It’s not difficult to pick holes in Education Secretary Gillian Keegan’s plan, publicised over the weekend, to deal with so-called ‘rip off’ university courses. True, there is a serious problem. Too many students are being inveigled into signing up for degrees with low entry requirements, little intellectual stimulation, a high drop-out rate and not a great deal deal of vocational usefulness at the end of it all. Something clearly must be done about this grievous waste of both young people’s time and also a great deal of just-about-managing taxpayers’ money.
The trouble with the government’s answer is that it shows a miserable myopia about the point of higher education. The government’s advice to students is essentially to shop around aggressively, coupled with a limit on admissions to courses that the Office for Students thinks carry no adequate earnings premium.
By all means encourage aspiration: but what we aspire to should at the very least be worth having
The idea that the state should turn up its nose at courses because they do not substantially boost earning power is philistine and unattractive (think theology, fine art, or for that matter mediaeval history). So also is the underlying notion, emanating from David Willetts’s cack-handed attempts to justify the 2012 hike in university fees, that university education is really just an investment in earning power, and that we should rely on the magic of the market combined with a little investor protection to sort out any problems.
This is about as far from the liberal idea of a university as you can get. It is also not what students either here or abroad really want (and remember that higher education, for the moment at least, is one of our larger export earners).
Unfortunately, there is something else rather more worrying. If the government has no idea of the purpose of a university, the opposition – which could well be the government next year – has even less.
On Saturday, Bridget Phillipson, shadow education secretary, amply showed this. She said, seemingly with a straight face, that the ancient universities needed to provide mentors to working-class students to help them master the culture shock.
This exercise in promoting anachronistic social cliché – a vision of Oxbridge as still some arcane re-creation of Brideshead Revisited and Chariots of Fire – certainly hits one between the eyes. It is about as far from the experience of any contemporary student, or for that matter university teacher, as one can imagine. (One also wonders how an ambitious student from Billericay or Blackpool would react to being told by a college tutor that, being working-class, she can’t be expected to understand the social graces and needs special help to master them: but perhaps it is better to stop there.)
More interesting, however, was the same shadow minister’s reaction to the government’s questioning of the utility of some courses. Phillipson’s line was not so much to criticise the government’s solution, as to deny that there was any problem to start with.
The present situation under which almost any course can be offered partly at the public charge, whatever its utility, provided only that young people could be persuaded to apply to study it and take out a loan to pay for it, was, it seems, just fine for her. Any attempt to reduce the number of courses, or discourage higher education institutions from hawking programmes that might not substantially benefit anyone other than those employed to teach them, amounted to a cap on aspiration. Phillipson said it was an attempt to impose a ‘class ceiling’, and exclude young people from disadvantaged backgrounds from the benefits of university education.
This is baloney, and dangerous baloney at that. By all means encourage aspiration: but what we aspire to should at the very least be worth having. Persuading working-class students to go into nearly £30,000 worth of debt in order to say they have a degree, when very often that degree is badly taught, uninspiring and unimpressive to employers or indeed anyone much, seems a strange way to encourage it.
Equally nonsensical is the idea that the proliferation of numerous dubious degrees actually helps the advancement of people with disadvantaged backgrounds. The opposite is much more likely. One suspects that the degrees in the government’s sights, which provide little benefit to students or anyone else other than filling lecture rooms, are very largely taken by the disadvantaged, with middle class students discreetly steered away.
Indeed, if you were looking for a way to keep the aspirational working class under, there would be many worse solutions than telling them they must have a degree and then encouraging them to do one that will neither inspire nor particularly qualify them. These degrees will leave them, and often their parents, many thousands in debt, and will not impress the employers who might otherwise lift them out of poverty.
In fact there is an interesting political reversal here. Labour (and the Liberal Democrats, who support its line) could have backed bold reform. It could, for instance, have appropriated the idea floated in 2021 under Nadhim Zahawi, of limiting support for university study to those with decent grades and giving everyone a lifetime entitlement to a loan to study anywhere, including a non-university.
But educationally Labour is now firmly the party of the status quo, pledged to preserve the higher education system as an increasingly second-rate institution substantially dependent on the state. It looks set to give genteel employment to those with academic leanings but no enormous originality of intellect, and provide a rite of passage to students many of whom have no serious or burning interest in self-directed learning and merely wish to ensure they get the magic certificate at the end. Oddly enough, a bit like complacent Oxbridge in the 1930s. How times change.
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