Any Right-winger who thrills at the thought of the university bubble bursting abruptly is either a sociopath or hasn't thought it through.(Mark Makela/Corbis/Getty)
The Jason Arday scandal blew up because it captures a sense of grift that now seems endemic in British higher education. His employment at Cambridge was the coup de grâce, revealing that corruption has even reached our supposed time-honored centers of intellectual excellence.
This crisis has been coming for years, if not decades. The problems in higher education span multiple lines of criticism across financing, geography, and standards. Every possible solution to one criticism promises to exacerbate another. Is it time to cut the Gordian knot? Or is higher education too big to fail?
Trust in the quality of the product itself has corroded. A third of Britons now believe a degree is not worth the time and money. One recent IFS report suggested one-in-four graduates will lose out financially from going to university: unsurprising, given the so-called “graduate premium” turned out not to be as generous when 50% of young people held degrees, as when this was true of only 10%.
Who could have predicted that? Not New Labour, or any subsequent government, none of whom seemed to have heard of supply and demand. But there are few alternatives for any young person who aspires to more than gig-economy work, so off they go to “Uni”. And, having graduated, the burden of student debt they find themselves carrying swiftly becomes a core grievance for pretty much any young graduate you care to ask. And can you blame them? Even a Treasury select committee recently called the Government’s own information on the student loan offer tantamount to “mis-selling”. The glossy presentations and videos didn’t, for example, mention anywhere that the repayment terms could be altered unilaterally at a later date.
Many young graduates who accepted these loans now watch with justifiable anger as the terms are changed underneath them, and their debt compounds beyond their ability to remedy. None of this is helped by a stagnant employment market, and rising living costs — not to mention, since Rachel Reeves froze the repayment threshold last year, more graduates than ever dragged into the repayment bracket. Nor does it look any better for future cohorts: fees are now indexed to inflation, even as the cost of living creeps ever higher. This generation faces what has been described as a “ticking time bomb” of debt and taxes.
As British school-leavers prepare to find out on Thursday whether they got the A-level grades required for their chosen degrees, critics argue that they’re signing up for a life earning scarcely above minimum wage, enslaved to what amounts to a graduate tax, for a credential so degraded by AI cheating and grade inflation, it’s scarcely worth the paper it’s printed on.
In this context, Andy Burnham’s proposal to increase access to technical education can perhaps be read as an indirect effort to tackle this predicament, by encouraging more young people to find other routes to qualification — and, perhaps, also tackle the more scammy end of “Uni”. His recent pledge is light on detail, but if more British youngsters were diverted to credible technical pathways at 14, surely fewer would then end up plumping for low-value degrees and a mountain of debt.
Will it work? It’s certainly a very Labour approach to the problem. Rather than seeking to impose “standards” from the top down, and risking an attack from the sentimental Left for being a big old meanie, the aim seems to be to create academic excellence as it were from the opposite direction: by improving other qualification routes. But the prospects of success are, at best, uncertain, and not just because others have tried the same measure and none yet succeeded. There are also many more factors in higher ed’s current predicament than just the range of choices available to school-leavers.
For one thing, both swingeing fees and grade inflation are facets of something more fundamental: the transformation of education into a product and the widening of “access” to that product. This is laudable, where it comes with great teaching, rewards aspiration and hard work, and enables social mobility. But in practice, it also means an absolute increase in the number of young people in full-time education. This group has more than doubled since expansion began in the Nineties. And this, in turn, means more students now hew closer to the national mean, in academic ability, than when fewer attended and selection was sharper. Inevitably, teaching and expectations have adjusted.
Meanwhile, the related change from grant-based to fee-based funding has encouraged students to see themselves as paying customers. This has shifted the relationship between students and professors. It’s much harder to hand out “Fail” grades to a paying customer, especially when you need them to give you good student-satisfaction ratings to attract the next cohort. Thus universities both have a financial incentive to preserve standards, and hence their reputation, but also to keep students happy by not asking too much of them.
The result is an unhappy compromise in which institutions trade on academic excellence, while quietly finding ways (such as a panoply of special accommodations for exams) to soften its demands. Meanwhile, the cost of attending continues to climb — even as people begin to notice that not all the newer graduates seem quite as, well, educated as they used to. (Nor indeed, as an astonished world discovered recently, all the professors, including those at Cambridge.)
