Too true Lynn. Joyce did a degree in zoology and then went on to build a broadcasting empire from scratch then selling it for millions and subsequently became a MP and minister with no political experience.

If you don’t want public debate about the direction our country is taking, then abolish the humanities and most of the social sciences. But, New Zealand is stupid enough without making it worse, so that’s probably a bad idea.

I guess if you had been to university and done some of this stuff, you might realize how stupid your piece looks to genuinely educated people (and before you start, most of the sciences are pathetically easy compared to the humanities subject I studied at college).

Perhaps doing something about the devaluation of degrees might be worth exploring instead. A Bachelors degree isn’t worth much. If you are serious, then you need at least a Masters.

On the other hand, it does seem to be the sort of learning that is focused on a narrow technical field rather than a broad field. So, it is probably excellent for training people to perform particular sorts of jobs, but rather less excellent at actually “educating” people.

Education, especially university education, is about much more than mere training for a vocation.

That means upskilling its population in advance. That means more people in education while jobs are scarce. If that means some of the people are struggling to pass while education institutions maintain standards – then so be it. It’s not clever to push people out of education onto the dole.

One less road will fund education they way it should be through this recession.

Joyce has chosen a billion dollar road a few years earlier over the lives of thousands of New Zealanders.

Just like Brownlee would choose a mine over the heritage of New Zealanders over generations.

This is a government of amoral philistines.

So in 10 years we will have all these roads and these people will be unable to afford to drive a car to get to their next work test interview at Work and Income.

So we will bring in skilled migrants, while we have these locals unemployed, and this will exacerbate a housing shortage.

All thanks to National’s infrastructure-planning person.

Let us rejoice at the prospect that this Minister is the greatest economic moron to be in Cabinet since “Think Big Birch” of the 70′s/80′s and the new reformed ex governmment investment addict “the no investment Birch” of the 90′s.

It all makes sense, if one sees roads as serving the needs of business and as for skilled workers they can get them free by hiring migrants. But this is a profile of a government that decides its policies on only two criteria – what’s good for business and can they still get re-elected.

The pass rate is irrelevant. People running courses are expected to hit a standard and not just place bums on seats. You can get someone who can pass almost anything and yet completely fail to get one paper (in my case it was organic chemistry ). But you frequently find that prerequisites are also almost irrelevant as well. I successfully did an entire science degree including the maths with virtually no secondary background in it (apart from crapping out in organic chemistry, which wasn’t that useful for earth sciences anyway).

The key is to provide the opportunity to enter courses because it is pretty damn hard to predict who will be able to pass a course or not. There are no major predictors of academic success, as virtually any lecturer will tell you. If students don’t pass then they don’t pass. There are adequate mechanisms to remove people who fail too many courses.

The government can simply close off access to courses to people who are not absolutely certain to pass (which is what I suspect this is really about – budget cutting). But that is extremely counter-productive for the country as a whole.

You usually find that the best people in most fields just fell into that field almost by accident. The lecturers are aware of this (but apparently it appears to have escaped Joyces understanding). Given a choice between gaming the system so only people that are certain to pass a course (but have no talent for it), and gaming to let people on to the course who may have the talent but aren’t certain to pass – then I hope that the lecturers take the latter.

Your problem is that you’re simply a small-minded dipshit who appears to have very little idea how talent arises and needs to be fostered. That appears to be the basis of your insecurities about tertiary training.. Your expectation (and Joyces) seems to be that tertairy education is there to churn out mindless (but well-educated) drones. The problem is that they aren’t that useful for driving the economy. It is a short-term strategy of little use to the longer term.

Read my post. It’s about the problem with incentivising academics to not fail students.

I actually think that getting a degree should involve more than a series of papers in a narrow field. It should to broader based than that.

I can see academics doing what they need to to protect the already stretched funding of their departments so they can continue to educate.