TOBY YOUNG: It's no wonder degrees are going out of fashion when universities have become the Madrassas of the Left

For anyone hoping to get into university, this year’s wait for A-level results has been a little less nerve-racking than normal.

Applications for degree courses are significantly down. Britain’s most prestigious universities have been left with thousands of unfilled places and even teenagers falling well short of the grades they hoped for have been given a second chance. Good news for them, perhaps. But what does this say about the state of our elite institutions, the universities at the supposed pinnacle of our education system?

And why is it that a poll last week suggests this is no blip but part of a long-term trend?

According to the respected Sutton Trust, which aims to improve social mobility, notably fewer schoolchildren now expect to go to university than a decade or so ago.

The answer, I’m afraid is troubling. First, it is increasingly clear the universities system is no longer a machine for guaranteeing future wealth and status, as the thousands of graduates in humdrum jobs, or no job at all, know only too well.

More than half of graduates don’t use their degree in their current work and, despite the official orthodoxy, the truth is that they have increasing difficulty finding any kind of employment.

In contrast, vacancies in skilled professions are at an all-time high and are projected to increase after we leave the EU and can no longer rely on importing skilled labour.

Perhaps that is why it has begun to dawn on school-leavers that a university place is not the only route forwards. Why spend three years doing media studies at a second-rate university when you could find a better-paid job after getting a qualification in a skilled occupation at a further education college – and without a debt of £50,000? The trebling of tuition fees has hardly helped.

But there is another, more insidious reason why applications are falling, which is that our colleges have become seminaries of politically correct nonsense – Left-wing madrassas whose purpose is not to disseminate knowledge and promote understanding but to suppress politically incorrect facts and stifle debate.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6075017/TOBY-YOUNG-no-wonder-degrees-going-fashion.html

Great article, that is bang on the money and loads more to read

I think most people are waking up to this socially engineered PC trash that is not in anyway progressive, but regressive to society. People are waking up to these completely militant leftist that are brainwashing students. They are not helping them have open minds, but trying to divide the future youth of this country, with identity politics.

What a sad reality its become, because those teaching such gibberish, have little to no liberal values. Not promiting any progressive values, but trying to impose their Far left extreme regressive beliefs and to me. They come from the school of Marxist idiotology and have not learnt a damn thing in history.