What I call the 15/50 problem does not seem to have been considered: the idea that when 15% of people in your class or school or town go to university and you don’t, it does not create a ‘left behind’ problem, but when 50% go to university and you don’t it does create such a psychological problem.
And it is absurd that so much higher education spending is focused on those aged 18 to 22. Many of them have acquired useful life experience and grown into young adults away from home for an extended period for the first time. Many have also acquired useful professional skills or pursued intellectual interests for the sheer joy of it. But far too many have learned little of value, and what they have learned they have quickly forgotten, their degree acting primarily as a signal to a future employer that they have the right personal characteristics to enter the bloated cognitive class. It is a ranking system and, in the UK, it is reinforced by the physical and social separation of the residential universities. And the sorting hat of higher education creates a qualification treadmill requiring ever more differentiation, with post-graduate degrees now booming.
Some people argue that more or less everyone should go to something called a university and the colleges should then specialise in different kinds of education and vocational training. Such people point to the fact that around 40% of university courses, and even more in the post-1992 universities, are essentially vocational — whether traditional, high-prestige, vocational courses such as medicine, law and engineering, or newer university degrees such as nursing, quantity surveying or marketing.
Yet the relevant question for the UK is this: is a classical university — with its bias towards academic essay-writing skills, and lecturers who are often researchers first and teachers second — the best place to deliver the kind of higher vocational skills that many individuals want to acquire and that the economy, especially in the UK, so badly needs? Public opinion in the UK clearly does not think so. A survey by the think tank Onward found that 66% of respondents agreed that more people going to university and fewer gaining technical qualifications had been bad for the country overall; 34% said it was beneficial.
Yet the current incentives in the UK, from very tangible financial ones to less tangible cultural ones, focus on three- or four-year fulltime courses for 18–19-year-olds, usually at residential universities which is very expensive both for the country and the individuals concerned and not always an effective use of someone ’s time. And those incentives tend to discourage part-time study, mature students, shorter diploma-type higher vocational courses. Moreover, thanks to the student-demand-led higher education funding system the UK was in the bizarre position, in the 2011–17 period, of increasing university teaching funding in physics by just 6% per student, compared with 27% for business degrees and 34% for sports sciences.
It is not that we are investing too much in education in general, but too much is going on signalling efforts for the higher-level exam-passers and not enough on the vocational, professional and technical skills, and indeed the lifelong learning, that most of the population, and the economy, need to flourish. It is a bit like acquiring a state-of-the-art nuclear weapon while your tanks and artillery decay.
If, thanks to an oversupply of graduates, advertisements for teaching assistants or accounting technicians begin to routinely require a degree, it is common sense for individuals who wish to work in these fields to obtain one. But it would be better for both individuals and society if the arms race could be called off and access to such jobs restored to conscientious school leavers and apprentices, as used to be the case.
Moreover, today’s graduates, as Paul Lewis of King’s College, London, argues, tend to have unrealistic expectations of high-status, well-paid jobs and when they are actually employed in the middling technical or junior manager jobs that their non-graduate parents might have done they quickly become dissatisfied. The system is producing the wrong mix of skills, with too many graduates and too few actual technicians and skilled trades jobs especially in construction, health and information technology from coders to web designers. UK employers in 2017 complained that they had trouble filling more than 40% of skilled trades vacancies.
We are suffering an epidemic of square pegs in round holes. And these disappointed graduate expectations may lie behind some of the more extreme campus identity politics and eruptions of political emotion from the Corbyn movement to Black Lives Matter.
It is true that longer, residential courses are popular with students — many are naturally attracted to three years fun and freedom away from parents at age 18/19 — but the high cost (both for the individual and the taxpayer) and disappointing returns is starting to shift attitudes. And if Covid-19 is going to mean a permanent reduction in the flow of international students, whose high fees have helped to subsidise the system in the UK, this middle-class rite of passage may be a luxury the UK can no longer afford. The residential experience can be a useful one in learning how to cooperate and rub along with people from different backgrounds but there must be other ways of providing that experience through residential apprenticeships or civic volunteering schemes.
The obvious point is that university does not produce the best outcomes for everyone. It makes no sense for many young people, from all social classes, who do not flourish in the rigorous academic environment that a university should be (but increasingly is not). And it makes even less sense for an economy that requires a range of skills and aptitudes many of which are better acquired in workplaces or other kinds of post-school educational institution.
And it is surely just self-defeating to assume that the answer to our growing education-based status (and income) divides is to send even more people to university. People from all backgrounds, especially less privileged ones, should be encouraged to go to elite universities if they have the aptitude for it. But in Germany it is perfectly normal for middle class children to do an apprenticeship or go to a technical college. And congratulations to Gavin Williamson for declaring he would be very happy if one of his children were to take a non-university path after school.
