Higher Education: Benefits, Costs and Propaganda

“Education, education, education.”

For many years, young people in this country have been brought up with Blair’s mantra of “education, education, education” ringing in their ears, and one form of education in particular – university, or, more strictly speaking, higher education – has been championed as the path to upward social mobility and prosperity. With this view in mind, policy has been directed towards the mass expansion of higher education (HE) – its ‘massification’ as some term it – with Labour having set the arbitrary goal of by 2010 persuading 50% of young people to study towards and achieve a degree. Initial movement towards this target proved to be more sluggish than the Blair administration had intended, leading to a rescoping of the 50% target so that it was broadened to apply to any “higher education qualification” which could encompass sub-degree qualifications such as the misnamed foundation degrees (i.e. a vocationally-focused qualification equating to the first two years of degree study), HE diplomas and certificates.

As time progressed, the constant repetition of the message that HE would lead to higher lifetime earnings, a better lifestyle and social mobility, was taken up by much of the mass media as well as schools, colleges and universities. This was accompanied by a rush away from manufacturing and the traditional extractive industries in the deluded belief that the key to wealth generation lay primarily with a vastly expanded service sector, and the UK’s participation in what the Leitch Report termed the ‘global knowledge economy.’

Children, knowing no better, came to internalise this message, and many academics, who have no such excuse, did so too. Yet, what underpinned this policy? What solid data was there to justify this claim that obtaining a degree, or an “HE qualification”, led to greatly improved earnings and life chances? What does the data suggest with respect to graduates who have come through the system in recent years? How do their prospects fare with respect to those of earlier generations? What, if anything, has this policy achieved?

Academic inflation and the debased currency of a degree

Many recent graduates will of course be able to provide a personal answer to a number of these questions, but what is striking about the whole thrust of this policy, often badged as “widening participation”, is the manner in which it has debased the currency of a degree. This debasement has taken two forms: firstly, the rapid expansion in the number of graduates has lessened the market value of a degree owing to their oversupply; secondly, the academic content of many degrees has been downgraded to cope with the inadequacies of the contemporary schooling system, which has left a certain proportion of the current undergraduate body with inadequate skills. The marketisation of HE is likely to exacerbate these trends still further.

For the past couple of decades, we have witnessed the annual headlines relating the latest year-on-year increase in the grades of GCSEs and A Levels, and yet those with direct experience of working in the university sector have not noted an increase in the calibre of the student intake. One of the reasons for this trend is of course the modularisation of A Levels, the ability to retake the said modules on several occasions, and the gearing of teaching towards passing the test, rather than towards the development of critical engagement with, and internalisation of, the subject matter of A Levels. Michael Gove has however announced that he intends to tackle these problems, with a move back towards a more rigorous approach based upon examinations rather than coursework, and a limited opportunity to resit.

We need more mathematicians: the sums don't add up!

Despite the fact that it was recently reported by the CBI that only one in five jobs in the UK are said to require graduate-level skills, the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) issued a report earlier this month calling for increased government investment in the university sector, claiming that this was necessitated by the UK sliding down the international league in the production of graduates, whilst China and India are investing heavily in increasing the supply. It highlights the particular need for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates, singling out mechanical engineering in particular. However, other evidence suggests that a significant proportion of graduates in these disciplines are unable to find employment in a sphere related to their subject, so what is being claimed appears to diverge from reality. Why should this be so? If it is the case, as the UCU claims, that employers are reporting a shortage of STEM graduates, should not more effort be put into helping match graduates with appropriate employment opportunities near the end of their studies, rather than simply increasing the number of graduates? If STEM graduates find themselves underemployed upon graduation, this is neither good for them as individuals, nor for employers nor for society at large; it represents a shocking waste of potential, as well as of time and money.

Another debatable claim contained in the UCU report, was that state investment in higher education should be increased because it is highly cost effective: whereas it claims that it costs the state an average of £18,800 to educate a graduate, the return in increased earnings over a lifetime is said to be £180,000. If this were true, the Government would provide higher education for free, but, as should be evident, it plainly is not the case. Even grander claims were being made about the increased earning potential conferred by graduate status in the early 2000s, with one figure widely bandied around from 2001 onwards claiming that graduates earn circa £400,000 more than non-graduates over a working lifetime. This eye-watering figure was employed to bolster the Blair administration’s Aimhigher initiative which was launched in 2004, but this statistic was, unsurprisingly, arrived at through rather dubious means, based as it was upon the highly selective interpretation of data relating to a cohort of graduates born in the early 1950s. Needless to say, the prospects that faced such graduates, who then comprised but a tiny fraction of the population, differed considerably from the massive numbers (and proportion) of graduates coming out of the system today. Our economy has also been eviscerated in the intervening period, with job insecurity becoming the norm and lifetime career structures and their earning potential destroyed by the opening up of the economy to full-blooded globalisation.

