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A Chinese economist once asked me to explain British universities. “Why do you take your young,” he said, “at their most creative age, lock them in a monastery for three years and make them drunk?” Each August I recall this question when hundreds of thousands of British teenagers scramble to enter university. They must perform utterly archaic feats of memory in their exams and then embark on an academic experience that has almost nothing to do with real life. Their reward may be a higher income, but perhaps not higher than their innate ability would have gained them anyway.
England’s present university system is in a terrible mess, chronically in need of a royal commission. Between 1997 and 2010, university student numbers increased by 68%. Then, under the coalition government, universities were offered £9,000 a year for each of an unlimited number of students. It was an open invitation to lower standards and increase overcrowding.
Some cities found themselves with two if not three universities, with multiple campuses, student residences and overheads to match. The waste was ludicrous. Their vice-chancellors received crazy sums. The average for the Russell group is now £400,000.
The government supposedly recouped the cost of all this by treating fees and maintenance grants as borrowed. This allowed university extravagance to appear not as public spending but as debt, on the thesis that the students would repay it with interest one day. Until recently no more than a quarter of graduates were expected to fully repay their loans – small wonder, as they averaged £50,000 a head.
The accumulated student debt is enormous. It has reached more than £250bn and is said to be heading for £500bn by the late 2040s. Quite why higher education should be so privileged as not to count as current spending has never been clear. As with HS2, the Treasury likes to treat certain sorts of posh spending as “investment” rather than hard cash.
The reliance on fees from overseas students – now covering nearly a quarter of university income – caused the present crisis. As this income has fallen, in part through recent immigration and visa changes, 40% of England’s universities are set to be in financial deficit. Jobs and courses are being cut back.
Meanwhile, every bit of news out of the university sector seems grim. Employers are disregarding not just classes of degree, but degrees at all. It is 10 years since the large accountancy firm EY started disregarding A-levels and degree classes in recruitment, while PwC said it would rely on aptitude and behaviour tests. I know of no job that ever depends on a class of degree. The Office for National Statistics records that more than a quarter of graduates in England are now in medium- or low-skilled jobs. Another survey shows the graduate “premium” is plummeting. This is not just a British issue. Across the US and the EU, graduate unemployment is almost on a par with non-graduate.
Students seem miserable. The two-thirds who leave home to go to college report soaring mental illness, with 90% suffering from loneliness. The Boston Consulting Group last year found ex-students the fastest group of young people going straight into long-term sickness.
The solution is glaring: cut back. The thesis that university courses requirea minimum of three years, each with barely six months of teaching, is absurd. For most courses, two years should be enough, as the former universities minister, Jo Johnson, has proposed. The number of institutions claiming fully-fledged university status should be slashed. The practice of almost every city hosting two universities – or 40 in London – should end in a mass of mergers. There should be a return to vocational colleges, with an emphasis on contact with local employment.
This was proposed by James Dyson in setting up just such a college in Wiltshire, the Dyson Institute, in 2017. Another, the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering in Herefordshire, was started by the Tory MP Jesse Norman. It is simply absurd that a large number of graduates should be doing work supposedly not requiring a degree, and yet the welfare state is chronically short of trained medical and care staff. This is a serious failure of education planning.
Higher education should be free at the point of use; not, as now, free only to those whose parents can pay their fees upfront. But those completing a university course should repay the privilege with a modestly higher rate of tax throughout their working life. Loans should cover only maintenance.
Of course university is not just a preparation for work, even if for 18-year-olds that is the primary issue at hand. A university is more than a start in life. It is also an experience of liberal education that goes far beyond the young who are its current beneficiaries.
A true university should promote breadth of thought and freedom of speech to old as well as young. It should not turn in on itself as its resources shrink. It should make its courses and work accessible to people beyond its walls and across the community. Universities are costing us dear. We should not feel they are wasted on the young.
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Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
