That’s nice for the Labour candidates. But their party is going to back the Browne report findings when they are released – and it is going to recommend raising fees.

And quite right too. Graduates earn a premium through their careers, and they only have to pay back the money if they earn above the £15k per year.

Asking taxpayers to pick up the bill is a straight subsidy from non-graduates to graduates, and that’s got to be pretty perverse in everybody’s books.

What’s perverse is that every single university-educated politician in the current government benefitted from no fees whatsoever.

£15k a year is fuck all in the south, and plenty of people scrape by on that without needing a degree. If it was £20k it would make sense, but currently it’s a tax on the aspirational poor.

On re-reading, my post @ 3 sounds confusing.

15k a year is “fuck all” in the sense that it’s not enough to make a degree worth having, from a life earnings point of view, as plenty of people make that without any form of HE. If 20k was the threshold then you’d be able to make the case that graduates ‘earn a premium’ that they should be indebted for.

I’m sure some whiz kid 1st year i-bank analyst would think £15k is “fuck all” too, but from a different perspective.

Another reason to vote Tory then… why should I be forced to pay for someone else’s adult education?

2. Mr S. Pill
What’s perverse is that every single university-educated politician in the current government benefitted from no fees whatsoever.

That’s the scary thing about welfare. Once you’ve got tax-funded university places, you can never criticize them without people saying you lived under that system when you were at uni, as though that made a difference.

Funny then, how all my friends with good degrees from respectable universities, in ‘real’ subjects are all working mundane 9-5 jobs; some in call centres.
Not all graduates benefit from a university education, especially in today’s financial climate.

Try checking out this league table, from a year ago, of the average salaries of graduates by degree subject. The highest average graduate salaries went to medics, dentists, chemical engineers, economists, vets and general engineers:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/table-what-do-graduates-earn-1675502.html

Pure science graduates are further down the pecking order and come lower than social work and land and property management.

I recall a piece in The Economist in the early 1980s about what happened to philosophy PhDs in American universities where the annual output exceeded the numbers of vacant academic posts becoming available. The answer at that time was that many made subsequent careers in the then burgeoning computer industry where analytical skills and a faculty for precise expression were valued skills in both computer hardware and software, which must shed some illumination on whether philosophy is a “real” subject.

@bob

Be careful with those figures – those are essentially starting salaries (taken as they are from HESA stats six months after graduation).

Different careers grow at different rates, and science careers take a while before the money kicks in. The other thing to bear in mind is that we’re talking first degrees. If you want to be a scientist, you need a PhD.

That’s a reason why the outcomes for science graduates going straight into the labour market after their degree are not actually very good – those bound for research have gone onto a doctorate.

(There are other reasons, but they’re a bit more complicated and down to actual demand for specific science skills in the labour market).

@Ken

Thanks for that correction about the demand for scientists and graduate salaries.

At least prior to the recent international financial crisis, there was a buoyant demand in the financial services industry for people with science, maths and engineering degrees to work as “rocket scientists” modelling optimal prices for derivatives in financial markets:
http://www.answers.com/topic/rocket-scientist

About ten years ago, academic physicists in congregation were complaining about the numbers of theoretical physicists being attracted away from academia by the high pay – including bonuses – being offered in financial services. Unfortunately the report on the web page of the Institute of Physics isn’t accessible now.

One implication is that it’s not stark staringly obvious why those graduates and post-grads able to attract high salaries in lucrative careers should benefit from a university education largely paid for by taxpayers.

Hi Gwyn (3+4)

I’m not dogmatic about the level at which it’s set, and could be open to raising it – maybe to median earnings if we want to apply some form of logic. It’s worth remembering that the rate at which you repay is tied to earnings, so at £16-17k you’ll only be looking at a few quid a month in your pay packet (and yes, that’s not great at that level of pay, but a bit of hardship at the front end of a career is worth it if you go on to make more later on).