In my observation too much of the case for mass higher education is based on an indiscriminate spirit of not wanting to kick away the ladder on the part of people who have had a valuable university experience themselves. It is a decent instinct but it also contains within it a kind of narcissism that says: be like me, pass exams at school, go to a Russell Group university and enjoy a successful professional career.
But there are strict limits on the number of people who can do that, even if everyone in the society had exactly the same level of cognitive ability. There is also a strict limit on the number of higher professional jobs. Indeed, it turns out that the knowledge economy doesn’t need so many knowledge workers after all; AI is now coming for the middling cognitive jobs that university expansion was designed to train people for.
And isn’t it better to widen the sources of achievement and try to raise the status of ‘not university’ rather than send as many people as possible to university, and in the process raise expectations of professional success that in many cases are likely to be disappointed, while starving the economy of the middling, technical skills it needs?
Tony Blair’s target has turned out to be bad economics, bad politics, and even bad for academic standards, as the value of a first class degree or 2:1 has plummeted.
There is no need for the Government to actually close universities. But thanks to the Covid crisis and an imminent demographic bulge, which would require another 20 or 30 universities to keep to the current proportion of undergraduates, it can encourage university mergers and just allow the proportion of school leavers going to university to slip back down to 30 or 35%, roughly the level when the Blair pledge was made.
Meanwhile if the Government gets its reforms right many more school leavers will find more satisfying, and more economically relevant, alternative forms of non-academic post-school education.
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Subscribe“turned out to have very significant unintended consequences, many of them negative.” – a line that sums up nearly every policy decision by Blair during his time as PM!
All very astute but I think this might be a long and painful undoing for many young people and educators.
I was talking to someone mid twenties the other day, 3 years after completing an arts degree and unemployed – their plan was still to return to education instead of an apprenticeship or job. My partner returned to uni for a masters, and now makes less money than she did before. An older friend of mine has a phd but has only ever managed short term poorly paid contracts.
Young people can see the lack of value in a degree but they still cannot turn their backs on queuing up for them. The social status factor has yet to rub off.
Why on earth would there be any ‘social status’ in paying tens of thousands of pounds to be handed a worthless degree from a so-called university? In a rational world this would be socially toxic, and all those in possession of such degrees thought of as monumental fools.
Perhaps social status is just the surface level part of it – it is the grand neoliberal vision that Blair tapped into being what people cannot give up.
The dream of living in trendy metropolitan areas, being fed and ferried around by an endless supply of immigrant labour. To pop out of uni and slot into the managerial class – they don’t want to compete or start businesses – hence the existential grief at the loss of EU membership.
“It’s not what you know but who you know” that counts.
To achieve that, and the collateral ‘social status’ that so many crave, forget the University and head for a top Public School. Whether you are a genius or a brain dead twit, the advantages of a five year ‘experience’ are worth every penny.
At the end you will truly have become one of a very select “band of brothers”.
This has been the British way, good or bad for eons, and even the Chinese seem to want it.
A lot depends on the degree. I still think a degree in a natural science (such as physics) provides useful thinking tools. Similarly, mathematics or engineering.
Non-woke history, classics and other traditional “humanities”, if approached with an open mind, can open the mind further and give perspective, but where are the programmes that have not been infected by “woke” and similar?
It is hard to discern the usefulness of a degree in, say, “Gender Studies” or anything else from the Faculty of Grievances (whose sole tool of reasoning is ad hominem). A plumbing apprenticeship would be far more worthwhile. People who balk at being scolded for wrong-think are willing to pay to have their pipes fixed.
Yes, and of course 50% of people are simply not capable of studying those subjects to degree level. It makes far more sense to limit the number of people attending university to those who are capable (probably around 20%). Those weird and wonderful oddball subjects had to be introduced in order to reach that daft 50% target.
Most people get put off the sciences already in school, because they are taught as if everyone is on a path to the cutting edge and so get bogged down in arcane technicalities that seem irrelevant to their lives. There is another type of course which hypes up the marvellous discoveries of science. Neither approach teaches what science is.
My experience of young children is that they are very curious and far more scientific in their thinking than older children who have been conditioned to the rote machine.
Science is a way of approaching the unknown, not the body of knowledge that it reveals. The approach maps out what is false. What is true is lies somewhere amongst what is not yet shown to be false. This approach is relevant to all disciplines. It is also consonant with the way young children first learn about the world.
I think if our schools encouraged a scientific approach (without calling it science), we would end up with more adults capable of navigating an increasingly uncertain world (and more who might want to pursue STEM disciplines).
Well, yes, but it was obvious as long as 30 years ago that even the dimmest members of the middle classes were going to ‘uni’, and that it would not end well. Of course, it has ended very well for the VC and marketers etc. (Full disclosure, I have made money writing websites for these so-called universities.).
