by Xavier Connolly,17 May 2025
The higher education system has been circling around the pan for a couple of decades – excessive student debt, universities in financial trouble, woke activism disrupting serious activities, excessive dependence on foreign students, rampant LGBT propagandising, degrees in silly subjects, trivial research projects – it’s a familiar story.
Somehow, it all trundles along, aided by vested interests and politicians who kick as many problems as possible into the long grass. But now technology is bringing a new threat to academic business-as-usual – in the form of AI.
Modern universities are not about iculcating the cultural values of disinterested learning and scholarship. Higher Education has been turned into an industry, they are run as businesses and are expected to make a profit, which is why they have become scholastic sausage machines, processing young people for a labour market thet neeeds people with practical skills rather than heads full of theory. A degree is still an essential ticket to most regular well-paid jobs but such jobs and carers exist in limited numbers. Higher education institutions must be able to certify that the sausages they process meet a certain minimum standard, but also to differentiate the best from the also-rans. They need an assessment system.
For most of the twentieth century, assessment depended largely on unseen timed examinations. Invigilated by beady-eyed disciplinarians, these were a rite of passage which we all used to endure.
But things have changed and most critiques of modern education overlook the elephant in the room….our Universities are a hot bed of indoctrination, driven by leftwing ‘academics’.
It is not long ago when only around 15% of school leavers went on to University. That was not simply because only 15% of the younger population were bright enough to attend but also because University education but also that higher education prepares people for a career or vocation which while usually highly paid, makes up only around 15% of the jobs market. Then we entered the era of politically correct dogma and government by virtue signalling.
Driven by crackpot thinking and a determination to make abslutely everybody absolutely equal Blair’s Gaybour Party government decided that at least 50% of school leavers had to go to university, and because of the socialist dogma of equality all those 50% had to get a degree of some kind. No child left behind was one of the slogans adopted by the Gaybour government'd education department.
Shoehorning 50% of schol leavers into university education meant the quality of higher education education had to be watered down; new universities sprasng up, if not quite on every streetcorner then certainly in every large town, and introduction of meaningless courses (e.g. film studies, black history, PPE, LGBT theory,) helped to cater for the 32% that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Another factor in the decline of University education is thar graduates were geared towards solving problems in society. Now they get desmonds (a 2.2 degree) in PPE, become SPADS to politcians and thus create them.
Progressive educationalists told us that traditional exams relied too heavily on memory, and tested only a limited range of skills. Modern exams obviously do not test ANY skills as people are graduating without any. This is reflected in the kind of jobs graduates take up. Now even baristas have degrees (in making pretty patterns on top of your coffee? The university industry is peddling a lie to see higher education. Not everyone will get a job sufficient to pay off the massive loans students must take out to finance their tuition and live while attending their courses. Naturally we long suffering taxpayers the tax payer will be shafted to pay for those who defaut.
The political reason for all this waste of resources is to massage unemployment figures whilst putting young people through the progressive left brainwashing programme with expensive low quality degrees that have little use in the real world. Only the top 20% at most need to be at university and that includes those whose courses properly belong in polytechnics, the rest should be in vocational training or employment or practising their entrepreneurial ability.
The thing it is taboo to mention now is that a degree these days just gets you through the door to gainful employment, Many degree holders find they just do not have the drive and necessary personal qualities to get on. They are bitterly disappointed as they thought a degree would be enough. They are not the only group who are victims of political gimmickery.
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