What to do? The most direct solution would seem to be to accept that not everyone is suited to higher education, and somehow force a return to greater selectivity. But there are several problems here. Firstly, you’d be placing your selection criteria in the hands of a professoriate of whom an unknown number thought Jason Arday was just fine. How would that go? And even if numbers did fall, this would inflict a sharp economic shock on the university sector. No Labour prime minister in his right mind would be blasé about job losses in so overwhelmingly Labour-voting a demographic.
And still more fundamentally, shrinking at all presupposes that our universities exist to educate British young people. And the reality is that this is now secondary, at least in financial terms, to their work as exporters of credentialism with a British accent. The incentives at work here are tangled, but boil down to the fact that domestic fees are capped while foreign student charges are not. A Times investigation recently revealed just how large foreign students’ contribution to university funding was: for 10 universities, this income stream makes up 40% of their total. A bit like the schoolmasters’ kids at a posh public school, British students are increasingly cross-subsidized by foreign ones paying full whack.
This academic globalization is at the heart of the sector’s current predicament. For one thing, the competition for foreign students has set off an arms race to provide impressive facilities, encouraging universities to take on enormous debt. Between 2008 and 2019, university borrowing increased by 180%; 38 higher-education institutions now have borrowing that exceeds half their income. And this has, in turn, necessitated even more high-paying foreign students to service the debt.
Some institutions have even resorted to dodgy “franchising” arrangements, where they subcontract their brand-name to third parties and skim off the fees. Needless to say, this has done nothing for these institutions’ academic reputations. It has also created a conflict of interest between universities seeking overseas student income, and ordinary Britons concerned about migration.
In response, Labour under Starmer made changes calculated to disincentivize “students” whose primary motive was really migration, including tighter visa requirements and changing the rules on student asylum applications. This resulted in a sharp drop in non-EU student applications — which has left some British universities in a financially perilous state.
The Times reports that 51 universities declared a deficit in the year the changes came into effect. These institutions are now scrambling for the far more limited pool of home students, and courses that previously required three A* grades at A level from British students are now accepting BBB.
So we can be sure that any measure designed to improve academic standards by further restricting domestic student recruitment would leave these over-leveraged universities in a still-more-woeful state. Should we care about this? I submit that we should.
In our clickbaity age, the temptation is always toward polemic. Gunboats in the Channel; hang the paedos; raze these scam institutions to the ground. But not all academics are Ardays. Some are dedicated and brilliant. Some are even (quietly) not woke. And a general insolvency across British higher education would in any case affect a great deal more than just the approximate 440,000 people who work in the sector. In some parts of the country, universities are one of the few remaining engines of even relative middle-class security.
They’re also still — even with the objectionable wokeists, sometimes foolish financial decisions, and at times flagrant visa-laundering — an engine of prosperity for many. This remains so despite — or more uncomfortably yet, perhaps because of — the now markedly globalist orientation of many universities. The top six higher-education cities in Britain are London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Brighton, and Cardiff, with a total of 157 higher education institutions between them. There is a strong overlap with parts of the country that suffered most acutely when Britain de-industrialized. And the knowledge economies that have grown up in, say, Liverpool and Manchester in the last decade or so, to the immense benefit of those cities’ inhabitants, most likely wouldn’t be there without the universities.
Simply allowing higher education to fail would replicate the catastrophic impact of the Thatcher years, in parts of Britain that still vividly remember what that was like last time, just without any compensatory City boom. Any Right-winger who thrills at the thought of this is either a sociopath or hasn’t thought it through.
This isn’t to say, though, that correction is not warranted. But higher education is a complex system, deeply embedded in Britain’s social fabric, and economically load-bearing in some regions. Unless we want widespread economic misery, and a lot of very radicalized, very unemployed, very Left-wing former academics at large, correction needs to happen via careful adjustment: gradually suffocating the visa mills, swiftly spinning up technical training, and perhaps buying out over-leveraged and/or academically vacuous corners of the sector.
So as a first step to averting the sudden death of British academia, we probably need to find some smart, prudent, reality-oriented sociologists to survey the field, and help devise this careful plan. Wherever they are. Perhaps Cambridge?
