If I read him correctly, which I might not have, I feel Doctor Vee himself misses the point here:
Costly in effort, surely, in hours studied but not in terms of money.
IMHO, education should indeed be free in monetary terms but there should simply be high mark quotas on A levels as there were when I matriculated.
This is a fundamental principle – overall monetary cost to a family should not prevent the higher middle students, the ones who will fill most places in business and industry, from attending their selected courses.
Scholarship material will be given free entry anyway but we're not talking about those here. We're talking about the student with talent and some potential who'll eventually fill the middle to mid-upper rungs in an organization.
Sometimes that talent doesn't fully realize itself until the student actually embarks on the course. Sometimes the talent shows itself to be there but the dedication is not.
There is a self-actualizing tendency here. There are fine state schools but there are a hell of a lot who have enormous problems, at least in England and the chance of talent being developed anyway is mired in social issues and instability at staff level.
So no, I'm not arguing that the floodgates should be opened but make it difficult on the basis of matriculation marks, not money. Once you tie higher education to money, then the product is politicized.
Proponents of free higher education miss the point of higher education. A degree is supposed to be a signal to employers that you are talented. For this signal to work, a degree has to be costly to attain.My reading of that is that the good Doc's original usage of the term “costly” was indeed referring to money. In that situation and as I commented at his site:
After all, if it was easy to get a degree, any old fool could get one. This would lead to the ‘devaluation’ of degrees that people so often talk about. The point of making a degree costly is to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
Of course, degrees are costly anyway. Not in a monetary sense, but in a time sense.
Costly in effort, surely, in hours studied but not in terms of money.
IMHO, education should indeed be free in monetary terms but there should simply be high mark quotas on A levels as there were when I matriculated.
This is a fundamental principle – overall monetary cost to a family should not prevent the higher middle students, the ones who will fill most places in business and industry, from attending their selected courses.
Scholarship material will be given free entry anyway but we're not talking about those here. We're talking about the student with talent and some potential who'll eventually fill the middle to mid-upper rungs in an organization.
Sometimes that talent doesn't fully realize itself until the student actually embarks on the course. Sometimes the talent shows itself to be there but the dedication is not.
There is a self-actualizing tendency here. There are fine state schools but there are a hell of a lot who have enormous problems, at least in England and the chance of talent being developed anyway is mired in social issues and instability at staff level.
So no, I'm not arguing that the floodgates should be opened but make it difficult on the basis of matriculation marks, not money. Once you tie higher education to money, then the product is politicized.
Completely agree, James.
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