A* for tales of underprivilege

Change of subject - educational standards and the Government's attempts to make the universities complicit in their decline.

The Sunday Telegraph notes that school pupils applying to Universities have been lying about their backgrounds to meet "social engineering" criteria. From the ST:

Application forms include sections where sixth formers can declare that
they were brought up in a care home, that their parents did not go into higher
education, or that they attended summer school classes.
...
A small number of universities, including three from the Russell group of top institutions, said they later found out that up to one in seven candidates who declared they
had been in care on their forms later admitted that they been filled the box "in
error".

So, your chances of getting in to university are now determined by being able to prove how poor and 'umble you are. Are potential students losing out because they are forgetting to doff their caps and touch their forelocks when being interviewed? Yea Gods. And the universities are expected to
verify all the hard luck stories? Haven't they got better things to be getting on with? This is what happens when you move away from having an objective set of criteria for admission to a lot of fuzzy, gerrymandered stuff that Labour has come up with to disguise the decline in standards in our state
schools.

It is entirely desireable to get more people from disadvantaged backgrounds in to university where they are bright enough to benefit from such an education. In which case, the way forward is to improve standards in state schools - rather than giving out qualifications in how to catch the bus.

Probably the worst way to go about it would be to:

1. Expand the universities and set a ludicrous 50% target for school leavers to attend...thereby leading to the creation of more Mickey Mouse courses like these ones.
2. Make it necessary to get hugely in to debt when you go to university as there isn't enough money to provide places for half of all school leavers.
3. Abolish (or at least try to) every f***ing grammar school in the country, which had provided a route for poor, bright kids to compete with the best from the private sector in higher education.
4. Scrap the Assisted Places Scheme, which subsidised private school places for, again, poor bright kids.
5. Threaten to withdraw the charitable status of public schools, making it even more expensive for those families who are making sacrifices to educate their children there.

But hey - it's easier to fiddle the system and encourage people to come with Dickensian tales of poverty. Like these guys: