ABSTRACT
Academic in English education is associated with the brain and vocational with the hand. Institutionally, this was played out in traditional class terms with academic higher education (HE) for professions endorsed by universities over non-academic trade training for manual crafts in colleges of further education (FE). Fundamentally, the perception of 'the problem' needs to shift from fixation on better preparing young people for 'employability' by providing 'vocational' secondary schooling alongside supposedly vocational but often actually continued 'pre-vocational' preparation in tertiary F&HE, or through government-backed pseudo-work placements, bogus apprenticeships and interminable internships. The Logic of Mass Higher Education can also be seen in England, where Alison Wolf has said FE has been 'decanted' into mass HE and the Susskind's anticipate that 'people will tend to be trained on a task-basis rather than for undertaking jobs'. This turns more or less academic vocational preparation at tertiary level into pre-vocational training of the type that Altbach assumes to have been completed in schools.
