Would a young Starmer really not be able to afford university today?  

Keir Starmer reckons that under today’s economic conditions and policy framework, he would not have gone to Leeds University when he left school in the early 1980s: ‘It was a financial stretch then; if I were a student today, I wouldn’t be able to go.’ I’m not completely convinced this is true, but I have a lot of empathy for what he says about university access. I also think it’s a politically interesting and astute comment. 

Let’s start with the politics. Compared to the population as a whole, Starmer is a very rich man who lives in a big house in London. He’s a KC and a knight. Like a lot of politicians, he’s sensitive about the fact that he’s richer and more comfortable than most of the people whose votes he wants, so naturally he prefers to talk about his humble origins. Hence those repeated references to his parents’ occupations: toolmaker and nurse. He’s ordinary, folks, just like you. See also: Rishi Sunak’s references to his mum and her chemist’s shop. So the first thing the Starmer comment on university does is reinforce the message about his origins.

The second thing it does is tap into a non-trivial public doubt about higher education (HE). Some people are starting to doubt the value of getting a degree. Students – and their parents, who are sometimes obliged to support them – look at £30,000 of fees and £20,000 of living costs and wonder if starting working life with a £50,000 debt is such a good idea. The Starmer comment is a nice way to show some understanding of that, without actually making any sort of policy commitment.   

You can understand why he’s steering away from policy. Until earlier this year, Labour was committed to abolishing tuition fees, an expensive and regressive legacy of the Corbyn years. Starmer dropped that commitment in the spring, to surprisingly little protest from his party, a sign that Labour really is taking a more grown-up approach.

But there’s still a (deliberate?) lack of clarity around the party’s approach to HE. It was notable that when Starmer gave his big ‘education mission’ speech in July, it contained essentially nothing of substance about universities. Partly that’s because Labour isn’t settled on an HE policy. And partly it’s because the party is more interested in non-graduates than in people who do go to university. 

All in all, then, a Labour leader raising some doubts about university makes political sense. But is it true? Would young Keir Starmer really have decided not to go to university? 

I sometimes ask myself a similar question, because I almost didn’t go to university. I’m younger than Starmer – I left school in 1994. I didn’t get offered any university places so I went to work, by chance in the office of my local MP. While I was reapplying for university, I was offered a job with a computer firm, with a salary of £11,000. Not much today, but then it almost matched the sort of cash graduates hired by the big accounting firms were paid. 

Then there was the cost of college. I qualified for a full grant, but that wouldn’t quite pay my term-time rent. So I’d have to pay the rent for the other half of the year, and find money to live on. At the time, the government offered student loans of £1,500 a year. 

For reasons of background and upbringing, I was terrified of debt, so I didn’t want to borrow for university. Instead I worked and saved, calculating that I would live on £31 a week during terms and stay in the black by working full-time during holidays. So that computer job was awfully tempting.

Culture mattered as well as money. While at school, I visited Oxford and Cambridge (the latter on a widening access course) and felt distinctly out of place. There weren’t many people like me there and my northeastern accent (now largely faded) was noticeable, and noted.  

So I can well understand why university participation rates among low-income kids remain depressingly low. Kids from the best-off postcodes are still twice as likely as those from the poorest places to go to HE. And the ‘better’ universities (those that demand the highest grades to enter) remain much posher than those that do less research and require lower grades.  

But in the end, I did go to university (Edinburgh, if you’re interested) and so did Keir Starmer. Why? Well for me it was because I understood that a degree was likely to be a prerequisite to the sort of job I wanted to do and the sort of salary I wanted to earn. I guess the young Starmer made a similar calculation: the sort of drive and determination that makes a person a KC and director of public prosecutions and a prospective prime minister begins early in life.  

And the fact remains that today a university degree is still, often, the best path to higher socioeconomic status. Yes, some courses are less strongly associated with good jobs and higher earnings. Yes, some employers are paying more attention to skills than qualifications. But getting a degree remains a pretty good way for a poor child to become a rich adult. My guess is that a young Keir Starmer today would see past the worries about debts and fees and go to uni anyway, much as Starmer did in the 1980s and I did in the 1990s. 

But it is equally true that a lot of kids like that imaginary Starmer don’t make that choice. They are indeed put off by the costs and culture of HE. The logic of the university sector means that some of those costs may actually rise in the years ahead: I wrote in the Times last week about the case for higher tuition fees, and I stand by that argument. 

But even as ways must be found to get more money into HE, much more must also be done to ensure that UK universities deliver more benefits to more kids from poorer homes. That could mean a proper regime of student grants for low-income kids; I hope Starmer’s words today are sign that this policy is on the cards. 

Would a young Keir Starmer have been put off going to uni today? I have my doubts about that, but I think the Labour leader’s words still point to a bigger and more important truth: not enough working class kids go to university. Having acknowledged the problem, what he has to do now is come up with some policies to solve it.