Of course the bit that almost no-one on here will agree with me (assuming that at least a few agree with my first post!) is that I think a proper market in uni fees (i.e. scrap the cap) is the way to go. This would give an indication of the returns that you could expect from a particular degree from a given institution – thereby making people really think about whether that degree in Pomegranate Studies from the University of Chipping Sodbury is such a great idea.

Maintain student loans, increase the amount that is available to borrow + the number of bursaries (this is absolutely not about stopping poor but bright kids from going to uni), reduce the interest subsidy and Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your aunt. Well funded unis combined with better informed and well-funded students = winner!

If nothing else, that ought to put a cat amongst the pigeons

@1. Illegal immigrant

Asking taxpayers to pick up the bill is a straight subsidy from non-graduates to graduates, and that’s got to be pretty perverse in everybody’s books.

Surely that is the case for most public spending. The healthy subsidise the sick, employed subsidize those out of work!

@Bob

“One implication is that it’s not stark staringly obvious why those graduates and post-grads able to attract high salaries in lucrative careers should benefit from a university education largely paid for by taxpayers.”

You’re right.

There is, in my opinion, a very good case to be made for it, but nobody has seriously tried to make it. The LibDems fall into the trap of assuming it is obvious, forgetting that most of the country has not, and will not ever, go to university, and that until you have made – and championed – a convincing case as to why university education for some is a public good for all, you cannot expect the poor to be enthusiastic about subsidising the rich to remain rich whilst telling the poor that they’re excluded.

Bob @ 11

Absolutely. It’s just that in those two cases (and indeed almost every other area) it is the ‘strong’ (in this case graduates) who subsidise the ‘weak’ (non-graduates). In the case of uni funding it’s inverted – which is, quite frankly, barmy!

BIG DISCLAIMER: This is not intended to be perjorative – graduates are not ‘better’ than non-grads, but in this case they get money spent on them which isn’t then available to others who – all things being equal – will earn less over the course of their lives.

Ken @ 12

The problem with the public good argument – or rather my problem with it – is that the individual benefits by substantially more than society from their education.

It is true that, if everything works smoothly, having more graduates boosts the potential for growth in an economy (throughincreased investment/ innovation etc.), and that certain graduates will more directly benefit society by curing diseases or inventing tulip powered cars. But the individuals concerned benefit by far more (either through financial reward/ reputation/ job satisfaction etc.), so they should bear the cost.

Alison Woolf makes the case far more persuasively in much of her work.

@13: “graduates are not ‘better’ than non-grads”

We maintain the fiction that all have equal status before the law.

The fact is that graduates are mostly better educated than non-graduates and some professions insist on a graduate qualification or its professional equivalent as a condition of practice. But besides all that, a range of country studies turn up with results showing that the (ILO) standardised unemployment rates of graduates are lower than for non-graduates and the employment rates higher. And graduates tend to be paid better than age-equivalent non-graduates, more so in some national labour markets than others. Reports a few years back were saying the graduate premium in earnings tended to be larger in Britain compared with other west European countries.

The inevitable question is why do labour markets in many affluent countries usually exhibit these observable preferences for graduates over non-graduates?

@14,

Alison Woolf does make a very good case, but the counter argument – that society as a whole also gains sufficient benefit for it to be worth funding graduates – has rarely been effectively advanced, even though it has significant merit.

There is also the less utilitarian case that funding our brightest to continue in education is something a civilised society should seek to do on principle.

But the cases are not being made with conviction, and so it is hardly surprising that people don’t believe it.

FWIW, right at the forefront of efforts to do this should be the NUS, but that organisation has been entirely useless for years.

@15

To be fair to i.i. @13, I think the point being made is that getting a degree doesn’t make you ‘better’. However, I think we’d all agree that it does tend to make you more valuable in the labour market – that’s what the figures show, and in fact once we get the full stats for the recession, it is very likely that the advantage accrued by graduates will have increased as a result of the downturn, as it tends to.

Ken @16

The fact is that universities are already hugely subsidised by taxpayers and so are the students in higher education who subsequently derive significant additional personal benefits from an earnings premium on graduation and from the enhanced employability of graduates compared with non-graduates.

