Varsity report is of grave concern

There will be many tempted to utter “so what?” at a report by the Council on Higher Education (CHE) that found many of our university degrees are hardly worth the paper they are written on.

Also, many of those with a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) can hardly write English and are lacking in critical thinking skills.

It may well be that a society with fewer lawyers might be a better place, but we do need skilled legal people to ensure the country – both government and private sectors – is run in a just manner. Half-baked legal graduates won’t help us become a first-rate nation.

The Star newspaper quoted the CHE report as saying large classes were blamed as a serious “inhibiting factor” in the imparting of critical thinking … something we may ascribe to the government’s insistence that there must be places for all who want to go to university, whether or not they are the right material.

The worrying aspect about this is that law graduates – and many others – are being sent out into the world unable to think critically. This makes them easy targets for the illogical populist rhetoric of demagogues. And this should worry all of us.

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