Young people are wising up to the Great British student rip-off – and they’re voting with their feet

As universities wind down teaching for yet another round of exams, more and more prospective graduates are asking: why bother? writes Simon Jenkins in The Guardian

This week begins one of the worst deals offered by any British professional institution. Almost all universities are about to stop teaching students and subject them to pointless exams, mocks and quantification, before passing or failing them, then packing up and reassembling some months later in September. For an average price of tens of thousands of pounds a head (except in Scotland), most students will get virtually no teaching for a good proportion of their course. From any other service – medicine, law, accountancy – this would be regarded as a scam.

The tradition of scholars teaching academic subjects part-time while doubling as researchers is a relic of medieval monasticism. Oxbridge operates for just 24 weeks a year while many other universities operate two semesters. Staff and buildings may be otherwise employed, but students will sit idle, doing odd jobs or studying on their own. No one dares challenge this system. Whitehall inspectors never declare universities “failing” or “inadequate” as they do schools.

But I sense the worm is turning. Last year the percentage of British school leavers going to university fell for the first time – other than briefly in 2012, when the £9,000 fees came in in England. Even before lockdown and the years of online-only teaching, an Ipsos Mori poll showed a falling demand for university among school-leavers, with just 32% being “very likely” to go in 2018. The same trend is evident in the US where college enrolments have been falling for over a decade.

Meanwhile industrial and professional apprenticeships are rising fast. At Lloyds Bank last year, 17,000 school-leavers applied for 215 vacancies. The exam bluff was called by EY’s Maggie Stilwell, who said there was “no evidence” to conclude that exam success correlated with career success. Personal qualities and professional training were what mattered. Her firm, along with accountants PwC and Grant Thornton, have dropped any requirement of degree classes or even A-level results from their application forms. The new “degree apprenticeships” offered by firms such as Dyson and Rolls-Royce are popular, with some 30,000 offered last year. The Institute of Student Employers records that a declining half of firms now ask for a class of degree, and a quarter explicitly state “no minimum requirements”. In Silicon Valley it is even known that an acceptance letter from Stanford University can be sufficient to secure a job. Why waste years swotting for meaningless exams?

The age-old debate over whether a university is really an investment, personal or national, as opposed to a middle-class finishing school has never been resolved. British graduates on average earn £10,000 more than their non-graduate contemporaries, but surely some students might have done equally well with the same number of years’ work under their belts, perhaps studying a favourite subject part- or full-time later in life.

During his brief career as universities minister, Jo Johnson at least hinted at radicalism. He questioned the one-size-fits-all residential university. He floated shorter courses, shorter holidays, broader subjects, more intensive teaching and lifelong learning. He might have added that artificial intelligence is posing a whole new challenge. Johnson may now have gone, but the marketplace is talking. This most reactionary of British institutions may yet be forced to waken from the sleep of ages.

Asra Nomani - Exposing Islamists

 

What's causing the wave of Economic Collapse?

 

The Confidence Game .....3

 The confidence game has existed long before the term itself was first used, likely in 1849, during the trial of William Thompson. The elegant Thompson, according to the New York Herald, would approach passersby on the streets of Manhattan, start up a conversation, and then come forward with a unique request. “Have you confidence in me to truste me with your watch until tomorrow?” Faced with such a quixotic question, and one that hinged directly on respectability, many a stranger proceeded to part with his timepiece. And so the confidence man was born: The person who uses others’ trust in him for his own private purposes.

Have you confidence in me? What will you give me to prove it?

Cons come in all guises. Long cons that take time and ingenuity to build up: From impostor schemes to Ponzis to the building of outright new realities - a new country, a new technology, a new cure - that have found a comfortable home in the world of the Internet, and remain as well, safely ensconced in their old offline guises.

