Jim Dickinson over at WONKHE.
If you are interested in higher education this article is worth a sympathetic and nuanced read. Some of it is outside my area of interest or expertise, but it provides another example of the ability of the political classes (aided by consultancy services) to fuck things up. I don’t go along with all the mental health messaging but we have built a wasteful and expensive system that does not do what people say it does. Many students are ripped off, as is the tax payer, and there is plenty of blame to apportion to the new higher education business. The quote below is worth serious attention. Yes, measurement systems are imperfect, but we have built a monster that consumes potential wealth in plain sight.
The 2023 PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) results reveal that UK graduates, particularly those from England, perform relatively poorly compared to graduates in many other OECD countries across literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem-solving assessments.
The scale of the underperformance is stark. Adults in Finland with only upper secondary education scored higher in literacy than tertiary-educated adults in 19 out of 31 participating countries and economies, including England. While England has seen a 13 percentage point increase in the proportion of tertiary-educated adults between 2012 and 2023, average skills proficiency has not increased correspondingly. The PIAAC data show no significant gains in literacy or numeracy among our growing graduate population.
In other words, we’re “producing” graduates faster and more efficiently than most other systems, but they’re demonstrating lower levels of the foundational competencies that their qualifications should represent. UK tertiary-educated adults scored around 280 points in numeracy compared to over 300 in Japan and Finland. In problem-solving in technology-rich environments, only about 37 per cent of UK tertiary-educated adults reached the top performance tiers, compared to over 50 per cent in countries like the Netherlands and Norway.
That suggests that our model of “compressed intensity” may be producing credentials rather than capabilities. The three-year norm, rigid subject specialisation, grade inflation and high completion expectations all appear to prioritise the award of qualifications over the mastery of skills.
The implications are profound. If degrees are not effectively developing human capital – the literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving capabilities that employers, society and students themselves expect – then the entire economic justification for higher education expansion with its considerable personal investment comes into question.” [emphases added]