In this day and age, I believe the populace has the resources to educate itself.

There should be accreditation institutions that run tests on occupational skills, but no actual body that regulates the learning process with lectures and tutorials (I never needed them and rarely attended). Of course private test-preparing institutions would sprout up to help the useless who have the money, but that cant be helped.

So you can get 'certified' in skill sets, but it's up to you which particular skill sets would be required for employ-ability.

No doubt there would be some corruption between the accreditation agencies and employers to make mandatory certifications, but on the whole it would reduce 'degrees' to 6-12 months.

It would encourage the idea of lifelong learning, reduce the outlay in terms of time to gain initial employment, allow flexibility in career development and save everyone a lot of time learning abstract concepts for the purposes of employment unrelated to said concepts.

We would also find out just what concrete, measurable skills are actually necessary for some of the airy fairy occupations.

University is like a Foxtel subscription where one has to buy the whole starter package just to get the sport. In this day and age people go to fulfill occupation skills (The horse has bolted on this), so the more granularity allows them to just buy what they need for their chosen career path, and they can go back for different things as needed.

There is no need for an institution to teach people, there is books, the internet and all sorts of resources available. What employers need is a guarantee that someone has knowledge in a particular area because they're too lazy to work this out for themselves.

Constance has summed it all up very nicely. In days of yore, we had in Melbourne, Technical colleges producing people with Diplomas in Engineering in several different disciplines and Chemistry, to name a few. All these people were ready to go to work in industry as they had been trained in the practicalities necessary to slot them into the work force. Most of these students came from the then existent Technical schools which provided them with hands on education which enabled them to to either become tradesmen or professionals.

I was one of the latter. It always seemed to me, that my fellow professionals who were graduates from the universities, lacked those skills needed for industry and it took some time before they got up to speed.

A previous post complained about the dumbing down of university education. I would submit that the greater sin is the dumbing down of the tradesman. Our technical schools have all vanished so that those children who would wish to become tradesmen now have been given no useful skills before they are turned loose into so called vocational training. The expectation seems to be that they should initially be trained to become academics while doing questionable courses in what are now called secondary colleges. Meanwhile we import tradesmen.

Woe is us.

David

There is no issue that people should be able to voluntarily pay for their own or someone else's education.

The political issue is, as always, whether some people should be coerced into paying for others whether they agree or not.

If all payment were voluntary, the value of the resulting qualification need only be the concern of those most interested in the question: the buyer and seller. But once we introduce the coercive element, it raises issues of value both ethical and economical.

In the USA the student debt bubble is a social time-bomb as serious and destructive as the government's other funny money debacle, the housing debt bubble.

For how anti-social and abusive it's becoming, see:
http://lewrockwell.com/spl5/student-loan-consequences.html

Ultimately, all government schemes to confer net benefits on society by taking from A and giving to B, do not and cannot achieve their original purpose, and just morph into dysfunctional parasitism. Thus democracy is just socialist fascism by instalments.

Is higher education a good investment for students?
Short answer, NO ! There are really no positives to compare to all the negatives since the big Goaf years.

Of course, people should be able to do whatever course they like.

But .....

* If they want to do utterly useless courses such as Social Work, Art and Design, Screen Studies and cultural studies, then they should be free to do so, as full fee-paying students.

* if they want to do valuable courses, the sort that the country needs, such as trades, Agricultural Sciences, Hydrological Sciences, &c, and anything related to the Mining industry - our current economic backbone, after all - then they should be able to study these courses completely free, with adequate student support, guaranteed lifelong employment, and given a five-year tax-break once they are employed.

Once people graduate from the useless courses, they can always go fruit-picking, and compete with international back-packers. Win-win !

Joe

I think the dangers of Higher education are shown in comparison to the old guilds and apprenticeships of old. In a guild, you would achieve ranks dependant on what you were capable of doing. If I was a blacksmith and could shoe a horse, then that would be that. In university, it seems that you are not expected to actually shoe the horse, as much as explain, in great detail, how said horse should be shoed.

Many businesses in the community (actually, probably more public sector as I think about it) require a university degree before employment can be attained. The risk is always that if a person does not actually "do the work" before "having the job" their theory will be swept away by the real world situation they are now in.

I do not argue that education is bad, but i think it would be more effective if, as sugggested, it was taught on an as-needs basis rather than a pre-requisite