Australia has NO universities, only Marxist Monoversities.

NO Australian child will be safe until we cut education funding by 100%. Close down the entire Australian education industry & start again from scratch.

This evil industry is so radically, extremely evil & toxic our children would be better off being home schooled.

A question in plain, simple english for the author + any & all commenters...

Q, What is the profile of the average, garden variety child sex predator today? A, She is female & a public sector employee.

Joan is into "writing and activism"; and she doesn't like universities being criticised. Bryan Caplan is the person we should be listening to. Who cares what "the left" thinks.

University entrance should be restricted to people wanting to work in health, engineering, education, science, finance and the like. People wanting to waste time on humanities, arts etc, should be out looking for a proper job as soon as they finish Year 12, instead of learning to be ratbags and good little Marxists - which is all they are capable of intellectually.

ttbn. Very true. There are other places for those who wish to engage in other things. I might give the Victorian College of the Arts as an example.
David

There was a time when we were the third wealthiest nation on the planet when things like an education and shelter were considered part of the suite of human rights we were entitled to in a country as wealthy as Australia.

Our tax dollars built every one of these institutions. And when we were still an egalitarian society that hadn't yet commodified education and water that fell from the sky as a gift from God for everybody.

If you want to create a banana republic from a wealthy egalitarian society, then put the extreme right-wing/robber barons in charge and allow them to privitise at will. No?

You mean we've already done most of that? And today's outcomes are the result! TH lessons of history are bound to repeat and repeat if these same idiot idealogues, ignore the lessons in favour of a few dollars more for themselves and their greed-driven cronies?
Alan B.

Joan,

This is a strawman argument, the right does not claim:

Most education doesn't teach you anything you use on the job.
Getting the certificate is all that's important.
Education's payoff comes from clearing hurdles. 'If you flunk a class, plenty of employers will trash your application. But if you pass that same class, then forget everything you learned, employers will shrug.'
That is, qualifications are used by employers as profiling tools, and inefficient ones at that.
This kind of profiling leads to credential inflation. The education needed to get a job outstrips the education needed do the job.
We should, in such terms, be pushing for less education rather than more

For most courses, the above is complete bollocks. However, some liberal arts courses have no use in the real world.

shadowminister, these points paraphrase Professor Bryan Caplan, economist, who sets up AN argument about how universities fail employers. The more general argument is about the function of universities and, at an even more general level, the meaning of the concept of education.