The Treasury is considering introducing a “Graduate Tax” to fund University degrees…

They had better not backdate it!

I have long believed in an assisted-private system for Higher Education, in which students pay the full cost of their degree direct to the university via a loan scheme. The money saved by the taxpayer could then fund scholarships and bursaries for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and sponsorship scholarships for those studying the most socially useful subjects – medicine, nursing, etc – in return for entering the NHS on an agreed contract upon graduation. In short we’d be channelling taxpayers cash to those most needing it and those who’ll repay in non-financial ways.

The current system of £3000 fees per year was an improvement – I supported it even though I was the first year group to pay – but it’s far from perfect. Degrees are different, some cost more to teach than others but the fees are the same. The result is that the focus has shifted to degrees viable financially at this figure and away from schemes that cost more. So there’s a surplus of places for some subjects yet the most intense competition is for medicine! A friend of my sister failed to get a place for medicine despite AAA grades! But don’t we want more doctors?

The idea of a Graduate Tax however is very wrong, indeed it would have put me and will put many others off of attending university. It will also encourage a “brain drain” of talented, high paid graduates moving abroad to avoid it. Graduates should pay for their degrees, they’re the ones who benefit financially, but they should pay for their degree – not other peoples!

Learning a foreign language is a good thing, and if you decide to do so then that is indeed a fine thing, however this recent post by New York venture capitalist AVC chimed with what I have long thought – namely we spend too much time teaching kids subjects with little economic or practical benefit, and in which the learning rate is so slow it’s a hopelessly inefficient use of time, whilst ignorring the subjects with true future value.

AVC writes on his blog…

My two girls finished middle school without ever learning how to write a single line of code…This isn’t entirely the fault of the school my kids go to. I’ve asked around and computer science classes in middle school are not very common. That’s wrong. We continue to teach our kids French but we don’t teach them Ruby On Rails. Which do you think will help them more in the coming years?

The NY Times has a story this morning about this subject. Here’s a quote from that article from Janice C. Cuny, a program director at the National Science Foundation:

“Today, introductory courses in computer science are too often focused merely on teaching students to use software like word processing and spreadsheet programs. The Advanced Placement curriculum concentrates narrowly on programming. We’re not showing and teaching kids the magic of computing.”

Introductory courses in programming should not happen in high school anyway. They should happen in middle school, around sixth grade. And they should allow kids to write software and make things happen with code.

If the Obama administration wants to really do something about jobs and retooling America for the 21st century, it would fund the development of great middle school programming curriculum. It would fund training teachers to teach that curriculum. It would get millions of kids writing code before they have their first date. That would change a lot of things.

I couldn’t agree more with AVC.

I went to a very good State grammar school in Kent where the education was top notch, however the National Curriculum was sadly lacking.

At the age of eleven I was quite certain that an hour of music, an hour of art, two of French and two of German were fairly wasted, and as it turns out I was right. Despite the best efforts of our excellent and very nice music teacher, Mrs Rowe, we both knew I was hopeless at it. At art I was doomed, being an ardent traditionalist (I did however enjoy the lessons and was very good at it); and although I was also good at French and particularly German (aided by that country’s fine model railway products and a strong sterling), I never got past a Edward Heath type accent in French and the ability to order a sandwich in German, nor indeed do I need to. Most people in my class have spent longer learning a language than it that country, and none to my knowledge are anywhere near fluent! Meanwhile I hated the hour of ICT, in which we largely did word processing. (At home I built websites).

Are we really making a good use of children’s time and school resources teaching as we are now, when technology is only going to play a bigger role in our economic future? It might upset the educational establishment, but isn’t it time we started to equip the young for the 21st Century rather than their foreign holidays?