Results so far suggest that many of them cannot. In a hard-hitting article last August in the New Statesman, Harry Lambert spelled out further the way in which the marketisation of higher education under the Blair rubric has also incentivised grade inflation.
Cui bono, then? Arguably less the students, graduating in ever greater numbers with ever less valuable degrees, than the cities in which they live for three or four years to study, and which have in many cases experienced a renaissance due in large part to the post-Blair expansion of higher education.
In 1981, after the Toxteth riots, Lord Howe advised Margaret Thatcher to abandon the entire city to “managed decline”. In a letter only made available to the National Archives in 2011, following the 30-year rule, Howe wrote:
“We do not want to find ourselves concentrating all the limited cash that may have to be made available into Liverpool and having nothing left for possibly more promising areas such as the West Midlands or, even, the North East. […] I cannot help feeling that the option of managed decline is one which we should not forget altogether.”
Today, Howe’s words remain only as a bitter memory: the regenerated Liverpool city centre hums with tourists, students and shoppers. The Albert Dock area, reimagined from shipping and warehouses to office buildings, shops and leisure, is beautiful, vibrant and popular.
Much of this regeneration has come via the higher education boom. In Liverpool and elsewhere, successive governments have used the higher education sector more or less explicitly as an instrument of regeneration. In effect, government-backed student loans have become part of this: an off the books subsidy for depressed post-industrial areas, that have thus been partially rescued from the threat of Thatcherite “managed decline” and reinvented as hubs of the “knowledge economy”, all funded by government debt.
But a conflict of interest lurks beneath this picture. If we work on the assumption that the main beneficiaries of the higher education industry are supposed to be students, then it follows that institutions delivering shoddy teaching and useless degrees should be allowed to fail, as word spreads and students go elsewhere. But what if the main beneficiaries of this industry are in fact the cities regenerated with the borrowed money those students spend there?
In that case, from a policy perspective, the quality of the courses delivered will be less important than that the students continuing to arrive in their thousands, bringing their borrowed money to the region and spending it on accommodation, lattes, printer paper, fancy dress hire and all the other essentials of student life.
If the aim were indeed less the introduction of market forces than the use of students as a covert form of subsidy, we would surely see market distortions. In order to head off the threat of young people abandoning poor quality higher education, and entice them into shouldering their allotted portion of off-the-books government borrowing, the “graduate premium” would have to be maintained.
And indeed, since Blair’s student attendance target was first introduced, we can see that instead of using market forces to drive up quality the government has conspired with employers to cartelise the world of work. A growing number of roles that were once accessible via on-the-job training have — by government fiat if necessary — been rendered degree-only. Nursing is the classic example, but in 2016 this was even expanded to include the police, a move so unwelcome in the force that this year Lincolnshire Police Force launched a judicial review against the policy.
The victims in this situation are the students, who have come of age at a time when to have any hope of snagging a job they are more or less forced to leave their families and shoulder an enormous debt burden — over £50,000 each on average according to the IFS. They must do so to acquire a degree whose value for money is declining, but which they cannot do without in a cartelised employment climate in which higher education is obligatory even as the grades it confers count for ever less.
Not only is the government paying for today’s elderly care (and banker bailouts) with borrowing that will fall on tomorrow’s taxpayers, but young people are also being forced to take on huge personal loans to fund degrees; degrees that are less useful as preparations for adult life than as a conduit for indirect subsidies for regional regeneration.
To make matters worse, the government knows that much of this borrowing will never be repaid, which will leave tomorrow’s taxpayer on the hook for yet more billions. It is an accounting fiddle on a gigantic scale, which penalises young people by first saddling them with loans, then devaluing their education, and finally by hiding government borrowing that future taxpayers will somehow have to meet.
Young people already live with the suspicion that overall public sector borrowing is running up a tab today that will be their burden tomorrow. The situation is far worse than they think.
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