I am currently reading Christopher Lasch’s ‘Culture of Narcissism’ and he identified the problem 40 years ago. The results of this with regard to the US are the vacuous white, middle class BLMers encouraging black people to destroy their own neighbourhoods. Indeed, he encapsulates it all in one brilliant line (which I can’t find now) to the effect that millions are now forced by economic necessity (the need to get a degree to get a good job) to study academic subjects in which they have no interest. Here in the UK a friend of mine resigned from her post teaching an aspect of law rather than hand out passes to students devoid of all application or aptitude.
That said, the real and much deeper problem is with education from 4 to 18. As someone else said here a few weeks ago, responsibility for this simply has to be removed from the state. We all know that everything the state does – certainly the British state – will be a disaster. But now it’s getting serious.
It’s an excellent book. I plan to read a few more by him.
Not only are most not suited for academic study to degree level, many are not suited to school to age 18. It seems to me when the school leaving age changed all that happened (other than a short term impact on unemployment numbers) is that a lot of children who could have started on vocational courses, stayed on getting bored out of their mind and possibly being disruptive as a result.
I was fortunate enough to work in one of the more internationally recognised universities in Great Britain and Ireland. Because I was born in 1950, I experienced what most folks of my age regard as the golden age of college education in the UK. University was chosen because I loved my subject and wished to understand it more fully. As Mr Chamberlain puts it below:
In the UK, this entire subject has been bedevilled by prejudices that go back centuries. I left school at the age of 18, and it was evident to me then, and remains evident now, that these prejudices made people look down on jobs in which you got your hands dirty. Inevitably, this has fed into the general public’s perception of what a “good job” is. Some of the most striking casualties of this have been the polytechnics and the trade-oriented institutions that supervised the country’s apprenticeships. The abolition, of polytechnics via conversion into universities and, before that, the blurring of boundaries between what should and could have been very different kinds of institution, represent one of the greatest lost opportunities for educational reform in this country’s history.
I had a very revealing experience when this subject cropped up in a seminar I was running about 25 years ago, with a group of students who (like most of my students) were well-above-average in academic and intellectual ability. I spotted that some of them held those same undesirable attitudes to non-academic study. The group included a student from Heidelberg University, studying with us on a one-year exchange. So, swallowing hard and guessing how she would answer, I asked her directly. The conversation went something like this:
Me: “You go to one of the most historic and distinguished universities in the world. If, a few years ago, you had instead decided to study, say, mechanical engineering at one of the technical universities or colleges, what would your status in German society be now.”
She: “At least as high.”
Her classmates looked pretty astonished.
Those responsible for the UK’s commodification of education, driven by utterly misguided concepts of egalitarianism, and by the worst kinds of utilitarianism, have a lot to answer for.
I understand German and Dutch technological universities are very good Universities ‘full stop’ – Delft being an outstanding example. They are way better than UK ‘Polys’. Even the Dutch ‘High School’ Universities of Applied Science seem to be respected, even if not seen as particularly academic. I can see the need for a world class group of technological universities in the UK and better quality HE/FE vocational community colleges, but Polys or whatever they wish to call themselves have to go forever, in my view.
Thank you. I agree with all of your observations. They are backed up by many conversations I had with academics from countries all over Europe. And you are right about the Polys having had their day. I wonder if the main obstacle to this country establishing “a world class group of technological universities” is the misguided egalitarianism in educational thought that prefers the widespread average to the elitism of true excellence.
This article, while very useful, is missing an important piece of sociological context. As the cliodynamicist Peter Turchin explains, for example in his book Secular Cycles, the tumorous expansion of higher education is a form of credentialism that occurs at the point in a society’s secular cycle where it is suffering from severe elite overproduction. The elites are in too-great competition for positions, and so conspicuously “waste” resources in an attempt to gain advantages in securing such positions.
This period in the cycle, which comes shortly before the inevitable crisis and collapse, is also marked by a sharp rise in what we might call “non-jobs”, i.e., useless positions in elite institutions that exist purely to make room for more elites to sponge off the productive members of society. Corporate Diversity Managers and Professors of Critical Theory, anyone?
Thank you. That’s a thought-provoking perspective.
I’m insufficiently expert in cliodynamics to be able to assess the validity of Peter Turchin’s thesis, even, I suspect, if I were to read his book. But the explanation given makes sense, and to my inexpert instinct explains a great deal about the seemingly irresistible yet slippery nature of the forces and characteristics that we are discussing.
Why don’t the elites get out of their boxes and do something about post capitalist people abuse? Why don’t they grow up and learn to fight for their inalienable rights!!
Well said – I DO hope the government can sort out a better direction for non-academic further education. We need ALL sorts of talents to make a society.
