UK Announces Hybrid Work/Study Undergraduate Program To Fill Digital Gap

An anonymous reader writes The UK's Digital Economy Minister Ed Vaizey today revealed a new scheme where undergraduates will be able to avoid student fees and student loans by working for companies for three years whilst simultaneously undertaking academic studies with participating universities, resulting in a degree at the end of their successful involvement in the scheme. The British government will fund two-thirds of the cost of tuition and the host employer the remainder. The "Digital Apprenticeship" scheme will remunerate students at an unspecified level of pay, and though details are currently sketchy, is reported to obviate the need for student loans. The initiative is targeting the skills gap in the digital sector, particularly in the field of web-development and technical analysis.

Comments

Serfdom

[Freshly Exhumed]

This is harmful to critical thinking and objectivity when a researcher is indebted (literally or otherwise) to any corporate entity.

Could be a good idea..

[jcr]

I learned to write C code by writing code, sitting in an office between two experts, one of whom later sat on the original ANSI C committee that defined the standard. I made mistakes, they told me what I did wrong, and I learned. Based on what I've seen from kids coming out of college, their instructors appear to have been people who couldn't make it as software developers.

-jcr

Re:Why the subsidy?

[Half-pint HAL]

I'm struggling to understand why this particular group of students should have such a heavily government subsidised education when they claim they can't afford it for the rest of us..

Isn't it obvious? We've got a general election in 6 months, and the guys currently in charge want to still be in charge in a year's time, so they want to be seen as the guys who did something to address the problem of unaffordable tuition fees, instead of the guys who caused the problem within months of the last election.

As for why computers, it's simply a way to give their regressive, exclusionist tactics an illusion of "progressivity". This is "real world" stuff rather than "ivory towers", so it's "economy". Yay for the world's oldest democracy.