Education

The BBC has a story today about Alan Milburn's report into dwindling social mobility, and I was pleased to discover that, despite being a member of the spin and cover-up obsessed Labour party, he has delivered a report (with the help of a number of unnamed independent experts) that reaches some bold conclusions. These conclusions have been known to some people for a while now, but have not been the fashionable thing to say.
Of course, the report also harps on about some old things that I hope will be forgotten with New Labour. For example, the report calls on universities to consider social background when choosing from applicants. As should be obvious, and is repeated by the universities themselves, their job is not to make up for the government's failure to provide decent school education by sacrificing their own standards.
The report does, however, point out that efforts to attract the attention of poorer applicants, and fight their low aspiration, cost perhaps £10,000 per pupil; a whopping amount which could be better spent by the universities on bursaries and scholarships if only secondary education were good enough.

The report also raises the problem of the number of places at university increasing. This well-meaning attempt to provide even more people with a university-level qualification has actually caused there to be a divide between those with degrees and those without, so that those without can no longer work their way up. Degrees have become so common that having one is now a necessity for senior positions. This combines with the problem that degrees have had to lower standards to accept so many more people, making many degrees meaningless. If a person can't even get a meaningless qualification, he must be a poor candidate!
With degrees meaning little, the social advantages of the rich: networks, friends in the profession, the ability to support children through internships and work experience (and to find them) all have much greater impact on the child's employability.

The solution, which was discovered, and even used, many decades ago, is to have a state-funded selective school system. This gives students from every background the chance to get a good school education and a place at a good university.
If universities had fewer state-funded places, but such places were actually free, rather than funded by student loans which then go to pay top-up fees, they would be accessible to all, and the students would have the ability to apply for internships and use university services with the knowledge that they did not have to earn money during the holidays in order to support their studies during term-time.

The idea that reducing the number of university places might increase social mobility and equality is counter-intuitive to many people. This is because it rests on the 'elitist' doctrine of letting the talented from any background do well, rather than on the stupid doctrine of trying to ensure that everyone, even the grossly untalented, has the same probability of doing well. If we can ensure that doing well costs nothing for the best of the best, we can be sure that we will have social mobility.
If we ensure that doing anything costs something, we can be sure that only the rich will achieve anything.
We do not have the money to work miracles and turn the untalented into the talented, nor reverse nature by equalising talent between people. We have only a choice between allowing success to be dictated by ability, or by parental affluence.

Until people realise that not everyone can be a star we're going to be stuck with the pointless pursuit of the highest level of education for all, which will merely cause ever higher levels of education to be created in order for the best to distinguish themselves, each level costing more and more money, and creating an ever-shrinking pool of parents who can afford to have their children go through it all.
The only way out is to break with the revulsion of selection in education and ensure that, however many levels of education the rich create, the government always funds the best of the poor through them.
To try to fund everyone wholly will bankrupt the nation, and to fund everyone partially gives the rich the advantage that we want to eliminate.