That said, I suspect there will be kick-back against some of this because of the idea of “elitism”. Insisting that those who study a particular subject have an aptitude for it (whether academic or not – I have seen this a lot in the arts, where conservatoires etc make a lot of money from taking on young people who self-evidently haven’t a chance of making it – and yes, I know there are always those who blossom late, but they are a very small percentage) is now considered to be discriminatory. People have got a bit muddled between the idea of an elite (I rather like brain surgeons or opera singers to be amongst the best there are), and elitism (restricting access to certain things to a certain group of people).
(On a personal note, thanks for all the good you did at Prospect, David. I so enjoyed it when you were the editor. I have sadly had to cancel my subscription, as it has taken a very different direction now.)
Yes the same here. Just cancelled my subscription. It’s a boring lefty publication now.
When I left school in 1968 under ten percent of school leavers went on to full time education however a much higher number combined employment with either evening classes or day release. I did neither until my mid thirties when I finally made the effort to take A-levels and professional exams. That option of studying while working has been made much harder with most of the further education colleges not offering vocational or academic courses in the evenings. If you want to learn conversational spanish there are plenty of courses but not for A-level English or Maths. Many people myself included are not equipped to study when they are eighteen but ten years later would make better use of the opportunity.
Hear, hear! And a thousand times over.
been saying the same for years. However, we still force our young through the same sausage machine and expect them to achieve good A level grades at 18, go to Uni at 18/19, enter the workplace and climb the greasy pole ongoing. many would benefit from the option of an education break form say, 16-19 then re- enter the system to take formalised qualifications in the light of some experience, or even maturation.
I have been saying these things for decades. A long time ago I read an article which stated “The fundamental flaw in higher education in UK is that it is driven by student choice not by the country’s need.”
Exactly. This is why we are no longer able to build our own nuclear power stations, or construct our own 5G networks, or even look after our own old people.
Which is the case, but a higher education system driven by what is perceived as “the country’s need” sounds suspiciously Soviet to me. That experiment wasn’t a great success either.
So what other options to determine what people study? The two least daft factors I can see are
(a) what the students think they want to do, and
(b) what some experts think they should.
The question then is by what process to convert those inputs into optimal decisions. Any suggestions? Presumably someone has done some research. And some others have ignored it as usual….
As I am old and in a state of advanced decay (perhaps because I never went to university) I recall when many if not most solicitors and accountants became articled clerks in order to qualify rather than going to university.
Yes, and nurses joined a teaching hospital as student nurses where they worked and learned on the wards as well as studying.
To be fair, nursing students do placements now (often of many hours duration). They are not based solely in universities.
It was obvious at the moment he announced it that the result would be the devaluing of the degree, the demand for ever higher educationPhDs etc – and that unless other routes to trades were set up, exactly this would happen. It was a stupid idea and anyone in tht room where it was discussed should have seen that immediately. Did they all think Blair was God and therefore unquestionable?
We need better alternatives to Unis,; how about all those polys which became Unis become Polys again? How about more and better apprenticeships?
My child is at Uni studying history because she loves history. She did look at apprenticeships and was tempted by several, I had said she would earn nothing from a History degree, but would always make a living hairdressing or plumbing…..
Hear, hear!
I worked at a high-ranking university. When my four children left school at 18, two of them went for a vocational degree, two or three years after they had finished school ” testing the waters first, they said. One went straight into work, is now a supervisor in the security business, quite well paid, and very happy with his job. Another went straight into an electrical apprenticeship. They all chose well; they all were supported by my wife and me. Only from others did we get any negative reactions ” “Oh, never mind. Maybe he’ll go to college later” was one reaction. As I mention in a longer comment here, the prejudice in this country against jobs where you get your hands dirty is very old indeed, and very widespread.
So congratulations on your advice and on your child’s commonsense.
I published this in Mercator a few years ago.
The Real World versus Educational Malpractice
On April 30, 2019 The National Post published Universities shine a light on Ontario’s failing
schools by Barbara Kay. In it there was a statement; “More than one-third of the profs they
interviewed identified fewer than 10 per cent of their students as “fully engaged.” Over 80 percent of professors said they had dumbed down their course work, and had reduced the frequency and difficulty of assignments.”
For most these figures are an abstraction, from my experience in the world of business and that of some others I can attest that the “dumbed down course work” that all of these professors claim to have been required to do, results in a difficult time finding hires that can be expected to perform in their chosen fields.
Educators at all levels have made it almost impossible for employers to assess the quality of potential employees, by destroying the traditional link between students’ test achievement scores and their intellectual capacity. The results have not been great for employers.
