Professor Anton Muscatelli, the new convener of the body representing Scotland�s university principals, wants up to two-thirds of all Scottish school-leavers to pursue university or college degrees by 2028 to secure the future economic health of the nation.
Professor Anton Muscatelli, the new convener of the body representing Scotland's university principals, wants up to two-thirds of all Scottish school-leavers to pursue university or college degrees by 2028 to secure the future economic health of the nation. Quoting Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) statistics, he says that Scotland is not improving tertiary provision as fast as other member states such as Finland, Australia and New Zealand.
His call is supported by a Scottish Enterprise-sponsored report which last year predicted that the country would need an extra 198,000 postgraduates and an additional 138,000 graduates by 2017 to service an estimated 18% growth in professional jobs. Yet the report emerged before the current credit squeeze's inevitable impact on future educational funding became clear and also appears to be at odds with the predictably more pragmatic view of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). That organisation says degree-level education is not the exclusive route to increasing or creating skills in most demand and that vocational training can be equally if not more valuable.
Critics consider that shoe-horning an extra 20% of school-leavers into degree courses must lead to a dumbing down of the process, with the inevitable devaluation of the degrees themselves in much the same way as recent criticism of high levels of pass marks for secondary school qualifications implied that standards of difficulty had been lowered to meet government targets rather than expand the knowledge base of pupils. Professor Muscatelli's pitch is prompted by an apparent decline in the numbers of pupils opting for degree courses from 51% in 2000 to about 47% now. That rate places Scotland 10th in the OECD league table, but is slightly distorted because it is based on the percentage of its national gross domestic product each country devotes to university and college funding rather than the numbers of school-leavers who progress to the next rung of intellectual achievement. Matching provision with New Zealand on that basis would cost the Scottish Government an extra £370m it currently does not have to spend, nor is likely to acquire as part of any share of UK revenue in the foreseeable future.
In his new role, it would have been surprising if Professor Muscatelli had not asked for anything less than a radical expansion of intellectual resources. It would have been equally astonishing if the CBI, dedicated to meeting the expedient needs of its members in the most challenging economic climate for decades, failed to support the kind of shorter-term vocational fixes companies need to survive and hopefully expand in due course as circumstances permit. To the CBI's credit, the reintroduction of apprenticeships vital to the health of the building and shipbuilding industries bears this position out to some extent and is already bridging key skills' gaps.
It is equally important that Scotland's solid and well-deserved reputation for academic excellence be preserved and maintained. Diluting that international benchmark in the interests of anyone's numbers' game would be counter-productive and ultimately damaging both economically and educationally.
