Casper

They are getting easier. An A and two B's at A level would have got you a place at Oxford 20 or 30 years ago. It would just about get you a place at Luton today. There's no way that the brightest and best in the country 20 odd years ago could only get three A levels -an A and 2 B's and perhaps 8 O levels - and yet today there are thousands of people with 5 A levels - 3 A's and a 2 B's and 14 GCSE's - without some pretty serious grade inflation going on. Nobody is going to tell me that teachers are that much better at teaching today than they were 30 years ago (they are arguably worse) or that student's brains have made such a huge intellectual leap or work harder than they did 30 years ago.

Furthermore, the evidence from the universities themselves would suggest that standards are falling rather than rising. It is well documented and reported that niversities are having to spend the first year bringing students up to scratch - going over what they should have learnt at A level. Similarly, employers are astounded at the lack of basic literacy and numeracy that they are getting out of grade A students (and indeed graduates)

The whole system has been dumbed down - there is a lot more to this than it being a matter of old people with sour grapes moaning as some students would like to think, and I'm not even anywhere near approaching 'old'!

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Reiver

Can you actually point to any empirical evidence of the value of these qualifications declining? For example, in terms of the human capital model (where we can assume wages reflect productivity), you should be able to show that the rate of return from further education investment has fallen

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