What's your Edu and it's implication to you?

[redkingjoe]

Someone PM me that the following can't be accessed from the computer:
(http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...06/nearn06.xml)

Go to a private school and a top college – and add £60,000 to your salary
By Julie Henry, Education Correspondent
(Filed: 06/03/2005)

An independent school education followed by a degree at an elite university can add more than £60,000 a year to your earnings.


A 20-year study, tracking hundreds of children who started secondary school in the 1980s, has found that people who went to leading universities were four times more likely to earn more than £90,000 a year in their thirties than those who attended "new" universities, most of whom earned less than £30,000. Of those in the top income bracket, 85 per cent had gone to private schools, while 61 per cent of those earning less than £30,000 had attended state schools.

The research, commissioned by the Government-funded Economic and Social Research Council, and called Success Sustained?, interviewed 600 "academically able" pupils from a variety of backgrounds, who started secondary school in the early 1980s. The paper, to be published later this year by London University's institute of education, found that most of the individuals, now in their thirties, were doing well. Those doing best, however, had attended independent schools and leading universities.

The study shows that 41 per cent of those who went to elite universities were in the highest social and occupational class. This compared with 28 per cent who went to other "old" universities and eight per cent who went to "new" universities, generally former polytechnics.

There was also a strong relationship between earning levels and the status of the university, attended, researchers found.

Those who went to leading universities were four times more likely to be earning more than £90,000 than those who went to new institutions. An even closer connection between school type and salary levels emerged. About 85 per cent of those on £90,000-plus a year were privately educated, while 61 per cent of those earning less than £30,000 were state educated.

The study said: "Meritocratic arguments could be used to explain the connection between schooling and earnings, as privately schooled respondents obtained higher A-levels and more went to Oxbridge.

"However, the legacy of private education is also evident in the relative success of a small group who did not go to university, which suggests that an elite private education confers advantages other than high levels of academic attainment."

Research by the London School of Economics found that between the early 1980s and late 1990s, the proportion of children from the richest families who had completed a degree by the age of 23 rose from 20 per cent to almost half. In the same period, the number of graduates among the poorest quarter of families crept up from six per cent to just nine.

Aaron Simpson, 33, who attended £18,000-a-year Brentwood School, in Essex, and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, said his "privileged" education had contributed to his success. As co-founder and chief executive of Quintessentially, a concierge service for the "super rich", some of his alma mater have become customers.

Mr Simpson, from Islington in north London, said: "I was told at 14 that I would be put in for Oxbridge. It can work two ways. It can be difficult if you are told you will achieve something and then don't achieve it, or it can be a good focus for your efforts. I concentrated on the subjects I knew I could do well in, as I was never a sportsman.

"St Edmunds was not a rich college but it had people from all backgrounds," he said. "It was only after graduating that I realised fully the implications of having gone to Oxford. The big gap in earnings between old and new institutions seems surprising but not when you consider that these places are feeders into the professions. Banks and law firms were picking undergraduates off before they even left."

Mr Simpson, who founded a film company and produced the British movie Mad Cows at 25, said his education had helped to prepare him for life. "At an early age I was negotiating £3 million contracts and trying to extract money from people in their forties and fifties," he said. "It could be quite daunting at 24, but I think my education gave me the confidence to carry it off."

Martin Stephen, the head of £19,000-a-year St Paul's School, in south-west London, said: "If you've been fortunate enough to go to a good school and then go on to a good university, there are no excuses. You ought to do well.

"The best schools give you a mixture of drive and self-understanding."

[redkingjoe]

Without prejudice

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Long live grammars

The unacceptable face of British elitism lies in a school system where money matters more than talent

Nick Cohen
Sunday July 31, 2005
The Observer

Radical slogans don't often stir the blood when delivered in a voice trained at a private school and polished at an elite university. But Sarah Montague (Blanchelande Girls' College and the University of Bristol) did her best when she confronted a teacher who was arguing for the restoration of the grammar schools. 'But,' spluttered the Today programme presenter, 'we don't want elitism.'
Heaven's forefend! Elitism? In England? All but a few of the grammar schools have gone. John Major (Rutlish Grammar School) declared Britain a 'classless society'. Tony Blair (Fettes and St John's College, Oxford) fought the 2005 election on behalf of 'hard-working families', while Michael Howard (Llanelli Grammar School and Peterhouse, Cambridge) spoke for the 'forgotten majority' - who responded by forgetting to vote for him. It's not only the BBC which has raised the scarlet banner high. All public cultural institutions from the Royal Opera House to the National Parks announce their distaste for the white middle class and their commitment to egalitarianism. A foreigner might be forgiven for thinking that Britain was in the grip of red revolution.

