Reply #37: I stand by my argument. [View All]

[AP]

My comment on the British complaining about the way Labour wants to change the way education is financed is because they're so caught up in tradition and they don't have enough perspective to see what's going on.

Cambridge and Oxford are rapidly diminishing in importance (most of their best faculty members went to UT Austin during the Thatcher years).

Nothing worth anything is totally free. It's fine when it's high school, because you don't need a huge capital investment to give people a good educational foundation.

Once you go to college and graduate school, if you want to prepare people to make a real impact on the world, you need to give them nuclear accelarators, and great computers, and professors who need to have the financial incentive to chose working for a university over working for Chevron.

This is a no brainer. The British University system is holding on by a thread, and it's merely tradition that's keeping them going. Once people see through that last facade, the whole things going to crumble unless Labour changes the whole system properly financed. They're going to get it properly financed if the Duke of Whatever's son is paying 20,000 bucks for an Oxford education and the cab driver's daughter is paying 500 bucks for a Cambridge education. They're not going to get it by charging everyone 1000-3000 bucks and then giving all the coutnries resources to Oxbridge, while strangling the rest of the universities of badly needed funds, just to finance the charade.