More than a decade ago, I designed a facility to manufacture large composite parts that I had invented. Each part had a high value, and each part was easy to sell into a willing international market. The design of the pilot plant was such that it could produce 10 parts in a 7.5-hour shift. The tasks were not difficult to perform. What was required was some care in the placement of the components and the need to work at a reasonable pace because the composite resins we used had specific workable times. The process required 20 workers, all of whom where high school graduates mainly in their early 20s.
At no point did all of these workers show up for work every day. They would never call in to say they weren’t going to come to work and they never offered a reasonable excuse when they did show up at work again. There were always a few who showed up late.
The result of this was that we had to hire at least 25 people to do the work of 20. Because there was always at least one person absent, the plant could never produce the full number of parts it was designed to make. We were never able to operate more than one shift. The result was millions of lost revenue and a bad outcome for the business as well as for its 20 employees.
After millions of dollars were invested in research and development, plant design and build,
testing and marketing the product, the plant was closed and scrapped because we couldn’t find 20 high school graduates who knew how to work.
Thinking this experience was unique, I surveyed my peers. The same problem exists all over Canada and in some cases in the U.S. One large manufacturer had identical operations in Canada and the U.S. The U.S. plant was 40% more productive than the Canadian plant. Eventually the company, which had operated successfully for decades, simply shut their Canadian operations. Hundreds of jobs were eliminated. The biggest difference between the two plants was that the people in the U.S. showed up for work every day.
Others told stories of a similar nature. A friend is a lead partner in a specialised consultancy. In earlier times they hired MBA graduates from elite universities in the U.S. and Canada. Several years ago, they simply stopped hiring these grads. The observation was that there was no way to tell if the graduate was of high enough quality to meet the needs of the firm. They all had perfect marks throughout their university careers, they all had amazing resumes. Yet they knew nothing.
Add to that their inflated sense of achievement and their arrogant, privileged world view and
almost non-existent work ethic and the firm just quit hiring these people. Instead, they hired
students with bachelor’s degrees, ran them through a rigorous interview and training process, and built their own consultants.
A similar story came to be from a senior software engineer at a world-renowned software
company. It became impossible for the engineer, who had hired hundreds of software engineers in the past to select new hires from a field of master’s graduates from the world’s most elite computer science and computer engineering universities.
All of the applicants seemed identical on paper. They had perfect marks, perfect references and perfect resumes. They seemed to come from some sort of factory. The company was reduced to interviewing applicants and simply putting examples of the typical problems that applicants would face if they were hired. It was rare to find any applicant who could answer these problems.
When the program directors at these universities asked how their students were faring,
they were surprised to find out that the company was not willing to train new hires to solve
actual real-world problems. It had to be explained to these professors that when a new hire was brought on board it was because the company did not have time to train them in the basics of software design, they had to hit the floor running.
Education should have the goal of helping students gain knowledge on their own. Knowledge is justifiable true belief. The tricky bit is always finding the truth.
Instead education is now about giving children high self-esteem. For schools, maintaining self-esteem means that students must have high marks. It is obvious that the marking system has been debased so that it is essentially meaningless.
We are in trouble in Canada. We are unproductive and are not an easy place to do business in.
We can’t compete because we no longer know how to think.
I imagine that the group of politicians discussing 50% university intake were mostly people who benefited from grants.
If graduates today are depressed by the poor salary premium, I suspect they are more angered by the obscene debt they now have to repay and which is accruing interest at a rate unavailable anywhere in the market place.
But they will never have to repay that debt. Everyone except the terminally dim politicians knew all along that the vast majority of the debt would be repaid by the tax payer.
It’s not even a debt. It’s a progressive tax.
An interesting article. I have always thought that the plan was to get a demographic to pay what is in effect a hidden tax.
‘All of this helped to create today’s more open and democratic mass professional elite’???
Tongue in cheek there surely David?
It’s a pity that the synopsis at the beginning refers to FE when what was meant is HE. Indeed the writer fails to comment on the fact that FE has been downgraded in status because of the expansion of HE, and often FE finds itself remedying the failures of the schools system.
Cancelling the 50% target is welcome but it is not just about number of students. The present system is too rigid, old-fashioned and cosy for a few academics who churn out spurious reports and papers spending more time on commercial consultancy than teaching. Tertiary education needs drastic rethinking. Why are most courses 3 years? Why are there 3 short terms of about 10 weeks (less than 60% of the year)? Why do research universities pretend to teach? Why are there so many useless courses? Why are universities so heavily subsidised? Why are universities so secretive and not held to account for their poor performance? I hope Gavin Williamson goes further than just this measure.
Well argued David. Worth remembering that many student loans will never be paid back because many graduates will never make enough money to pay them back. I also overheard a conversation between a couple of my EU students a few years ago who said that, once they’d graduated, they intended to move back home where the student loan company couldn’t find them (have no idea if this is the case). What will be the cost to the taxpayer of unpaid loans in the future? The only people that benefit are academic staff (I am one, but my salary has declined in real terms over the last few years and my working conditions have deteriorated) and VCs (well, someone has to pay their salaries, don’t they?)