It’s not obvious why the subsidy of students should be increased. I’m unconvinced about those claims that the student subsidy is a necessary feature of a civilised society – besdies being deeply suspicious of any argument which appears to hang on that emotive notion of “society”, whatever that is.

The (slightly wobbly) case for subsidising universities relates to the economic benefits accruing from blue skies research, which cannot be captured (privatised) through patenting or maintaining commercial confidentiality and is therefore potentially available to any – at home or abroad – capable of reading the research literature.

Sadly, there are many claims that business in Britain tends to be badly adapted at turning scientific discoveries into successful business ventures to the benefit of the national economy. If so, that rather weakens the case for subsidising universities and suggests public policy should instead focus on promoting the more effective exploitation of blue skies research by business.

Britain’s problem is that historically, we have not done well with a proactive industrial policy to promote technical innovation by business – recall Concorde, unloved by world airlines except the national carriers of Britain and France, or the unsuccessul gas-cooled nuclear reactors or ICL, Britain’s answer to IBM? All of those industrial programmes cost millions of taxpayers’ money but yielded little downstream benefits. The outcome was a national reliance on Britain’s financial services industry in which we did have a commercial advantage, at least up to the recent financial crisis.

@5

Another reason to vote Tory then… why should I be forced to pay for someone else’s adult education?

By that reasoning, why should you be forced to pay for someone else’s primary or secondary education? Everyone benefits, directly or indirectly, from a highly-skilled workforce. Just like everyone benefits from good public health, roads etc. I might never get sick or use a car but I still don’t mind being forced to pay for those who do.

@19: “By that reasoning, why should you be forced to pay for someone else’s primary or secondary education?”

Primary and schooling up to the minimum school leaving age is usually free at the point of delivery in most affluent countries, which tell us that most governments in those countries rate the social benefits as worth the costs to their taxpayers. But in Japan, fees are charged for schooling in tertiary education onwards. Despite that, Japan had a high stay-on rate in schooling post-16 30 years ago, well above the relatively low stay-on rate after 16 in Britain’s education system.

Fees for state universities in Japan are subsidised but not so for the many private universities and colleges and the competitive entrance exams to secure a place in the state universities are famously very challenging. And there are no student maintenance grants in Japan so families save hard to pay for their siblings to have higher education.

@18

The case for subsidising graduates is, in my opinion, a little more complex than that, especially in areas with low graduate participation. The Centre for Cities and the Work Foundation especially are good on the wider benefits of university participation for areas with less robust economies, and I am personally convinced by the evidence (although not always by the methods used by economic actors to try to either increase or measure participation efforts).

However, I can definitely see what you’re saying, and I accept that it is very much a case that has not been made to the wider population. We agree on more than we disagree here, I think, and you argue an excellent point.

FWIW I think an inordinate emphasis is put on debating subsidies for universities and undergraduate fees when other issues in education matter at least as much.

Universities in Britain are disproportionately well represented in world league tables whereas we rate badly in adult literacy and certainly in vocational training opportunities for those who don’t want an academic education.

Our financial services industry in London is a major global player – at least it was up to the crisis – but the record of our indigenously owned and managed manufacturing sector is dismal. Excepting the Japanese motor manufacturers in Britain, how come so many of the old established motor manufacturers have withdrawn from assembly in Britain (Ford) or failed (the Rover Group) when Britain is a top rated location for the design and making of GP racing cars? Why did Marconi, Britain’s major indigenous electronics company, fail?

Successive rounds of tests and surveys have found that about 18% of 11 year-olds and also of adults have reading difficulties. IMO that connects with relatively low manufacturing productivity in Britain and why manufacturing industries in Britain are forced to compete on the basis of price competitiveness. In some regions, young people in the labour market are disproportionately reliant for jobs on the public sector and working in call centres.

More debate on these issues could illuminate neglected areas of policy.

Bob, I agree with what you’re saying, and I think so, actually, does the current Government. Leitch said pretty much the same thing, and the UKCES is currently concentrating on NVQ 3 and below because that’s where the real issues are.

