Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. And those who can't teach devise educational assessment systems. The Leaving Cert points table is brutal but objective - more objective, perhaps, than the "offer prior to examination" given in the UK, as a result of which certain Oxbridge colleges have been accused of favouring applications from the children of former students, writes Declan Kiberd
Recent reports that the points system might soften and even melt down in coming years are, however, over-exaggerated. Although more places than ever at third level in Ireland are available to a diminishing number of students, with a resultant drop in the points needed for many courses, nevertheless the old familiar story is being told.
Over the past week, I've met several students who did not secure the places on which they'd set their hearts. Many of the class of 2006 will, like their predecessors over the past decade, walk into local shops and discotheques under the prying eyes of neighbours, who can mentally see the numbers 310 or 465 branded on their foreheads. Forever. And others will walk the streets with the word "repeat" mentally etched on their brows.
Some from all these categories are submitting themselves to the pain of reading over what they wrote under conditions of absolute stress last June, in hopes of those extra points that will get them into medicine, law or whatever.
Last week, a brilliant young woman burst into tears during a phone-call to me. Her problem was different. She had scored 590 points, having opted for an arts degree. Now she was confused, because people in her neighbourhood were telling her that she was "mad" and "throwing herself away".
Why does the arts degree still provoke disdain in some quarters? The answer lies with educational planners. The fabled "Shanghai system", which rates global universities, does not even bother to include arts faculties in its assessments. You could have five Nobel Prize-winning Seamus Heaneys iyour department and they would count for nothing.
Yet both our Government and some education correspondents in newspapers treat the Shanghai findings every year as holy writ.
No doubt, China before the modern age had a rich tradition in medicine and philosophy; but for those of us now working in the arts, it's rather ludicrous to see a country with its dismal recent record on everything from human rights to cultural freedom suddenly being allowed to set the "gold standard" in higher education.
Back within the more mundane realities of our own points system, arts degrees have risen in points and prestige from a nadir in the 1990s, and for many reasons. In an age of communications, they teach valuable skills.
Personnel managers see arts people as having the necessary flexibility of thought and personality to meet the ever-changing needs of companies in transformation. The "human resources manager" (odious phrase) of a major energy firm told me recently that each year he took in more arts than any other kind of graduate. Yet, despite all this, the Government has launched a programme forcing cutbacks on arts faculties, which had already been producing quality graduates at a fraction of the cost incurred in other lands. Margaret Thatcher applied similar policies in the UK through the 1980s to disastrous effect.
Are we to be, in James Joyce's words, "the most belated race in Europe" yet again? Joyce's model prose stylist was John Henry Newman, the definer of a liberal university. He was confronted with "Gradgrindery" when he gave lectures in Dublin in the 1850s.
He said: "My critics very naturally go on to ask, what is there to show for the expense of a university? . . . on the supposition that it does not teach us to advance our manufacturers".
His listeners were members of that Catholic middle class which had only just begun to emerge after more than a century of Penal Laws, in which almost all forms of economic advance had been denied them.
They had every reason to be suspicious of a visiting Englishman who told them that things of the spirit might be worth even more than material efficiency. But they listened and acted on his advice that "intellectual culture is its own end".
Their descendants are now one of the wealthiest peoples in the world (thanks, in part, to traditions of critical thinking which Newman helped to initiate).
But that hasn't prevented them from devaluing those liberal arts so bravely praised by Newman at a time when his listeners might have been excused for taking a more materialist viewpoint.
Newman said: "Though the useful is not always good, the good is always useful."
He knew that an arts education can never have its value fully quantified, even in exams. There are some things that just can't be finally measured.
Not even in Shanghai. Not even in Marlborough Street.