The drive to push half of all young people into universities has done no one any good. Not the universities, not the more academic students, nor the less academic, not the employers and certainly not the country as a whole. (Indeed the only beneficiaries seem to have been vastly over-remunerated University vice-Chancellors)
I know ‘Elite’ is now universally applied as a pejorative, but that seems daft in the context of higher education. Universities should be elite institutions, attracting the brightest and the best, and pushing them to fulfil their potential. If we returned to that model – say 10% to 15% of each generation attending university – then the taxpayer could afford to remove tuition fees, and the University’s finances could be re-focused. They are not a “business”, and trying to run them as such has been to their detriment – both academically and financially.
Instead we have seen successive governments pushing to get as many students as possible into universities just as a stated goal without thinking through the consequences. So now we have huge numbers going to university, piling up substantial personal debt, studying non-academic courses that will not lead them into research or academia nor even benefit them in the jobs-market. No wonder we’ve seen reports of graduates looking to sue their alma mater. Under the current system they paid handsomely for a “product” that didn’t live up to its advertised worth.
In the past, those people who went into Further Education – rather than Higher Education – would have gained the benefits through colleges or polys without being saddled with £50k worth of debt for a degree that, given the saturation of the “graduate” jobs market, means little more than a decent set of A-level results would have done 20 years ago. The trouble is, in this country, the idea of HE and FE is the U and Non-U of the C21st.
The current model needs to change but there have been painfully few politicians (of any stripe) with the sense (or courage|) to point out that rather obvious fact.
the rapid expansion of Higher education provision was based on one factor: change in the HE funding mechanism. In one fell swoop, contact hours were almost halved, resulting in twice as many students needed to meet the needs of contact hours required by teaching staff….and then it goes on, and on, and on!
Covid may do in the woke Marxist climate that has been festering on our campuses for years. Most people are not willing to pay out expensive fees for online courses to be indoctrinated by Marxist professors, especially in courses that have very little employment value such as post-colonialism and critical gender theory. There is very little opportunity for group indoctrination if people aren’t on campus. Those professors without tenure will be dismissed by cash strapped universities and the Marxist professors who are for the most part older or near retirement age will retire as they are probably averse to zoom and Skype conferences. In the unemployment crisis that Covid will generate, students will look for practical courses that provide employment and skills.
It may be a cynical thought, but I can’t help wondering if this very widespread hostility to universities and their mission, which is expressed increasingly on the political right, has less to do with the actual value (tangible or otherwise) of a university degree than with the realisation that graduates vote disproportionately for left-wing parties. If most graduates ended up voting Tory then I do not think that Gavin Williamson would have adopted this policy.
I suppose I’m also old-fashioned enough to find the whole idea that education is justified by its contribution to the economy appalling. When I applied to university a quarter of a century ago, it didn’t occur to me that I was trying to maximise my earning prospects. I thought I was going to learn to think more clearly and live more fully.
To fix the youth lefty bias one has to start much earlier than university. The schools are so thoroughly corrupted with left-think that one would have to purge all the teacher training colleges, and send all the teachers to “cult de-programming” camps.
The entire system should be (1) privatised, (2) attendance voluntary, (3) literacy and numeracy the principle requirements to be called a school. (4) If there is to be tax-subsidy in the transition, let it be by pupil following subsidy vouchers. (5) Let competition do the rest.
I agree, and that was what I too was after (and got) when I studied for an arts degree in the early 1980s. Newman believed that the purpose of university was to offer a liberal education, which ‘does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others; but it does much more. It brings the mind into form, for the mind is like the body.’ A world away from what universities, including (especially?) the ‘elite’ ones, offer today.
A wonderful quote; thanks! That was what I was aiming for, and I do believe it brought my mind into form (matric mid 80s). I believed that I was learning how to learn and to think for myself.
Why do you think this isn’t happening today? Many university students and teachers attempt to follow these ideals.
Addressing the tribal element of this is a fair point, but I think you have brushed over how graduates just seem to end up voting for left wing parties. Is this some odd coincidence in your opinion?
Left wing activism isn’t just something they absorb by osmosis (as over 90% lecturers are left leaning), it is a main part of the syllabus now. Students are not asked to think through left / right philosophy, they are presented with Marxism and its derivatives as fact and then asked how best will you enact social revolution?
Well, I think it’s more complex than that. As I’ve said in a few posts, my perception is that these activist attitudes are absorbed well before they arrive at university on social media, and the “customer-centred” model that we’ve adopted in the last two decades encourages the universities to cater for those values (in the era before tuition fees, the relationship between teacher and student was much more like that between a boss and an employee than between a service provider and a customer, so universities didn’t need to submit to student demands in the same way). So in answer to your first question, I’d hypothesise that the kind of people who are susceptible to left-wing arguments are more likely to want to go to university.
