Have you got the Uni-Factor?

I watched the first question on "First-Time Voter's Question Time" today:

"There are loads of people coming out of universities who are going straight onto the doll because they are overqualified for the jobs available. What are you going to do about it?"

I watched the first five words of David Lammy MP's response ("erm...er...well, the recession-") and turned the television off because I've heard this discussion a million times before and I could confidently predict what, as a Labour MP, Lammy was going to say. But thinking about it a bit more I wish I'd bared with him so I could listen to what the other members of the panel had to offer on the debate.

To me, the problem isn't one of the government not doing enough for graduates, it's with the university (and for that matter, education) system itself.

Or more specifically, the incompatibility between the university system and the companies it's intended to provide graduates for, and people's confusion between giving opportunities and just giving.

The university was set up to either give very fortunate people a benchmark academic knowledge required for high end jobs in industry, or (for the more fortunate) to provide a place where people could learn much about a subject of their choice. Because of the high fees, university was a privelidge for the few and semi-unintentionally ensured that the establishment remained the establishment. As the country developed, the people realised that this was unfair and eventually (and I've skipped a fair amount out here) the student loan was set up to allow people from any upbringing the opportunity to study.

At this point things seem near enough balanced on the face of it, but still the majority of students were from well heeled backgrounds, and there was still a shortage of graduates in many industries

Then two things happened. Firstly, polytechnic colleges started to become universities, and were allowed to award degrees to students. Secondly, Labour came to power, with a the sound-bite of "education, education, education" ringing in people's ears.

Because polytechnics didn't have the kind of reputation to lose that the established universities had, they realised that they could offer nearly as many courses as they liked on as many subjects as they liked and receive more funding from the authorities. They could use this money to improve their facilities. So they did, and they did.

They created a model which provided to hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn't have otherwise gone into higher education.

This is where the boundarys between "giving opportunities" and "giving education" are blended. You don't "give" people education, you "give them the opportunity" of education.

The big problem is, unlike our university system, our job system still runs in the same way that it always has. You still have a triangle, with the big boss at the top, the different layers of management in the middle and the majority (the workers) at the bottom. For big companies (which employ the majority) that triangle isn't going to upend itself any time soon. Not if the big boss has anything to say about it anyway.

If you have a room filled with 1000 potential students, sit them down with an entrance exam and tell them that the top 100 people will go to university, you aren't denying the other 900 the "opportunity" of higher education. They've all had equal opportunity, the other 900 will have to accept that they just didn't meet the entry requirements.

Well, the other 900 kicked up a fuss, and Labour thought they had a problem, and instead of being brave enough to tell that 900 that that's how the system had to work and they should get over it, instead they looked to the ends of their noses and encouraged more to go to universities. This, fortunately for Labour, had the miraculous side-effect of boosting their education figures! What luck!

Which leaves us in the situation we have today, with graduates from universities having qualified themselves for jobs which never existed anyway. They realise that a graduate position in a company had been a mirage all along, only now they've walked for 3 years in the wrong direction. They realise that they should have gone from 6th Form to work. They should have found an apprenticeship. They should have found a sponsored course with the real prospect of a job at the end of it (in joke).

But of course, people don't actually realise this. People are vain. They are now graduates, after all. They are "overqualified" for a position on the shop floor, they'd rather not work out of principle!

I suppose I'll have to summarise at some point, and it might as well be now.

At the end of the day, there are just as many "opportunities" in education as there ever have been. There might be more people going to university, but they shouldn't assume that university is an "opportunity". Universities are utterly brilliant things, but even they can't change supply and demand.

In a perfect model, universities would only provide the right number of people with the benchmark academic learning required for the appropriate roles in a company. The universities would provide the courses needed in accordance with what various industries needed. Those who wanted to learn about something specific to an industry which was full would still learn, but accept the prospect of a period of unemployment, or employment for a while in an unskilled job.

Instead, the graduate market for employers is more like a really boring episode of X-factor which doesn't have crap singing but does have a sweaty palmed twenty-something talking scripted tosh about what they'd bring to a team. It reduces the diversity of  knowledge and experience gained from a degree into a single boolean value, just like the X-factor reduces the art of music to a Christmas number 1.

But then that's all education has become really, a boolean value, only the question is "were you lucky enough for it all to fall into place for you?".

The figures might look better, but we're in exactly the same position we always were.