Again, I think employers have the right to expect university leavers to be employable. Schools, colleges and universities are places of learning - that's their intent and sole reason for existence. Workplaces are for working - the clue is in the name.
The German system is closer to the system I'd prefer. I think I've mentioned on here before about a school where my wife used to teach - it is in a particularly rough area where many of the kids have never seen their parents work. Obesity is off the scale, university attendance is next to zero, standard sink estate expectations, etc.
That school got fed up of zoo keeping the less academic kids and started taking them out of lessons and training them as electricians, builders, etc. Taught them how to stay safe on building sites, how to write an invoice as a self-employed person, etc. Not only did the kids leaving that school have better prospects from that point, the results in the other classes improved too as teachers were able to focus on those more suited to academic achievement.
There's clearly a problem in how to select for grammar schools, and I don't know what the answer is to getting that right. What I am sure of is that it's our best chance of getting kids the most appropriate education we can.
Wait, you acknowledge that universities are places of learning - that they are built around that idea and fulfill their role as teachers first and foremost (even though that's not strictly speaking true - their foremost role is *research*, not teaching. Teaching comes second).
But then you say that they should prioritize making university leavers 'employable'? If workplaces are so different to universities, then where's the logic in asking universities to tailor themselves to workplaces when their primary function (as you stated) is to teach, not to train?
Universities are meant to make people think and analyse the world around them in various ways - the best of those people end up researching that world to further the sum total of all human knowledge. But, essentially, their role is to turn schoolchildren into thinking adults, and has been from the time the first eager scholars stepped across the threshold of the Universitas de Paris in the 12th century. The skills they pick up along the way make them suitable for employment - but, by and large, their practical/vocational training was once done by the companies and organizations they joined, as a historical continuation of the apprenticeship system and as a prelude to a career in higher management or otherwise away from the shop floor (again, in simpler, less universally-educated times). As mentioned above, that has changed, but not in a justified way, imo - and it isn't the university or the student's fault for that change.
The problems with schools are another matter entirely. I agree that there, it's a far more complicated socio-economic millieu that distinguishes overachievers from children held back by their surroundings, their peer group, their economic status or their innate ability. But the fundamental question that dogs preselecting students to pursue certain streams early on (as Germany does) is simply whether you're putting a child somewhere he or she won't succeed - who are you (or who am I) to make the judgement that a child isn't suited for one way of life, and by doing so railroad them into a career and a life that they might not end up enjoying or succeeding at?
In more opportunity-filled, socially-stable times, such questions wouldn't matter as much because someone could theoretically switch out of their educational stream and into another one without too much judgement or hardship as a result. We don't live in those times. And thus I don't think the German system is *unreservedly* the best, although *at least* it incentivizes companies to pay their share in terms of educating their own future employees.
Maybe that's the case at the top universities. I'm not running IBM or Google. Neither am I running a big 4 (is it 5 now?) accountancy firm.
At the end of the market where I have to shop (ex polys on the whole) kids can barely spell critical thinking, let alone enact it. They are entirely void of any logic skill or problem solving ability and not suitable for employment in the roles they are supposedly trained for.
Well, I can't speak for how disparate the standards at UK unis are, because it's outside my own personal experiences. I did my undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Toronto - and in Canada, there's a fairly level spread of reputation and instructional quality across universities. Your education won't drastically differ in, say, Thompson Rivers University (in British Columbia) when compared to what you'd get at U of T - same thing with colleges, which, while acknowledged as more vocationally-oriented than their public university counterparts, still provide broad-based educational levels outside of program-specific training certified at (mostly) public uni standards.
There are differences across programs, of course, in terms of employability. You can't employ an IR/social sciences/humanities grad as an engineer/programmer in most cases - you likely cannot employ an engineer/programmer as a doctor, or as an FSO (although there's an imbalance there - you *definitely* can't employ the former in roles meant for the latter, but you can *sometimes* employ the latter in roles meant for the former, something I once got a bit insecure about
).
But, overall, unis here aren't all that different - at least compared to what the ex-polytechnic/public uni divide sounds like based on my observational knowledge of education in the UK. Thus, I wouldn't know what the standard of kids you get applying to your company is like.
However, I will say this. Whatever their specialization, and however poorly they've been trained (and whatever the state of their skills), they are *still* more educated and capable on average than the generations that preceded them. This isn't an arguable fact - it's simply true by dint of the number of millennials with a university education of *any* kind relative to their forebears, and the generational changes in terms of technical literacy and schooling that accompanied the millennials (growing up as they did with access to computers and smartphones, and in a world which saw educational standards rise worldwide for two straight decades).
