Today will see the media roll out the usual stories of elation as A-level results are published. And praise will be heaped on all those who get a place in higher education – which will be most of them.
But as a parent with four children at university, I am becoming ever more sceptical about the hype.
The mantra that “education is good” has morphed into “higher education is good for as many as possible”. And universities, set up in England to operate as profit- and growth-seeking enterprises, shout that message from the rooftops. Nor are they alone. Schools, parents and most media and politicians all proclaim higher education’s ability to unlock prestigious careers and high salaries.
Unsurprisingly, then, student numbers have shot up over the past two decades, reinforced by employers who now use degree possession as a screener of applicants even for basic trainee and office junior roles. This credential spiral is only getting more vicious as many applicants in many fields are now having to get master’s degrees to differentiate themselves from the crowd.
That is highly problematic in a system that requires students to fund the bulk of their studies themselves. Yes, repayment of student loans is income-contingent, but having to pay 9 per cent on any earnings over £25,000 for up to 40 years is still a huge burden. Stories abound of graduates even on high salaries who struggle to pay off the balance given the interest rates. And it is demoralising to start your working life with a typical debt of £50,000 to £100,000.
The horrific irony is that what is actually studied at university is often of little direct use to employers: the Institute of Student Employers’ 2023 Student Recruitment Survey found that only 19 per cent of adverts for graduate jobs stipulate a specific degree.
And while the graduate premium exists, it is only an average. As a recent article by the chief executive of TASO, the What Works centre for higher education, put it: “When we drill into the data…by subject and institution type, or by such intersections as gender, free school meal status and prior attainment, it’s clear that not everyone is benefiting economically from higher education.”
Moreover, even if it generally makes economic sense to get a degree given the paucity of job opportunities for non-graduates, that doesn’t mean that mass higher education is the best way to prepare a workforce. After all, if the most academic and hard-working children typically go to university and employers, reasonably enough, recruit on the basis of that correlation then the graduate premium is inevitable. It says little about the intrinsic worth of three years of study or about whether the more than 40 per cent of UK school-leavers who currently enrol in higher education is the optimum proportion.
There is evidence that it is not. For instance, 29,905 UK students enrolled on law degrees in 2022, but only 4,952 new traineeships were registered. Those numbers may have been affected by Covid, but also keep in mind that 50 per cent of traineeships are offered to students with other first degrees who do a law conversion course. Moreover, while the number of law graduates has grown by nearly 50 per cent since 2006, the number of training contracts has remained static.
Universities are hailed as engines of social mobility, but we don’t need to have participation in higher education as the de facto method for identifying and rewarding hard-working and academically able young adults from poor backgrounds. On-the-job training and apprenticeships should be seen as just as effective preparation for employment – as they used to be, before the glut of graduates made employers see non-graduates as the “dregs”.
Of course, the graduate glut has made employers reluctant to offer their own training courses, but they need to step up. If employers were paying, they would only fund courses proven to be useful for that particular job – and they could stop complaining that universities aren’t providing the precise skills they need.
It is irresponsible of the government to allow such a tenuous link between the number and type of courses being taken and the needs of the job market. It is true that state-planning of economies has a chequered record, but the current free-for-all is both wasteful and immoral, so the government is going to have to partner with business, professional bodies and academics to set numbers for each course – and, typically, much lower numbers than currently.
In law, for example, the state might decide to fund no more than twice as many courses as there are training contracts available. It might be harder to set sensible caps in non-vocational courses, but it must be done to avoid students being enticed on to courses that look interesting but are unlikely to be useful in the jobs market given the oversupply of their graduates.
Young people with good A-level results do need to be congratulated: they have followed society’s rules and worked hard. But we are doing them no favours when we march them all into university without any guarantee the huge investment will pay off.
Paul Wiltshire is the father of four UK university students.
