Tichtheid wrote: ↑Sun Aug 20, 2023 5:49 pmI fundamentally oppose the idea that this is lowering standards, if that was really the case then the university would not be reporting that their contextualised offer students were achieving above average results at the uni.
When I was a student back in the 70s, back in the days when it was the academic top 10% ish who went to university, it was well known that students from state schools with the same level of qualification as those from private schools were academically brighter, and tended to do better at university. It was uncontroversial even then that, on average, it was harder for a state school pupil to achieve a certain level of results than a private school pupil.
It was also generally recognised that, relatively speaking, once they hit the job market, the private school kids followed the normal distribution on the achievement bell curve from over to under achivers. The state school kids tended to cluster at the ends, with a somewhat higher number than expected at the under achiever end.
Private school pupils tended to understand that getting the degree, getting the job, was where the real work started. The state school pupils who understood this went gang busters as they tended to be very highly motivated to succeed. But many faltered when they hit the jobs market as they they tended to think that getting the degree was the hard part, and from then on it was cruising from 9 to 5 every day getting a decent salary. Some recovered, some never did.
Back then firms firms tended to recruit 'people like us' as they knew what they were getting, whereas state school kids may have had gems amongst them, but were more unpredictable quality.
Fast forward nearly 50 years and my wife's firm makes no bones about recruiting 'people like us'. The difference is that my wife went to a state school, as did the CEO who is the only person senior to her in the firm. They still recruit a disproportionate number of private school kids, but the state school origin is higher. The problem they see in state school recruitment now is that it is very polarised, and it reflects the polarisation of society. My two sisters who have spent their careers teaching in state schools echo this. Pupils coming out of schools like Cults Academy, Boroughmuir High School, Linlithgow Academy (where my older sister's kids went) Jordanhill and others may not have quite the achieviement of the better private schools, may not have quite the polish, but their quality is discernible. Meanwhile the products of many state schools are so poor it is pretty much impossible to ascertain in a selection process if they can be developed. 'People like us' also tends to include far more women and minorities than it did back in the day .
I am 8 years retired now. Former colleagues tell me they can't wait to follow suit for a number of reasons. One of those is that the quality of recruit across all levels has fallen. It has fallen because there is now a points based selection process. In that process, points for being from a minority, a state school and other factors outweighs actual ability to do the job, even at quite senior levels.
That to me is going too far. Give the able who have not been given the extra polish a helping hand, but do not recruit / promote those less able purely to satisfy a desire for equity in outcomes such as 'we must have x% black employees'. By all means work hard to support less advantaged kids in schoools, in universities etc. But there comes a point where the decision has to be made purely on ability to execute.
