“The throwaway remark that university isn’t for everyone is typically made by those who have themselves benefited from higher education and who fully expect future generations of their own family to do likewise” —Steven Jones

The throwaway remark that university isn’t for everyone is typically made by those who have themselves benefited from higher education (often at the expense of the taxpayer) and who fully expect future generations of their own family to do likewise. The statement itself initially seems a hard-to-refute observation that some young people may be better suited by alternative routes into adulthood and the workplace. However, the political classes’ professed concern about a lack of vocational alternatives should always be treated with caution. It potentially enables competition to be lessened for places at higher prestige universities, and then for graduate employment opportunities to be further hoarded by their own offspring. A dichotomy is often nonchalantly imposed between our kids and other kids. In 2019, prime minister Boris Johnson said ‘it is a great thing that 50 per cent of our kids should have the ambition to go to university, but of course it is equally important that other kids should acquire the skills they need that can be just as valuable’. In his memoirs, David Cameron (2019) offered another insight into the self-improving, middle-class logic underpinning higher education policy when he noted that ‘wanting your children to go to university is like wanting to own a home of your own’, adding that ‘as the party of aspiration, we should absolutely support this’. The analogy is telling, because home ownership is also something out of reach for large proportions of the population in an economically unequal society, despite urgings to dream big. Normalising university attendance, as Cameron does, offers no help for young people who have the aspiration but lack the pathways, wherewithal and guidance to realise their goals.

Quoted from Universities Under Fire 🔥 Hostile Discourses and Integrity Deficits in Higher Education by Steven Jones dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96107-7

via Boris Johnson: ‘It’s vital we invest now in FE and skills’
feweek.co.uk/boris-johnson-its-vital-we-invest-now-in-fe-...

CC BY-SA picture of the Mob Quad at Merton College, Oxford from Merton College Chapel Tower by DWR via Wikimedia Commons w.wiki/EwSS

Taken in: UK / England / Oxford (show map)

Taken on: June 27, 2003

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Sets appears in: • Doubted • Educated

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