A-level results.

With A-level results out today, and the surrounding excitement, it got me thinking.  Success.  In any conventionally measurable sense of the word (income, career prospects, home-owning?!?), many people are doing much better than I am.  Most of these more successful people would have had poorer A-level results than me*, significantly poorer A-level results or no A-level results at all.  Of course, I may be an exception to the pattern, and better A-level results may usually mean you’re more likely to achieve more highly later in life, not guarantee it.   However, I actually suspect that there is a rather low threshold, after which it is hard to predict what the relative success of a 3A student might be vs a 3C student.  A better predictor of later life success is probably what school you went to, which is in turn indicative of your social background painting a rather worrying picture of social mobility.  I guess my questions are why is there so much emphasis and stress placed on the results of A-level examinations and are any other important qualities being overshadowed?

The first answer to why A-levels are stressed as important is because they determine access to further education - most significantly what university you go to.  This again just seems to be moving on the problem to the next set of qualifications – out of me and my siblings, one didn’t go to university, one went to a former polytechnic and one went to one of the highest ranked universities in the country.   Again by conventional measures, comparing their relative successes, the latter (me) is in the weakest position.  Again, I may be an outlier, and of course some degrees undoubtedly indicate a higher chance of later success than others, but again I doubt they are as strong a predictor as a social background.  For me the answer that A-levels matter because they determine your university place just expands the question to why is such a great emphasis placed on qualifications in general?  Highly regarded qualifications may predict later success, but both are far more strongly predicted again by social background (here is an article on this - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/social-class-determines-childs-success-934240.html).  High qualifications then seem to be more back-slapping for the already financially and culturally well-off.

One of the cruelest punchlines of formal education is that if you’re doing it to get ‘a good job’, excluding vocational callings such as medicine, law, architecture or research, after years of cramming information into your skull, you end up just starting again.  I made 5000 cups of tea in my first year of employment!  I didn’t need a medical sciences degree to do this – I might have started this at 16 and then been 6 years of experience further ahead of my university leaver piers at 22 going into the same work.  Even in vocational degrees, I imagine there is a large amount of theory baggage that never really gets used in the practical side of work.  This is hardly a new argument.  Does all this education then have any worth?  Of course it does. Exam results just aren’t always very good at reflecting this value. 

Whether its education or success, we often focus on the qualities which are easily measurable (exam results, money, etc.) and can miss other valuable qualities which are harder to quantify.  Education has tremendous value in its own right - the development of conceptual abilities, the sense of endeavor, the pleasure of being part of the massive conversation of human understanding.  Being too focused on exam results alone risks stamping out this endeavor all together.  All that work.  Done now. 

No conclusion. 

Go and make the tea.

*since you ask AAAAa, but yeah, one was General Studies.