OECD chief: UK ‘doesn’t need more people going to university’

The UK “needs a lot more people getting a good post-secondary education” but does not need “more people going to university”, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s head of education, as political debate over higher education expansion intensifies in Westminster.

Rishi Sunak, the UK prime minister, said recently that the Labour government’s 1999 target for 50 per cent of young people in England to enter higher education was “one of the great mistakes of the last 30 years”, leading to “thousands of young people being ripped off by degrees that did nothing to increase their employability or earnings potential”.

Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills, said that the organisation’s data for the UK showed the earnings advantages of tertiary education were higher than in many comparator countries. But there were also “low marginal earnings returns”, he said.

Earnings and employment returns, he continued, “used to be very strong for the UK…It was almost a sure bet to go into university. I don’t think you can say that now. It works for some. But the variability in earnings for university graduates is very high. It’s still a great investment for some, but certainly not for all of them.”

Others might argue that graduate earnings data in England reflect its high level of economic inequality between regions and the structure of an economy widely seen as not creating enough high-skilled jobs.

“I would say the UK needs a lot more people getting a good post-secondary education,” Mr Schleicher said. “But I don’t think it needs more people going to university. That’s really where the issue lies. The future is a much more diversified set of pathways.”

The Westminster government said in its recent King’s Speech setting out plans for the coming parliament that “proposals will be implemented to reduce the number of young people studying poor-quality university degrees and increase the number undertaking high-quality apprenticeships” in England.

Mr Schleicher said that nations with strong advanced technical education systems such as Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland “don’t pitch technical education at low skills – you can go to a high-skilled profession through the vocational route. It’s basically the style of learning that is different, not the level of education.”

But in England, it is “still a little bit the case that university and the vocational routes, we are talking about hierarchy”, he added. “You cannot say that in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland – they are pretty much different ways of learning similar things. They have a high share of transversal skills in vocational programmes.”

He continued: “People vote with their feet. Despite the fact that Germany pays you if you go to university rather than asking for fees, they still have lots of people opting for [vocational] alternatives.”

Is it possible for England – or any developed nation – to get to a point where it has enough people going to university? Until now, participation has gone up and up in developed nations.

“That’s very much a question of what you want universities to be,” said Mr Schleicher. “If you want them to be institutes of broad tertiary education that provide a mix of skills at varying levels, then you just shouldn’t charge young people [such] high fees – that’s one option.

“Or you say, [we] want universities to do what they are best at: namely to provide theory-based, research-oriented education. And then I do believe there is a limit [to what] a country needs in the skills mix of its people.”

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com