British Manufacturing

British Manufacturing
British Manufacturing

Monday 19 January 2009

Employment

The Graduation Ceremony at Exeter on Saturday brought it home. It is no longer numbers; it is names and faces and on Saturday they were mostly post graduate degrees.
I return to a piece I wrote with tongue firmly in cheek, as indeed we all did, as we argued that higher education should be only for the rich. Outrageous and wrong, but...
But, is it fair to take people through three years as undergraduates and then one doing a masters or solicitors exams or some such, with no real possibility of work? Or do we play a longer game and accept that first time round the right job won't come, but that there are other opportunities which will add something whilst we wait? It is the prospect of so many people educated to a level which the jobs market simply does not require. Or, again, is government thinking of a longer game? Or, as I have argued before, is it a device to massage the unemployment figures?
An honest and informed assessment would go down well.

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