Yet as Ruth Kelly (Westminster School and Queen's College, Oxford) has noticed, 40 years of comprehensives have left Britain a sclerotic society where parents' money matters more than a child's talent. Perhaps she'll twig that the anti-elitist harangues from the upper middle class are the perfect cover for a system which suits it to a tee.

That Britain is becoming an aristocracy of wealth is undeniable. The simplest measure was devised by Jo Blandon and her colleagues at the London School of Economics. You might assume that a child born in 1958, when Harold Macmillan ran the country and stuffed his cabinet with dukes, would have been far more hamstrung by his class origins than a child born at the end of the swinging Sixties in 1970. Not a bit of it. The LSE found that on average a boy born to a well-to-do family in 1958 earned 17.5 per cent more than a boy born to a family on half the income. The son of an equivalent Mr and Mrs Moneybags born 1970 will be earning today 25 per cent more than his contemporary from the wrong side of the tracks. Far from decreasing, class advantage has grown.

All the efforts by New Labour to redistribute wealth, all the Sure Start schemes and working families' tax credits, have merely slowed the process, while the great expansion of the universities has left the gap between working- and middle-class participation in higher education wider than ever.

Economists produce thousands of papers on the reasons why. The education system has to be high among them, unless you believe education doesn't matter. The liberal-left never has believed that since the Enlightenment, although I do hear rather a lot of liberals dismissing education today.

Their denial is an excuse for a failure of idealism which has left education as the largest cause of hypocrisy and mystification for my class and my generation. In public we deplore elitism. In practice everyone knows that the grammar schools, which at least selected by ability, have been replaced with private and comprehensive schools which select by parental wealth. If you are rich and have a bright child, he will go private and although he will have to pass exams, he won't face competition from children whose parents can't afford the fees. If you are rich and have a dunce, you select by house price and move into the catchment area of a good school or get your nanny to drive your child to a good school in another borough or lie to vicars and send your child to a good church school. Again, you know your child won't face competition from brighter children whose parents can't afford to buy houses in the right area or don't have the knowledge to play the system. The result is that in the inner cities we don't have comprehensives but a universal system of secondary moderns.

The refusal to be honest about money makes serious debate impossible. The children of the rich stay rich. The children of graduates graduate. The children of the working and lower-middle classes sink into financial and cultural impoverishment. Yet most of the time when education is discussed the speakers refuse to admit that, uniquely in Europe, Britain has private schools with higher intellectual standards than their state rivals.

If they did, conventional political certainties would evaporate. Before he left the education department, Charles Clarke (Highgate School and Kings College, Cambridge) wanted to force successful schools to take disruptive pupils, even though the teaching would inevitably suffer. It sounded like a tough socialist measure which promised equality of misery. Yet Clarke couldn't force the private schools to take excluded pupils, so you could look at him another way and say here was a public school boy stopping the best state schools competing with his alma mater. Clarke didn't mean that, anymore than another public school Labour minister, Tony Crosland (Highgate School, and Trinity College, Oxford) meant to give the private schools their greatest boost ever when he began the civil war in state education with the promise to 'destroy every ****ing grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland'. None the less, both Crosland and Clarke were the objective friends of the children of the wealthy because they handicapped the competition.

The LSE economists report to Gordon Brown. Tony Blair's Downing Street Policy Unit has thought about increasing inheritance tax and freeing-up education by ending selection by house price. Although they don't want the grammar schools back, both know that this is a more class-ridden country than when the grammar schools were in place and I guess both know that unless the brightest in the working class get an elite education the Today listeners will always win.

Blair and Brown can't do much because Labour MPs still cling to the Sixties' settlement. It's only when they notice that the rich are getting all the gravy, that they will help the poor with brains.

Source: (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comme...539682,00.html)