To fix education, fix the economy first
One of the best illustrations of the importance of economic growth for a society is that when it is weak for long enough, you start to hear complaints about specific things going wrong in specific domains, which ultimately all turn out to be downstream of economic stagnation.
In the UK, this is happening more frequently with education. The standard explanation for Britain’s declining graduate wage premium is that higher education expanded too fast and too far, and too many people now go to university. But similar expansions elsewhere have not produced the same outcome. Instead, the evidence points primarily to problems in the economy, not the education system: weak productivity growth and an unusually low number of genuinely graduate-worthy well-paid professional and managerial jobs.
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In much the same way, the standard explanation for why Britain’s non-graduates feel like distant second-class citizens to their degree-holding counterparts is that they have been failed by an education system that does not provide technical and vocational routes to a successful and respected career. But here, too, economic factors look more likely to be the real culprit.
One useful reference point is Germany, where school pupils specialise early into either academic or more technical routes, and those who choose the latter can be confident they will find relatively high-paying jobs. The country’s education system is a darling of those who believe achieving “parity of esteem” for people who do not go to university is simply a matter of reforms to schooling.
But I’m not sure it’s that simple. The status conferred by a particular qualification is a function of the job and salary it brings, not the piece of paper it’s written on. What really differentiates Germany from the UK, then, is its larger, higher-value and higher-paying manufacturing sector (German factory workers earn 50 per cent more than their British counterparts). Britain can tinker with its vocational routes all it likes, but without good jobs, the deficits in esteem, employment and earnings will remain.
Germany is also as much of a cautionary tale as a model to follow. With China’s booming electric vehicles industry rapidly eating into its automotive exports, I suspect the Germans may have their own moment of misdirected angst over vocational education a decade or so from now as the good blue-collar jobs dwindle.
In this sense, the most durable way for governments to ensure that both university students and their less academic counterparts can move through the education system confident of good financial outcomes for themselves is to have a dynamic economy and robust productivity growth.