As for the fact that academics themselves are increasingly disproportionately left-wing, again I think you’ve put the cart before the horse. I think a growing right-wing hostility to higher education has pushed academics to the left. Even before articles such as Mr Goodhart’s started appearing, Tory and Blairite reforms had attacked what had been the postwar norm – i.e., secure employment, high salaries, and an almost total autonomy to pursue one’s preferred area of study, irrespective of its demonstrable benefit (it was assumed that the pursuit of knowledge was a good thing in itself). From the 1950s through to the 1990s, there was a pretty strong consensus in both main parties that higher education was a good thing, and therefore the leftward bias was less. Similarly, we now hear a lot of right-wing commentators tell us that people who work for the BBC are biased to the left, but when the Conservative Party is trying to defund and marginalise the institution, this is hardly surprising. If you work at a university now, or at the BBC, you probably vote left as a matter of self-preservation.
Marxist scholars were numerous in the late twentieth century; I was obliged to read their work (not, you understand, exclusively) in a humanities discipline in the late 1990s; my perception then was that the wave had crested, and five years ago I would still have said that it was mostly a phenomenon of the past. In the disciplines with which I’m familiar, actually what happened was a movement away from the activist scholarship of the late twentieth century towards an inoffensive historicism. The recent sudden resurgence of what seemed like a moribund ideology even within universities has taken me by surprise. It should be noted, though, that if Marxism is being promoted in universities, it’s of a kind sufficiently remote from what that term traditionally meant as barely to touch on what is supposed to be the central priority of socialism, the redistribution of wealth.
Indeed, the rich kids who spout Marxism at these places would certainly not accept the redistribution of their wealth, or that of their parents. What repulsive people they are.
They would do everything they can to avoid the lower orders.
Students are no longer taught how to incorporate personal responsibility into a healthy work ethic. From a young age they are labelled by their weaknesses and constantly provided with excuses for their bad behavior by well-meaning, but naive teachers. This attitude goes on all the way to higher education which over the years has become increasingly therapeutical rather than educational. As such professors are supposed to confirm student biases rather than challenge and expand upon them.
What this means in practical terms is that many young people enter the job market without ever having encountered the real world, particularly in the US where children’s activities pretty much always take place under some form of adult supervision. The problems we face today is that a whole generation of children who never roamed outside or made friends outside of school or college are now coming into management and leadership positions. This explains why we are seeing really wonky ‘woke’ attitudes coming from the cultural and academic sectors: journalists working for The Guardian or New York Times, and HR and Diversity officers at universities. These are the kind of people who strongly believe in social engineering (after all it worked on them) and that correct attitudes can be taught. Those who resist must be stupid or bigoted. Basically Western society is in the hands of molly-coddled middle-class Marxists who are terrified of a world that doesn’t conform to their ‘university campus’ worldview. Because they have a college degree they must be the good guys. They want equality for everyone except for themselves.
Graduates tend to vote left because they are indoctrinated to do so throughout the entire course of their education, from age 4 to 24. And because they are not capable of thought, they do not question the indoctrination.
This claim clearly doesn’t stand up to analysis. If it’s matter of “the entire course of their education”, then the relatively small proportion of time they spend at university – at an age when, obviously, they’re less impressionable than they were in childhood – wouldn’t make a major difference to their voting preferences.
That’s a good point, but I could just as easily have written ‘young people’ instead of ‘graduates’. Of course, those that leave school at 16 and start to work and pay taxes may be slightly more likely to stop voting Labour before the graduates. And of course the fact is that graduates skew somewhat towards the middle and upper classes, who are now more likely to vote Labour anyway.
They (the people who leave school at 16, I mean) may or they not stop voting Labour sooner. It’s not necessarily having to pay taxes that shifts people to the right, but feeling economically secure and self-sufficient (which very few people do these days). Old-fashioned more-or-less secure private sector jobs would carry a lot of people in that direction; being able to afford property, too, is a key thing – which again, few can do now without without one of Unherd’s columnists referred to as “Parental Housing Ladder Privilege” (I’m a beneficiary of that kind of privilege myself).
Why should taxpayers shell out vast sums to someone who just wants to “live more fully”? If society invests then society should gain. If you just want to better yourself by going to university then you should pay for it yourself.
When just 10% of the population was going to university, it was assumed that people who had been trained in critical thought ” a very good gateway to “living more fully” and a training relevant to just about any subject ” would be of benefit to society.
