Prof Dylan Jones Evans asks:
Could WAG have done more to help young people get to university?
The answer is probably YES.
The question that I would ask is slightly different - Should WAG have done more to help young people get to university?
Isn't the real problem that we send too many young people to university in our days?
When I was of university age only 10% of young people went to University, only 8% of the population would gain a degree. The numbers gaining 1st class degrees and doctorate use to be a minuscule percentage of the general population.
There are jobs that would have been available to a CSE failure 30 years ago that now require a degree and a post graduate qualification!
"A" levels and degrees, even MA's and PhD's seem to be like incapacity benefit now: a way of keeping young people off the unemployment statistics for x number of years. As many of them will be on the dole when they graduate the highly educated workforce argument doesn't ring true!
Instead of pouring more and more money into universities wouldn't it be better if we used that funding to give real on the job training to enable 16 year olds to do proper jobs that are needed in our society rather than wasting millions in keeping them in education for an unneeded 5 to 10 years just in order to massage the unemployment figures or in order to create a fake idea of a nation that is more educated than it really needs to be?
Unfortunately, that would involve admitting that successive governments' economic policy has been an utter disaster since at least the first Wilson administration. We have destroyed the productive part of our economy and are left with however many layers of administration of administration can be piled upon fiddling the figures.
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