Concentrating on graduates is concentrating on the best-qualified third of the population, who are best equipped in the modern labour market. There is a great deal that could and should be done there, but the real priority is lower down the skills chain.

One area with which we diverge is on manufacturing. IMO, our manufacturing future lies with high-tech, high-skills manufacturing where we can’t compete on labour cost, but can compete in innovation and quality. Unfortunately, this further squeezes lower skills.

Ken: “One area with which we diverge is on manufacturing. IMO, our manufacturing future lies with high-tech, high-skills manufacturing where we can’t compete on labour cost, but can compete in innovation and quality.”

One continuing puzzle is about how Japanese motor manufacturers can do so well in Britain in terms of productivity in assembly and in attaining production quality up to the standards necessary to export back to Japan. That compares starkly with the sad history of our indigenous motor industry but then there was an old management literature I recall from c. 1980 which found that British managers tended to be under-qualified compared with their counterparts in other west European countries.

Education programmes to tackle adult literacy issues have a long history. It tends to get overlooked that the Conservative government, prior to New Labour, had programmes but on the evidence most of these seem to have had little impact:

“Up to 12 million working UK adults have the literacy skills expected of a primary school child, the [HoC] Public Accounts Committee says. . . The report says there are up 12 million people holding down jobs with literacy skills and up to 16 million with numeracy skills at the level expected of children leaving primary school.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4642396.stm

Bob B @ 18

“Britain’s problem is that historically, we have not done well with a proactive industrial policy to promote technical innovation by business – recall Concorde, unloved by world airlines except the national carriers of Britain and France, or the unsuccessul gas-cooled nuclear reactors or ICL, Britain’s answer to IBM?”

Er, at the time Concorde was on the drawing board, there was a very big divergence of opinion as to how aviation would move forward. Air travel wassn’t even the commodity it was in the ’70s, let alone today. Boeing bit their collective fingernails to the quick wondering if the 747 would be a gigantic white elephant for most of the ’70s – so I’d say that, an oil crisis, plus a dose of sour grapes on the part of the US when Boeing’s SST was cancelled didn’t help Concorde any rather than a fundamental error on the part of the British and French designers.

“All of those industrial programmes cost millions of taxpayers’ money but yielded little downstream benefits. The outcome was a national reliance on Britain’s financial services industry in which we did have a commercial advantage, at least up to the recent financial crisis.”

I’d say it was political maneouvering on the part of the Thatcher government that nailed our colours almost irreversibly to the financial services mast – doing away with our industry but promoting managerial and financial careers (because managers and bankers tend to vote Conservative) was a big factor in throwing away what we had thirty years ago.

As for the hitting Japanese QC standards building Japanese cars in the UK, that started with the Rover Group, and the partnership with Honda which blossomed in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Your point about our managers lacking vision is pretty much the cornerstone of why British engineering has traditionally had problems – and it’s not a recent thing. In the late ’50s, at the instigation of the head of BEA, De Havilland invited Boeing over to show them their new design – a revolutionary trijet. The head of BEA then emasculated the De Havilland design by reducing its size and power – thus handing the world market to Boeing, who followed De Havilland’s original blueprint to the letter. More recently, the carpetbaggers who oversaw Rover’s sale to BMW (who only wanted it for the rights to some old Land Rover designs) did a similar thing, thus depriving it of the partnership with Honda which had produced cars people wanted to buy.

In fact, “lacking vision” doesn’t seem to cut it – nakedly putting short-term personal gain ahead of the long-term well being of their companies and our industries as a whole is a more honest assesment.

@25:

Where to start? DR Myddelton on: They Meant Well (IEA 2007), is good on Concorde and a daunting collection of other costly government project disasters.

@25: “I’d say it was political maneouvering on the part of the Thatcher government that nailed our colours almost irreversibly to the financial services mast.”

I don’t recognise that analysis as anywhere close to historic fact.

