As a UK graduate (BSc and PhD) who has not lived or worked in the UK for 20-odd years, my impressions may be somewhat off-base, but the issue I have is the changing role of higher education - into a training system as opposed to education. As a number of previous commenters have noted, real training (as in learning the job) comes when you are on the job - the degree requirement was to identify those people who could learn and had the necessary background.
It now seems more and more that people (employers? employees?) expect to be able to "do the job" as soon as you start not "learn on the job" and so the focus of the qualification becomes more vocational than educational. In this case, we end up reducing the usefulness of the qualification for anything other than the specific job it is intended for and ability of the employee to bring anything more to the job than just an adequate ability to perform it. Now this is a chicken and egg situation - do employers demand this or teachers expect this to be the case - but as I compare my A-levels and degree studies with what I read now, there is no doubt that there has been a large change in focus.
As I have been exposed to higher education in four other countries since my UK PhD, what I have noted is the value in the highly focussed A-level system in the UK: For those people who have the desire and ability to get into research it is (or was?) the best system of any that I have experience of. Whether this was a problem for other students was an important question, but wrecking one (only?) good thing about the UK education system hardly seems the right way to go about addressing a different problem.
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Education - or training?
As a UK graduate (BSc and PhD) who has not lived or worked in the UK for 20-odd years, my impressions may be somewhat off-base, but the issue I have is the changing role of higher education - into a training system as opposed to education. As a number of previous commenters have noted, real training (as in learning the job) comes when you are on the job - the degree requirement was to identify those people who could learn and had the necessary background.
It now seems more and more that people (employers? employees?) expect to be able to "do the job" as soon as you start not "learn on the job" and so the focus of the qualification becomes more vocational than educational. In this case, we end up reducing the usefulness of the qualification for anything other than the specific job it is intended for and ability of the employee to bring anything more to the job than just an adequate ability to perform it. Now this is a chicken and egg situation - do employers demand this or teachers expect this to be the case - but as I compare my A-levels and degree studies with what I read now, there is no doubt that there has been a large change in focus.
As I have been exposed to higher education in four other countries since my UK PhD, what I have noted is the value in the highly focussed A-level system in the UK: For those people who have the desire and ability to get into research it is (or was?) the best system of any that I have experience of. Whether this was a problem for other students was an important question, but wrecking one (only?) good thing about the UK education system hardly seems the right way to go about addressing a different problem.