In an ever-smarter world, all but the most myopic parents sense that getting their children an education is urgent
Another day, another batch of headlines about A-level results, the shortage of university places or – in today's Guardian – the knock-on effect on 16-year-olds of their older siblings staying at school or sixth-form college because they haven't found a course.
This never used to be page one news. So what's changed?
There are two obvious responses, both essentially tied to economics rather than the inherent value of education as such or the ever-popular subplot about the merits of media studies unearthed in an alarmist report today from the right-leaning Civitas thinktank.
One is that, in an ever-smarter world in which unskilled manual jobs such as digging fields or sweeping pavement shrink by the day, all but the most myopic, burger-munching parents vaguely sense that getting their kids an education is even more urgent than bequeathing them a weight problem.
We'll come back to that, since the marginal financial benefits of a bad but debt incurring degree become ever more marginal as the market is flooded with more graduates when jobs are in short supply as the recessionary cuts bite deeper with official assistance.
The second focus – not emphasised sufficiently in the acres of media anguish over dumbed down/up A-level results – is the very obvious point that higher education is a major export industry for post-industrial Britain, as it is even more so for the rapidly de-industrialising United States.
It's worth many millions to the UK economy, plus intangibles such as networking and those creative people who come to research and stay.
Why? We all speak English and, despite everything, we have some very good universities which feature in most global top 50 tables – not just the usual suspects on the Cam and Cherwell rivers, but Imperial and UCL, Edinburgh, Warwick and others.
As a French friend explained at the weekend, anyone who has the necessary matriculation requirements at home can attend a French university – does the same principle apply in Italy? – with the result that they are crowded and not always good.
The French offset this with highly elitist post-graduate "grandes ecoles" in the Paris suburbs, including one attended by William Hague, though it did not cure the foreign secretary of an inappropriate dress sense.
It produces what is explicitly called "the republican elite", which runs everything from TV to Renault. "Only thick kids go to private school," my friend explained. There's no need.
What happens when your (UK) universities attract a lot of foreigners – foreigners who are especially valued because they pay full fees – is that locals get squeezed.
It happens in the property market, too. My neighbourhood of west London has been utterly transformed in the past 20 years by refugees from Kensington who can no longer afford to live there.
Across the capital in Dagenham it's worse for poor people, whose refugees are even poorer.
So the 187,488 A-level students – I love these precise figures – still searching for a university place know they may have lost out to candidates from the EU and beyond.
I once attended a ceremony at UCL (my old college) where a Hong Kong Chinese family had just put a fourth generation through the law faculty.
The issue in Britain is complicated by class and gender. The private schools (7% of the secondary total) still hoover up a disproportionate share of the educational goods – as, increasingly, do conscientious and focused young women – because they are better resourced and (important) motivated to push their pupils hard (and discard the weaker ones? I hear it happens).
This weekend, the ex-health secretary and Labour leadership contender Andy Burnham suggested robust steps to rectify that kind of built-in advantage.
In future, work experience networks – which so advantage people with contacts – should be opened up by public advertising (by law) and restricted to three months. Rather than being free, slave labour "workies", as some of my colleagues call them, should get the minimum wage.
Virtuous thoughts, which arose from Burnham's own unhappy experience as a workie on the Middleton Guardian in his native Lancashire, though I can't help but notice that meritocracy in the French sense worked for him: within three years of leaving Cambridge university, he was working for Tessa Jowell MP. Within a decade, he was a senior minister. Well done, Andy !
Would it work? People with privileges rarely like to give them up without a struggle, be they barristers or firefighters with a string of part-time jobs, and today's Mail is enraged by the parallel kindly suggestion from universities minister, David "two brains" Willetts (also from a modest background) that universities take students with poor results but good potential.
How "unfair" to the middle class, the Mail suggested. But isn't it reasonable to conclude that a youngster with two Bs and a C from BogStandard Comprehensive is probably smarter than one with similar results from UpMarket Ladies College?
They already do that. I know a well-qualified and entitled young man who had to work much harder than he expected to get into med school. The jolt did him no harm.
Tricky, isn't it? I remain unconvinced that the traditional model for higher/further education – the three-year, academically orientated university degree – is the right one for continually expanding the sector in ways that benefit all students.
Not everyone is academically minded. That does not make them stupid, as plenty of ill-educated millionaires routinely demonstrate. Labour's efforts to boost the vocational path (plenty of plumbers earn more than mediocre barristers) seem to be running into the sand. But the coalition should persevere.
Recession or not, we need an educated workforce and, even more important, an educated citizenry.