The fact is that a total of £3.4bn of taxpayers’ money had been poured into British-Leyland, renamed as the Rover Group, before it was sold off by the Thatcher government in 1988 to British Aerospace for £150 million. Rolls Royce aeroengines, taken into public ownership by the Heath government in 1971 to save the company from collapse, was turned round and sold back into the private sector in 1988. It is now one of the few leading producers of jet engines for civil and military planes in the world.

It’s true that the Big Bang in the financial markets of 1986 paved the way for the later success of the City of London as a global financial centre able to compete against New York but the Big Bang removed a string of anti-competitive practices and regulations that would have blocked expansion.

Nissan, Toyota and Honda established car manufacturing plants in Britain during the Thatcher and Major governments. By the early 1990s, Japanese electronic company plants in Wales had turned Britain into the largest producer of TV sets in Europe. Motorola and NEC had semiconductor manufacturing plants in Scotland.

IMO the best, concise and dispassionate, retrospective assessments of how the performance of the British economy improved during the Thatcher government is Nicholas Crafts: Britain’s Relative Economic Performance 1870-1999 (IEA 2002) or chp. 6 in Nick Crafts and Gianni Toniolo (eds): Economic Growth in Europe (Cambridge UP, 1996).

@25: “As for the hitting Japanese QC standards building Japanese cars in the UK, that started with the Rover Group, and the partnership with Honda which blossomed in the late ’80s and early ’90s.”

The technical support of the Honda Group did much to revive British-Leyland but my information is that the senior operations management of British-Leyland (renamed the Rover Group) didn’t really get on with Honda management at all well. To all appearances, the Rover management was really delighted with the sale of the Rover Group on to BMW in 1994.

I know nothing about the DeHavilland – BEA connection that you mention.

This is a link to DR Myddelton: They Meant Well – Government Project Disasters (IEA 2007)
http://www.iea.org.uk/files/upld-book419pdf?.pdf

@26

A concise write-up of the BEA/DeHavilland/Boeing story:

http://www.ww2aircraft.net/forum/post-war/british-airliners-nearly-get-right-shock-17298.html

And the Thatcher and Major “improvements” to the economy came at the expense of large swathes of our raw material-producing industries… IMO it was a case of cutting off our nose to spite our face, and purely for the ideological goal of neutering the unions.

Any notion that Britain’s economy was doing splendidly in the 1970s before Thatcher became PM in May 1979 is pure fantasy.

Nationalised British Steel was being propped up by subsidies amounting to £1m a day by the end of the 1970s. In what were then several key sectors in the economy – steel, automotive manufacture and coal minining – productivity had been declining on trend through the 1970s.

The Thatcher and Major governments poured billions of taxpayers’ money into propping up coal mining until it was privatised by the Major government in the early 1990s.

What did the damage to manufacturing in the early 1980s was the huge appreciation of Sterling as Britain became a net-exporter of oil because of North Sea oil. Productivity in manufacturing was dismal compared with other leading west European economies and with the appreciation of Sterling huge swathes of manufacturing in Britain simply couldn’t compete in markets at home or abroad.

If Mrs Thatcher and her governments were so dreadful, how come she won successive elections in 1979, 1983 and 1987?

29
“If Mrs. Thatcher and her governments were so dreadful, how come she won successive elections in 1979,1983 and 1987?”
Selling council houses for less than half the market value, selling shares of nationalized companies for a pittance ie, selling our national assets so the economy was awash with money which had been the investment of the previous generation of taxpayers added to the income from north-sea oil. This may go a long way in explaining Thatcher’s electoral success.
Funny how, despite her longevity, she is rarely mentioned by the current tory shower.

@29 – Straw man argument. I didn’t say that the UK was doing fine in the 1970s, and the notion that things had to change in response to a changing market is not fallacious.

*However*, I feel strongly that the scorched-earth anti-union policies of the Conservative government from 1979 to 1994 took things several steps too far, and as a result you see a lot of the initial seeds of the malaise affecting our former industrial heartlands these days. To those who made a success of themselves during that era, those who lost out simply didn’t matter, which is an unconscionable attitude, and one that even old-school Tories like Macmillan balked at.

At the end of the day – the sense that there was a quid pro quo of making lives better for Conservative voters in finance and management at the expense of our traditional workers is the one I come away with, looking back on it.

@30: “Funny how, despite her longevity, she is rarely mentioned by the current tory shower.”

Quote from The Guardian of 20 March 2010: “David Cameron will today invoke Lady Thatcher’s resolute leadership to offer himself as the man to confront the vested interests holding Britain back, citing bankers, trade unions and the educational establishment.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/20/david-cameron-unions-margaret-thatcher/print

My understanding is that Mrs Thatcher’s current state of health is such that she can no longer give interviews.

“those who lost out simply didn’t matter, which is an unconscionable attitude, and one that even old-school Tories like Macmillan balked at”

You’re really missing the point.

The performance of Britain’s economy post-WW2 was lagging that of other major west European economies through to 1979, which is how we came to be dubbed “the sick economy of Europe”. And up to 1979, the Conservative and Labour parties had spent almost equal times in government since the war.

In 1961, Macmillan as PM was motivated to apply for Britain to join what was then the European Common Market in the hope and expectation that the superior economic performance of our peer-group countries in western Europe would prove contagious. In the event, De Gaulle vetoed that application as well as the subsequent application by the Wilson government. Britain finally joined the Common Market in January 1973, after De Gaulle’s death, on the application of the Heath government in 1970.

The Macmillan government in the early 1960s also established the National Economic Development Office (NEDO), along with the Council, in the hope that “tripartitism” – both sides of industry working with the government of the day – could improve the performance of the British economy. In 1976, Callaghan, as Labour PM, explicitly abandoned keynesian remedies to tackle unemployment:

“We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.”
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Callaghan

On the evidence – see above citations @26 to assessments by Nick Crafts – none of the measures through to 1979 worked whereas the Thatcher measures did improve productivity performance in the British economy relative to that of peer-group countries in western Europe. The downside was that Britain’s standardised (ILO) unemployment rate remained above that of France, Germany and Italy through to the final quarter of 1995.

We can note that the industrial relations legislation of the Thatcher and Major governments has been mostly left unamended by New Labour governments. This ONS graph shows what has happened to trade union membership, which rather speaks for itself:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=4

@33

We were the “sick man of Europe” because we were the only ones paying our sodding war loans from the US back! To this date we’re still the only country that did.

32
Just prior to that article, the tories were on about 38 to 40 percent, could invoking Thatcher’s dogma, have anything to do with the decrease in support?. But the phrase ‘broken Britain’ and Cameron’s references to society doesn’t really sound very Thatcherite
And I don’t think it did Brown very much good when Tebbit described him as Thatchers natural heir.
Thatcher won elections by giving away the family silver.

IMO it would be a good idea to read dispassionate professional assessments of Britain’s economic performance instead of the fantasy stuff.

The fact is that by comparison with other large economies in Western Europe, the post-war performance of Britain’s economy, through to the end of the 1970s, was abysmal. The failings of the economy have been well documented in an extensive professional literature. A team of crack economists from the Brookings Institution was invited over to attempt assessment and prescribe remedial policies:

“Having sponsored a major study of the British economy in the late 1960s, the Brookings Institution has taken a look at a decade of slow growth, high unemployment, and inflation mitigated by North Sea oil. This first-rate team shows that quite a few popular diagnoses of the problem have only limited validity. Britain is buffeted by the ills that beset most countries, but its peculiar trouble, the authors conclude, ‘stems largely from its productivity problem, whose origins lie deep in the social system.’ There are only a few ways out.”
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/34468/william-diebold-jr/britains-economic-performance

Part of Britain’s low productivity problem was that by the mid 1970s, half the adult population had no education qualifications at all – and recall that by 1979, the Conservative and Labour Parties had spent virtually equal time in government since 1945.

