The day before yesterday was an important day for a lot of teenagers (including my son) who are aspiring to go to universities. In the UK there are three national exams, called GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education), AS (Advanced Subsidiary) and A (Advanced), over three years starting from age 16, and the exam results for AS and A were announced the day before yesterday across the country.
University annual fee is about 3,000 pound stirling (about 5,000 US dollars), but this fee is suddenly going to be tripled from 2012. This means that a lot of kids who might have planned to have a gap year under normal circumstances all rushed to get into universities before the fee goes up next year. The result is three quarters of the applicants couldn't get in even if they had the top marks in the chosen subjects.
What I'm wondering is this. Why would the parents (or kids) want to pay three times as much as what they have been paying until now for their kids (or themselves) to go to universities from next year and to get qualifications which millions of others have? It doesn't add up to me... If something special is owned by everyone, it's not special any more.
I think it's a matter of time that students would overflow from the lecture rooms and universities would have to put up an IMAX-size screens outside the campus building. Then someone would probably propose to set up one more special step in higher education, like Grandes Écoles in France, and make it even more selective. What are we going to do with all these clever people...?
If 95% of the population have Gucci handbags, then it would become cool to carry plastic bags with trendy designs from supermarket. I think it's a matter of time that it becomes fashionable not to have any university degrees and have some funky features in you instead. Well, in the meantime, me and my son's father have to focus on our jobs to earn more for the tripled university fee because we would rather our son didn't leave an university with massive debt.
Sweet potato cakes - an adaptation from a booked called Plenty by Ottolenghi. I used a potato variety called Kumala (or Kumara) here, but I would have liked to use Japanese variety which has pale yellow, firmer, meatier, and sweeter flesh than Western variety.
Ingredients (for 2 people or 1 hungry person):
(for potato cakes)
about 500g sweet potatoes, cut into an inch chunks
1 teaspoon soy sauce
50g flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
pinch of sugar
1 tablespoon spring onion, sliced thinly
1/2 teaspoon fresh red chilli, chopped finely
(for sauce)
50g crème fraîche (or Greek yoghurt)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon coriander leaves, finely chopped
Steam the sweet potatoes until cooked and leave to cool for a good hour.
Whisk all the ingredients for the sauce and set aside.
Mash the potatoes together with the rest of the ingredients for the cakes and mix everything well. Heat a large knob of butter in a frying pan, make potato patties a bit larger and thicker than digestive biscuits, and fry them until nice and brown.