Did you ever need an arts graduate in a hurry? So why so many universities?

DID you ever see, in the old Yellow Pages or on the web, anyone advertising himself as an emergency journalist? No, nor I. Did you ever, on some blighted weekend, tell yourself that you’d pay practically anything to get a journalist to come round? No, nor I.

So when people ask me how they can get into journalism, as they sometimes do, I urge them to become plumbers instead. First of all, they can absolutely guarantee that they will always have work and income, as plumbers will never cease to be necessary. This is not the case with journalists.

So if you want to take up the ancient trade of scribbling articles, it would be best to have a standby. And a few months of unblocking sinks and rescuing people from flooded kitchens and broken boilers will give you an education in life, and what people really care about, which will make you a much better journalist.

THIS illustrates better than anything else why Sir Anthony Blair’s call for 70 per cent of young people to go to university, instead of learning how to do actual jobs, is sheer foaming madness, and actively wicked into the bargain.

Because for most of them, the experience will involve poor tuition and huge debts incurring increasingly vicious interest rates. And what will they have at the end? Certificates to frame, but no special advantage in seeking the rather small number of jobs for which a degree is really needed.

As far as I can see, the wild expansion of universities, which began under John Major and exploded under the Blair Creature, had three real purposes. By raising the school leaving age to 21 it kept the official unemployment figures down and compelled those involved to pay their own dole by borrowing the money for fees, rents and food.

It completed the foolish switch to an American-style school policy, which began with the smashing-up of the selective state grammar schools in the 1960s and 1970s. This created a high school system in which the 11-18 years are used mainly to socialise children into citizens of an egalitarian state, with a little education on the side. Education of a sort then begins in college, which costs a fortune. But real university tuition starts only when the young stay at college, for even longer and at even greater cost, to do second ‘Masters’ degrees.

Third and perhaps most important was the transformation of universities from serious places of learning into hard-driving businesses, cramming in the numbers, joining the property rental business and paying giant salaries to their bosses. I suspect many British towns and cities nowadays depend heavily on these shaky places, founded almost entirely on debt. How they will cope in the new world of savagely rising prices and taxes, I cannot tell.

But there are few things worse than giving false promises to the young. Starting wars is one of them, but Sir Anthony has done that too. How does he have the nerve to stay in public life? Probably because he has ensured that hardly anyone these days is educated enough to see through him.