Besides the Crafts citations above, here are some other accessible, detached assessments which should be available in any decent public library – neither fit into a category of Thatcherite hagiography:

Simon Jenkins: Thatcher and Sons (Penguin, 2007)
Alac Cairncross: The British Economy Since 1945 (Wiley-Blackwell, 1995)

Cairncross was economic adviser in the Treasury 1961 through 1969 and one of the signatories of that famous letter to The Times in 1981, signed by 364 economists, condemning the then government’s deflationary budget:
http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000876.php

@36 Bob B

It’s interesting that the Brookings Institute report puts it’s finger on the problem, namely that the problems were in the social system. Post WW2 we imposed a system of government on the Germans which made the quaint archaic fogeyism of the British system look positively antediluvian.

Only now do we have a realistic prospect of finally jettisoning the worst parts of the UK system which have held this country back for so many decades, making it less liberal, more unequal, less competitive and more inward looking.

Let’s just hope that a week from now, the electorate put a stake through the heart of the old, and usher in the new.

@37: “It’s interesting that the Brookings Institute report puts it’s finger on the problem, namely that the problems were in the social system.”

As George Orwell observed in chp. 7 of: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a study of poverty in the north of England in the depression years of the 1930s:

“The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a ‘job’ should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly.”
http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/6.html

From his context, George Orwell was writing mainly about South Yorkshire.

What’s so revealing is the persistence of the laddish culture in places. Girls, coming from the same neighbourhoods with similar social backgrounds to the lads, do much better than the lads at school and more than half undergraduate students in universities nowadays are young women.

“Female students are ahead of men in almost every measure of UK university achievement, according to a report from higher education researchers.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8085011.stm

I hardly think that a US-based organisation that counts among its members corporate beneficiaries of a monetarist, US-centric view of economy and social policy is a balanced source of information there, Bob.

The education system in this country between the immediate postwar years and the 1970s was hamstrung by the two parties constantly trying to undo the policies of the previous government – the comprehensive system as originally envisaged was scuttled by the Tories, leaving a half-baked system in its wake – can’t let the proles do too much thinking, what?

38
Although I’m a fan of Orwell, you have to remember that ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ is a work of fiction, he actually spent little time in South Yorkshire, furthermore, Orwell, from a middle-class background, spent most of his life in the home-counties, believe me, Sheffield and Barnsley in the 1930s were far removed from Henley. Nonetheless, he does capture the resistence towards schooling and the work ethos of working-class mining areas. But, of course, it isn’t so much a disdain for education but the force of survival; in the 1930s coal mines were privately owned and wages were low, life expectency was around 45 years for males and many died long before then. More often than not, a 14 year old boy’s wage made a massive difference to family.
It’s easy to look at the situation which exists in South Yorkshire now and surmise that the reason young males are not doing well in education is somehow a continuation of what Orwell observed, but the clue that it’s not, is that poor educational achievement for young males is a national problem. Sadly, the suicide rate in young males is also on the increase.
There’s definitely a problem with education/employment but the young males which Orwell observed had jobs to go to, they were highly valued members of the community and were able to participate in the dominant neighbourhood culture.

“I hardly think that a US-based organisation that counts among its members corporate beneficiaries of a monetarist, US-centric view of economy and social policy is a balanced source of information there, Bob.”

Profound ignorance is showing again – the Brookings Institution is a highly respected Democrat leaning think-tank, with widely rated expert research staff who mostly focus on a range American issues. Its reports in the 1960s and in 1980 on the British economy were encouraged by governments in Britain at the time and were subsequently well reviewed in the professional literature here. Brookings Institution staff cannot be accurately dubbed as “monetarist” in any meaningful way – famously, the Institution emphatically leans towards keynesian traditions, as this old text on public finance demonstrates:

Alan Blinder, Robert Solow et al: The Economics of Public Finance (Brookings Institution, 1974)

Robert Solow was subsequently awarded a Nobel prize for his contributions to economics and Alan Blinder became deputy to Greenspan in the US Federal Reserve Bank during the Clinton administration.

