‘Long Eaton is dying a death. I was born and bred here, so I’ve seen it go downhill quite quickly. There’s not a lot here. We’ve got two supermarkets, bad road infrastructure, it’s dying.’
Listening to a mum from the outskirts of Nottingham describe her frustrations with her community in a recent focus group, the other participants, all local to the area, nodded along in agreement. The mood was one of resignation. All the members of this group had cast their vote for Labour in 2024 hoping to arrest the pervasive feeling of decline and decay this woman described. But barely a year into Labour’s term, and with things seeming even worse than they did before, all of these participants told us that they would switch to voting Reform if there were a general election tomorrow. Their message was clear: after years of being promised that their efforts to tighten their belts and endure financial hardship would be worth it, these voters felt betrayed. And to many of these voters, the two universities that dominate the Nottingham landscape were an embodiment of promised benefits that never materialise.
The idea of university as an investment in one’s future earning potential has become an increasingly normalised way of framing its benefits. Almost a century ago, when describing his own experiences at Oxford, arch-defender of the university experience Evelyn Waugh said: ‘as far as direct monetary returns are considered, our parents would have done far better to have packed us off to Monte Carlo to try our luck at the tables,’ deriding this as ‘a narrow and silly way to view education.’ But in recent years, it has become received wisdom that the benefits of a university education to individuals and society are primarily or solely economic. Our polling shows that the public agree that people should have to pay for the earning benefits that university education can offer, and the recent Post-16 White Paper reaffirmed the economic impact of the higher education sector, which runs to more than £250 billion.
But to the Reform-aligned voters we spoke to – both Labour-to-Reform switchers in Nottingham, and 2024 Reform voters from Kent who’d vote for them again tomorrow – these payoffs weren’t guaranteed, and they certainly weren’t evenly distributed. For one thing, the impact that universities have on their communities feels concentrated around campuses. As one participant put it: ‘I think the value in university is more for the city centre, because a lot of those professional roles are city centre based. So they’re the ones who will benefit from it and see it more.’ To some voters, this perceived inability to deliver spillover benefits for the community is echoed at a national level too. One voter poured scorn on the value of university graduates compared to tradespeople, saying: ‘If we had fewer people going to university, what would we do? We need builders. We need plumbers. We need electricians. We need people in AI. We should be looking to do apprenticeship schemes, and really fast track it.’
Above all, there was widespread scepticism regarding the personal returns on the debt and delay to starting work that a degree entails. Not only was there doubt regarding the skills and knowledge that degrees confer – as one Kent-based voter said, ‘some degrees are actually pretty useless, and there’s a huge amount of student debt’ – there was also a rejection of degrees as a recruitment credential, with one mother from Kent saying ‘I know that when they were recruiting [for her son’s job], there’s a pile of CVs, and all the people who didn’t have degrees went straight in the bin.’ On every level, then, Reform voters’ patience with the modern university system has evaporated. Like so many other parts of the public sphere, the government and personal investment demanded by the system seems like a gamble that has little chance of paying off.
But here’s the twist: while the Reform voters we spoke to were deeply sceptical about the value for money that university represents, they recognised that universities do need income from somewhere, and were therefore, somewhat surprisingly, cautiously supportive of international students. ‘I think we can have lots of foreign students,’ said one man in Kent. ‘It’s a great business, it produces fantastic income.’ And far from crowding domestic students out, Reform voters understood that cross-subsidisation from international to domestic students allowed those who do want to go to university to do so at a lower cost, with one Kent mother saying that universities closing because of student immigration restrictions would be ‘a detriment to UK students’. It seems that despite general pessimism about the value of higher education, Reform voters do want to see universities succeed and deliver. Perhaps a university sector that shows it can evolve to meet voter concerns, and is supported with the right policy incentives to do so, might yet win back public support.
The Reform voters we spoke to feel that the boom in higher education has left them behind, and see few spillover benefits from universities either in their communities or within the economy at large. In their eyes, these institutions are just another part of the public sphere where a bet made with public money hasn’t paid off. As the government attempts to win these voters back, universities have to act now to demonstrate the tangible benefits they can have on their communities and the people within them – to Reform voters, verbose promises of future prosperity aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. When it comes to the value of the higher education sector, Reform voters have put their cards on the table. It’s time for universities and politicians to respond.
Comments