In the UK the huge rise in the number of people going to university (now 1.4 million) has been paralled by a collapse of the apprenticeship system, the number of apprentices falling from 250,000 in 1973 to 50,000 in 2016. Technical training for the less academic was dealt a death blow by the transformation of polytechnics into universities in1992.

At the same time there has been little or no improvement in the educational attainments of the bottom quarter of scchool students. 17% of them leave school functionally illiterate and 22% are innumerate. These figures ate similar to that of Albania. The government, faced with globalisation, has preferred cognitive ability and general knowledge to character, competence, experience and technical and manual skills. All this is replicated in the US, and has resulted in a polarisation of which the elites were not even aware – until it hit them. (The Week)

This is really stupid. I remember thinking the scrapping of technical colleges was bound to be a disaster. In my day Oxford Polytechnic was almost harder to get into than the main Oxford University. It had a worldwide reputation. Now called Oxford Brookes, its reputation has declined and circumstantial evidence suggests that it has almost more foreign students than British, many of whom are doing nonsense courses like business studies, which teach them to run a major corporation and to spout business-speak, all, I suspect, to little useful effect. Meanwhile, the country depends on Poles and others for technical skills. If and when they return to their countries of origin the results for Britain will be really scary.

Meanmwhile, the Trump administration in America has just unveiled a budget seeking $1.5 trillion in non-defense discretionary cuts and $1.4 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the course of a decade, while adding nearly half a trillion dollars to defense spending. The plan, titled “A New Foundation for American Greatness,” (don’t laugh – they are robbing you) would dramatically reshape federal spending, cutting anti-poverty and safety net programs, but leaving Medicare and the retirement portion of Social Security untouched. Talk about betrayal!