Raising the bar, destroying the premium: the betrayal of the Blair generation

One of the stated objectives of the last Labour Government’s mass expansion of higher education was the promotion of social mobility, the opening up of opportunities for young people with no familial experience of university education. It was thus touted as a route into the professions and, more generally, to prosperity. However, as has already been alluded to in the reference to the low percentage of job roles requiring graduate-level skills, this approach was at best wrongheaded, and at worst, immoral. Rather than serving as a means of social advancement, the acquisition of a degree has often led to young people from these backgrounds entering the same types of roles that they would have done had they left school following the completion of A Levels or GCSEs, with the same types of salaries. An oversupply of graduates has led to a lessening of the wage premium offered by employers, with many roles and occupations that were once open to individuals with a handful of decent O Level passes, now demanding a degree. Likewise, graduate professions have raised the bar, now often demanding Masters or Doctorates, resulting in more debt for the student, more years spent out of the labour market, and a lower return on their investment. Academic inflation has run rampant, greatly devaluing the currency of a degree, the cost of which has simultaneously increased significantly.

What then, is higher education for? For anyone who would wish to study because they are motivated by the love of their given subject, I would say take the opportunity, but do not expect it to provide you with a route to a better life and higher earnings, because very often it will not.

Special interest groups, distortion and the need for clarity and reform

It seems clear that one of the primary motivations underlying the UCU report is the understandable desire of UCU members to protect their livelihoods. Owing to the rapid expansion of the university sector, higher education institutions are now big employers playing significant roles in the economies of the towns and cities in which they are located. Any downsizing in the sector could thus have a notable negative impact upon some local economies. For the past three years, pay in universities has effectively been frozen (with the egregious exception of university vice-chancellors, a number of whom earn well in excess the salary of the Prime Minister), staff numbers have been cut and the radical overhaul in the tuition fees system has led to a great deal of uncertainty with respect to the viability of some institutions in their current form. It is understandable therefore, that this report should seek to forward the claim that an increase in funding for higher education should be made a national priority, but it is precisely for these reasons that the conclusions it draws should be treated with a healthy degree of scepticism, given their tendentious nature. 

Should higher education be for the benefit of students, the country and the economy, or for that of vested interests within the university sector? Unpalatable as it may be, it would seem that our higher education sector suffers from overcapacity, and that rather than seeking to increase absolute numbers of graduates and the proportion of young people gaining degrees, we should instead be looking to redeploy staff in higher education elsewhere in the economy. The big question of course, is where? Young people should be given better opportunities in FE colleges, learning useful skills that will make them marketable and afford them a decent living. The one thing that does seem rational in the UCU report, is its emphasis upon protecting STEM subjects. To secure a meaningful economic recovery we need to harness the full potential of our graduates in these disciplines through promoting a hi-tech research and manufacturing based economy. We need to create jobs that generate new wealth, not jobs in the service sector that are parasitic upon the recycling of existing capital, or borrowing it from the international money markets.

Higher education in this country needs to be reprofiled and retooled. Young people must be provided with the most objective information available with respect to the likely implications of studying a certain degree; the doors that it will open, and those that it will not, together with genuine information relating to salary expectations and career progression. Contrary to offering a leg-up to children from working-class backgrounds, the policies of the last Labour Government and its successor have spun them an unrealistic yarn and led to everyone running faster to effectively stand still. This, coupled with Labour’s (and the Condem’s) vigorous pursuit of globalisation, leading to increased job insecurity and downward pressure on wages, has constituted a betrayal of the Blair generation.

Whether £27,000 of debt for tuition fees, coupled with many thousands more for living expenses incurred whilst studying, and the thousands potentially lost through not working during this period are adjudged to be worthwhile in obtaining a degree, must be left to the individual, but the decisions that they take should be based upon objective information and evidence, not upon the self-serving data supplied by the higher education sector itself, or by government. Cynics might say that getting students to pay for a degree is a cost-effective means of removing them from the unemployment statistics for three to five years whilst simultaneously making them pay for the privilege.