(2017-06-30) Sutherland Gov Pay Only One Year For College

Rory Sutherland: A College Degree course should last a year – after that, let them pay

The young of today just cannot conceive what a chore it was to eke out enough material for an essay in 1984. To find out anything took hours of mostly wasted effort in a library. If you imagine a world where every page of Wikipedia took half an hour to load, it should give you some idea of what it took to educate yourself back then

So why, pray, do university courses still last three years? Can people not learn any faster now?

Some canny Americans now game the system by approaching Silicon Valley firms armed only with a letter offering them a place at an Ivy League university (Signalling)

Is it possible that the expansion of Britain’s educational industrial complex has been a disaster? Though designed to widen opportunity, it may have achieved the opposite. First of all, by creating an academic apartheid where the career prospects of the 50 per cent without degrees are unfairly curtailed. Secondly by creating more expectation than there are good jobs. And thirdly by creating a system so large that it can only be funded by placing millions in debt. Debt by definition reduces opportunity.

We should pay people’s fees and living costs for one year, thus forcing universities to offer one-year courses

I’d prefer they were learning on the job.

This approach may not work for brain surgery. But for 95 per cent of jobs, if you can’t learn to bluff it in a year, you probably shouldn’t be doing it at all.