Besides all that, there is a wealth of other commentary by widely respected independents remarking on the relatively low productivity attained in industry in Britain as compared with other west European countries, including by the OECD, a problem that is still with us in recent years as this ESRC report observes:
http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/Images/The%20UK's%20productivity%20gap_tcm6-4842.pdf

“Orwell, from a middle-class background, spent most of his life in the home-counties”

That’s more rubbish. Try looking at Orwell’s books with his reportage: Burmese Days, Down and Out in London and Paris etc. He made a challenging living as a jobbing journalist. After handing in the draft of: The Road to Wigan Pier for publication by the Left Book Club, he went off to fight in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, where he got wounded, hence his next book: Homage to Catalonia.

From personal experience over years, his reported observations about the low regard for schooling and education among lads in many local working-class neighbourhoods is absolutely spot-on. The New Labour government has made continuing efforts to boost stay-on rates in school beyond the minimum school leaving age of 16:
http://moneytolearn.direct.gov.uk/

Alan Johnson, when he was education secretary, tabled proposals to increase the minimum leaving age to 18. Why would that be necessary if there wasn’t a problem?

In places, not much has changed in neighbourhood cultures as this news report from the regional press in Yorkshire shows:
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/columnists/Jayne-Dowle-A-Shameless-generation.3873620.jp

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Orwell came from a relatively wealthy middle-class background and his values, were totally different to the working-class from South Yorkshire mining villages, that’s what I was alluding to not your changed location of Burma, London and Paris
He visited South Yorkshire with the view that ‘It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a job should descend on anyone at fourteen” whereas those fourteen year old boys were eager to earn money to assist the family, many with fathers who had died at a young age from mining related accident and illness.
The chasm between working and middle-class values with regard to children dates back to the 19th century and is illustrated with the introduction of The Mining and Factories Act and The Education Act. Whereas the middle-class law makers believed that banning women and children from certain work areas was a good idea along with educating children to an elementary level, it created great hardship because children could not earn a wage. By 1890 over 90,000 children had been abandoned in England because their parent/parents couldn’t afford to keep them, and this, in effect, led to the creation of The Barnado Homes.
Of course there is a problem with young working-class males, but it isn’t confined to South Yorkshire, it’s a national problem.
Works of fiction can give some insight into the world of other people, but to be fair,
a short visit to a location by an author, to take a snap-shot picture, is hardly sound research methodology.

“Works of fiction can give some insight into the world of other people, but to be fair, a short visit to a location by an author, to take a snap-shot picture, is hardly sound research methodology.”

IME Orwell as a journalist with a working commission was relating something that was and still is true about the aversion of many working class lads to schooling and education while girls have learned from their observation of peers that getting an education has become increasingly important for better job prospects. It’s observable still in many neighbourhoods and one of the main reasons we end up with neighbourhood boys “sports colleges” and “academies” ranking low in education league tables.

There probably was a powerful motivation in northern regions in the 1930s depression to find jobs to support family incomes but that hardly applies in recent years and the fact is that many districts in Yorkshire nowadays rank at or near the top of national league tables for late teens and early 20s classified as NEETs – not in employment, education or training.

“Young people in England should not receive state benefits unless they are working, training or in education, a committee of MPs says. MPs are suggesting adopting a system use in Holland reduce the number of 16 to 25-year-olds not in education, employment or training, known as Neets.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8607014.stm

Orwell consciously rejected his middle class upbringing and values and struck out to build an uncertain and initially poorly paid career as a jobbing journalist. It’s a favoured Yorkshire delusion that “outsiders” and “comers-in” can’t understand Yorkshire ways whereas outsiders are often better placed to take a detached and objective perspective. Continuing neighbourhood aversions to schooling and education was readily apparent to me 30 years back and on the evidence, little has changed since.

Amazingly few in Yorkshire ever stop to wonder why it is that the East Midlands region, just to the south, manages to maintain persistently lower unemployment rates in the regional league table.

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The whole point of my post was to argue that the reason why fourteen year old boys (school-leaving age in the 1930s) were eager to leave, was to obtain work. I then went on to say that the current reason for an aversion to learning is not for the same reason. And now you write “but that hardly applies in recent years
What is observed and what it means are two totally different things.