wrote in message

On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 13:44:53 +0000
Graeme Wall wrote:
The problem is who gets to define which courses are vocationally
useless For instance golf management courses I would take to be a
subset of estate management which is a long established and valid
course. I would agree that the general course (estate management in
this case) should be subsidised to whatever level the government of
the day thinks is appropriate and the specialist addition (golf
management) should be for the student to fund.

Well thats never going to be an easy one to solve since there has to
be a line drawn somewhere and someone will always object that their
course should be subsidised. I'd start with suggesting that all
science, engineering and major humanities courses - english,
languages, history, law - should be free so long as the students
complete them and pass. Other courses should be subsidised on a
sliding scale based on how I would guess some national committee
feels how intellectually rigorous or useful they are. Media studies
should be somewhere near the bottom.

The funny thing is that graduates in some of these much-derided modern
courses are more likely to get good jobs than those who take traditional
academic courses. For example, golf management graduates tend to walk
straight into jobs, so they may be better equipped to repay the fees
than, say, English graduates:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/lif...cle6829650.ece
The article cites the case of someone who started on a Chemistry degree,
and then switched to a much more useful brewing-and-distilling course,
which led directly to a good job.

One big advantage of charging significant fees is that students will
become much more demanding of the product: they will research which
degrees and colleges lead to the best job prospects, and will demand
high quality instruction. In other words, if they know they have to
invest significant money, they'll also need to achieve a decent return.