Today's Targets Tomfoolery

Several years ago, the government gave itself a big pat on the back for this:

The target for half of young people to enter university could be achieved much sooner than expected - for women. The drive for more university places aims to have 50% of youngsters going to university by the end of the decade...

The most recent official figures for a gender breakdown are from 2001 - and these showed that ... 46.7% of girls were entering higher education, compared to only 40.4% of boys. Since then, the overall numbers entering university have increased year on year.

Via CaptainFF comes this:

Thousands of teenagers may end up on the dole instead of going to university because of a funding cap on student places, the government is being warned.

Phil Willis, chairman of the Commons Education Select Committee, says a cap on places in England must be lifted. Applications are up 9% on 2008 - about 40,000 people - but Mr Willis says he has been told as few as 3,000 extra first-year places have been funded. Ministers insist there are a record number of funded places on offer.

The latest figures from the admissions service UCAS suggest that by the end of the summer 600,000 people may have applied for a university place in England. The government's target is for 40% of all adults in England to have a university education by 2020*.

Notwithstanding that the 50% target was nonsense in the first place, as is the 40% target or any other target, isn't this straight out of "1984"? If you miss a target, you just rewrite the original target to be slightly lower than the actual outcome, to make it look as if it's been met?

* I suppose on a pedantic point, you could argue that there is a difference between 50% of current school-leavers going to university (which is a year-on-year thing) and 40% of adults having had a university education (which is a far more stable variable but would be impossible to achieve, given that until a few decades ago, only five or ten per cent of people went to university), but I don't think that's how they mean it.