University of a part of Sydney

Just the other day I was sharing a coffee with an academic friend. He mentioned that my graduating institution, the University of Sydney, was strategizing its future around becoming an extension to Sydney’s private schools.

I said ‘what?’

He said that they are planning to simply take their incoming students primarily from the more expensive private schools on the premise that parents that are happy to pay $50k or more a year for high schooling will pay even more for the right university degree.

I thought about it and suggested that this might be a brilliant financial strategy and that for most of the degrees, the professional services such a medicine, law, dentistry, vet and the like, that the quality of the students doesn’t really matter that much. All they need is solid training.

He said ‘what about business and economics?’ in reference to the graduates that go into our large financial sector. Even there, I proposed, competence was sufficient, especially in our oligarchical Australian economy. All they have to do is compete with themselves and so long as they are from the same gene pool what can go wrong?

The only degrees where the lack of focus on talent and achievement might bite them in the bum is in the arts and the sciences. In these degrees, in the ideal world, you’d bypass the over-coached over-achievers and go looking for genuine talent from anywhere in Australia, or even around the world.

Oddly enough, I have this suspicion that great talent in the arts and sciences can actually be ruined by too much money/focus/coaching/status in high school. The truly great talent needs time to contemplate during the teens and thereby develop the inner fortitude required to ferment their own ideas and disrespect past orthodoxy.

Think of this like good wine. It needs to be put on a shelf and left alone for years while it slowly matures to its own fancy. Anything that is continuously played with is likely to become corked, or mature too quickly and only be good for immediate drinking.

Back to the University of Sydney. I thought my friend must be simply wrong – they couldn’t be that short of ideas. But maybe the inbreeding has already started?

Today I read in the herald that indeed the University of Sydney is piloting a paid HSC-bypass scheme at one of Sydney’s private schools.

Geez, I might have to take this institution off my resume.