The con is the oldest game there is. But it’s also one that is remarkably well suited to the modern age. If anything, the whirlwind advance of technology heralds a new golden age of the grift. Cons thrive in times of transition and fast change, when new things are happening and old ways of looking at the world no longer suffice. That’s why they flourish during revolutions, wars and political upheavals. Transition is the confidence game’s greatest ally, because transition breeds uncertainty. There’s nothing a con artist likes better than exploiting the sense of unease we feel when it appears that the world as we know it is about to change. We may cling cautiously to the past, but we also find ourselves open to things that are new and not quite expected. Who’s to say this new way of doing business isn’t the wave of the future?

The Confidence Game......2

 There’s a likely apocryphal story about the French poet Jacques Prevert. One day he was walking past a blind man who held up a sign “Blind man without a pension”. He stopped to chat. How was it going? Were people helpful? “Not great”, the man replied.

Could I borrow your sign?” Prevert asked. The blind man nodded.

The poet took the sign, flipped it over and wrote a message.

The next day, he again walked past the blind man, “How is it going now?” he asked. “Incredible,” the man replied. “I’ve never received so much money in my life.”

On the sign, Prevert had written: “Spring is coming, but I won’t see it.”

Give us a compelling story, and we open up. Scepticism gives way to belief. The same approach that makes a blind man’s cup overflow with donations can make us more receptive to almost any persuasive message, for good or for ill.

When we step into a magic show, we come in actively wanting to be fooled. We  want deception to cover our eyes and make our world a tiny bit more fantastical, more awesome than it was before. And the magician, in many ways, uses the exact same approaches as the confidence man - only without the destruction of the con’s end game. “Magic is a kind of a conscious, willing con,” says Michael Shermer, a science historian and writer. “You’re not being foolish to fall for it. If you don’t fall for it, the magician is doing something wrong.” 

At their root, magic tricks and confidence games share the same fundamental principle: a manipulation of our beliefs. Magic operates at the most basic level of visual perception, manipulating how we see and experience reality. It changes for an instant what we think possible, quite literally taking advantage of our eyes’ and brains’ foibles to create an alternative version of the world. A con does the same thing, but can go much deeper. Long cons, the kind that take weeks, months or even years to unfold, manipulate reality at a higher level, playing with our most basic beliefs about humanity and the world.

The real confidence game feeds on the desire for magic, exploiting our endless taste for an existence that is more extraordinary and somehow more meaningful.

When we fall for a con, we aren’t actively seeking deception - or at least we don’t think we are. As long as the desire for magic, for a reality that is somehow greater than our everyday existence remains, the confidence game will thrive.

Extracted from The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova

A Confidence Artist (con man) Satisfies a Basic Human Need

“Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.’ Voltaire

The above quote is accurate because it touches on a profound truth. The truth of our absolute and total need for belief from our early moments of consciousness till we die.

In some ways, confidence artists have it easy. We’ve done most of the work for them; we want to believe in what they’re telling us. Their genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire.

Confidence men are sometimes referred to as the ‘aristocrats of crime’. Hard crime - theft, burglary, violence is not what the confidence artist is about. The confidence game - the con - is about soft skills. Trust, sympathy, persuasion. The true con artist doesn’t force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn’t steal. We give. He doesn’t have to threaten us. We supply the story ourselves. We believe because we want to, not because anyone made us. And so we offer up whatever they want - money, reputation, trust, fame, legitimacy, support - and we don’t realise what is happening until it is too late.

Our need to believe, to embrace things that explain our world, is as pervasive as it is strong. Given the right cues, we’re willing to go along with just about anything and put our confidence in just about anyone. Conspiracy theories, supernatural phenomena, psychics; we have a seemingly bottomless capacity for credulity.

Or, as one psychologist put it, ‘Gullibility may be deeply engrained in the human behavioural repertoire.’ For our minds are built for stories. We crave them, and, when there aren’t ready ones available, we create them. Stories about our origins. Our purpose. The reasons the world is the way it is.

Human beings don’t like to exist in a state of uncertainty or ambiguity. When something doesn’t make sense we want to supply the missing link. When we don’t understand what or why or how something happened, we want to find the explanation. A confidence artist is only too happy to comply - and the well-crafted narrative is his absolute forte.

 

Extracted from The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova

The Left's International Ecosystem in India