As our editor-in-chief, Robert Colvile, writes here, the basic issue is that we produce too many graduates, many of whose degrees confer neither a first-rate education, nor higher earnings. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that about 70,000 students a year, roughly one in five, would have been financially better off not going to university. Equally, the ‘graduate premium’ masks a huge amount of divergence between courses and job outcomes. For every high-earning lawyer or doctor there are several grads doing paid jobs they could have got without a degree.
Given the cost of a three-year BA is approaching £30,000 just for tuition, you could hardly blame students for thinking twice about applying at all. It’s a financial problem for the Government too, as a huge chunk of each year’s cohort will never get round to repaying the cost of their degree, leaving the taxpayer on the hook for the remainder. Little wonder the Intergenerational Foundation called the English system ‘a self-perpetuating debt-generating machine which short-changes young people’.
The debate on university numbers has understandably tended to focus on ‘Mickey Mouse courses’, with low entry requirements and poor job prospects. Media Studies, perhaps with a unit in ‘Beckhamology’, is the archetypal example. The stock response, which happens to have great merit, is that we need to put more resources into vocational routes for those who are not suited to university.