-level did 20 years ago when I did my degree (at a Poly!), as there are so many people doing them as Barry says. When I did mine, about 10% of the population (good guess Barry ) got degrees either from uni’s or poly’s (wow, I just used something I learnt in the sociology part of my degree ). To get to an equivalent level, you now have to do a postgrad of some sort. And that takes money… so guess access is effectively restricted (though I don’t have any statistics about this). So although the original (Thatcherite) goal of broadening education has taken place, it has also effectively been dumbed-down, and the social divide still exists because of this.

    Another reason for the dumbing-down is the squeeze on resources. More students + no extra funding = lower standards and intolerable stress on staff. I saw several people suffer both the mental and physical effects of this stress, including heart attacks and nervous breakdowns. I wasn’t immune either. And from friends who still work in the sector, things don’t seem to have improved at all.

    As for the older university’s versus the old poly’s/new universities, the difference in quality is not always clear cut. I did my psychology/sociology degree at a Poly with a particularly good psychology department – better than some universities. I also worked at the University of East London, which was rated overall as one of the worst in the country (this was over 10 years ago, but I doubt the situation has changed). At the time I was there, we were part of something called the Research Assessment Exercise, which was a national study, executed very 4 years or so, to rate the quality of research in certain departments – your score affected future funding. And in theory, if a university has good researchers, it should be teaching to a higher standard (although I actually have my personal doubts about that). UEL actually had a few departments which scored more highly than the equivalent departments in either Oxford or Cambridge University.

    So quality is not a clear-cut issue between the older and newer universities.

    Clearly we do need an educated workforce, however I doubt that several thousand more students with some of the more imaginative degree subjects you get these days is the answer. Whatever happened to vocational education

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by stewart38 View Post
    bugger bar caters
    Sorry Stewart, but

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by stewart38 View Post
    So its a good idea that the bugger bar caters for the 90% who are not good eneough to attend ???
    Thats where Oscar Wilde got his education so don't knock it.

    You cant have it both ways
    ..well speaking of Oscar Wilde...

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by Twirly View Post
    Whatever happened to vocational education
    It still exists, and the government has a programme of reforming it - the initiative to have employers accrediting qualifications is part of this.

    Lord Leitch did a review of skills which was looking at how to give people the skills they need for employers and the country as a whole.

    The response to the report is an implementation plan, which includes this:
    24 We will make it easier for employers to have their own in-house training programmes accredited through the Qualifications and Credit Framework.
    So that's where all this comes from...
    Love dance, will travel

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    Re: It must be spring...

    Quote Originally Posted by Twirly View Post
    Sorry Stewart, but

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