Well, but that I’m afraid I think that is sadly typical of an element of the present mindset which sees the price of everything and the value of nothing. I think that society gains, in the intangible sense, having people who think more clearly and live more fully – which is to say, when I imagined those goals I thought of them both as something for myself and as something that would allow to make a more worthwhile contribution to society. So that I agree that “if society invests then society should gain”; it’s just that I don’t believe the gain can necessarily measured in terms of economic growth. As I see it, creating a society where people think clearly and live fully ought to be our ultimate goal.
I’m also not sure, of decades of economic growth, that people are wiser or happier than they were in, say, the 1950s. Beyond a certain point, I’m not sure that society gains, in any meaningful sense, when citizens get richer.
So we should all become teachers with leather patches on the arms of our tweed jackets where worn thin by our elbows.What a lovely idea
I think tweed jackets and leather patches are optional extras!
Unfortunately, Basil, our universities no longer offer the liberal, mind-expanding education you fondly remember. Just how much of that type of education do you think a graduate of one of our new universities’ pseudo-vocational courses is getting? BA in Sports Centre Management anyone?
The country does need expert academics in the archeology of Ancient Sumeria and the like, just not that many of them. When 10% of school leavers went to university, that was affordable. Now 50% go, that student-led, self-selecting model is not.
Sure – I don’t think our universities should be offering BAs in Sport Centre Management. But some academics at some of our universities still strive to offer something akin to an old-fashioned liberal education. What intervenes to impede them is usually the dictates of management.
Thank you, Mr Chamberlain. I have quoted you in a separate comment.
I am not sure to what extent the hostility to universities is attributable to the left-voting of students and others associated with universities. But over the last eight or so years I have increasingly sensed an awareness among those taking decisions about education in the UK, that something has gone seriously wrong with the sector, especially for 18-year-olds and above.
I don’t have quotes to hand, but I clearly remember that even during the coalition, some Tory MPs were saying that the sidelining of technical and vocational training had been a mistake.
So I agree with the many commentators who have declared that the Blair decision to send 50% of all school leavers to university is having catastrophic consequences on the education system in general, and on a whole generation of young people who have had to endure its consequences, well described in this article.
In The Sunday Times last weekend, Rod Liddle declared that decision to be one of the three worst mistakes of that government, the other two being the Iraq War and the decision to allow immediate, unrestricted immigration from eastern Europe when those nations joined the EU. I agree on all three counts. Perhaps Gavin Williamson would eventually have made a comparable decision based on those realities.
My reasons for going to university were just about the same as yours. I loved my subject, and university was where I could explore it, in a way apt for my disposition, and more deeply than I could elsewhere.
Well, indeed, I’m very much in favour of an expansion of technical / vocational training. At the same time, part of me thinks that a pretty high percentage of people probably could benefit, in the intangible sense, from some kind of university education (ideally one rather different from the kind we have now) – even if it doesn’t necessarily increase their earning power!
Setting percentage targets is almost always a bad idea.
I was intrigued enough to look up Mr Liddle’s article in the Sunday Times, and I note that he didn’t actually single out the decision on Eastern European immigration, but rather simply wrote “unconstrained immigration”. I suspect he’s referring to Andrew Neather’s notorious claim that “I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy [of mass immigration] was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”.” This policy, Mr Neather claimed, dated back to c.2000 and pre-dated the entry of the Eastern European nations into the EU. I think I’d also be right in suspecting that Polish immigration isn’t the kind that most troubles Mr Liddle.
Thank you.
You are, I suspect, right when you suggest that
I’ve often thought that the old types of General Studies degrees, or well-devised programmes of Liberal Arts ” provided they are well designed and aim high (not the same thing as making them difficult) ” could achieve exactly that kind of benefit. They were dying out in the early 1970s, when I started my career in academia; but in the university where I worked and in many others I know of, there were constant attempts to ameliorate the negative aspects of early specialisation. Some worked quite well; others didn’t. But they were always additions to an essentially specialist degree structure.
I stand corrected on Rod Liddle’s comment about immigration. Thank you for it. I don’t know why that snippet transformed itself in my memory, for, as you say, immigration from Poland is not the kind that would most trouble Mr Liddle.
Most Polish people would regard Poland as being Central Europe.
In what way was Andrew Neather’s claim notorious? Surely you can’t mean mass migration and ‘diversity’ is manifestly a great thing for everyone ,and not just the Labour Party ,in that it skews the voting demographic in their favour ,bringing in people who will mainly be dependent on welfare and benefits of various kinds.
They become left -wing for two reasons .Their teachers ,especially in courses like sociology, are invariably left -wing and give them reading material and lectures that imparts their own ideology ,’white fragility’ being the most infamous recent shaper of woke mindset.
And they end up in debt and without any prospects of getting a job that meets their expectations.
If you take on the debt of a degree and then cannot get anything but a minimum wage job which political party would you vote for?