Unversities versus Lord Mandelson

One good news measure of our economic impact -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8340552.stm

The report is well worth reading as it puts a bottom line
(and an impressive one) on our economic impact
and explictly excludes the societal impact (which I believe
would be a trivial case to make)

On Mandelson and turning HE into a 1960s
Comprehensive System....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8339454.stm
as part of his higher ambitions (viz
http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/higher-ambitions
if you were having a hard time finding it)

I really think we dont handle these guys very well - obviously
we don't "just rely on A levels" when doing admissions -
that would be stupid -
its the government that are stupid to say so,

Why don't we have a Alastair Campbell type press person
to fight our corner in the public eye -
the government press office gets away with
repeatedly reporting complete and utter balderdash
(witness their attempts to trash the Cambridge report on primary education,
let alone their wilful ignorance in attempting to
supress other science advice recently).

Why do we listen to politicians when they don't listen to us?

We should take our case direct to the public more.

For example,
fundamentally, if someone is disadvantaged by a
state education in getting to university the
solution is not to disadvantage children of wealthy parents
by displacing them from university by people with lower achievements
which would be obviously 100% unethical,
reducing the quality of education for everyone,
but to put the resources into fixing
secondary schools.

every time some good university
catches "criticism" from Mandelson,
for a low %age of state school kids
(e.g. UCL, Imperial, Cambridge, Oxford)
we should look at the list of
schools where we rejected people from
and say
"so what are you doing
about these useless schools,
Lord M?"

and pass this on to the applicants and their parents to
go to their LEA and ask what they are doing with the tax money...
and the subsidy they are getting from people who send their kids
to private school and still pay tax but don't put load on the system
(oh, ok so the private school gets teachers....well if the state school was god, and more state schools are getting people in to uni than private, so more are, by this definition good) then they will attract good teachers - and they do - its just naff schools that don

comprehensivising the universities will screw them up just the way
it did to english 2ndary schools for a couple of decades - solution is
let the teachers do their job and resource it properly (like pretty much any where else in europe(including scotland for example) except england)

and lay off -if you cut university income, you are cutting a profit center - no-one who has "business" in their job title, vuts
profit centers.