August 7, 2024 - 1:00pm
“Today, I set a target of 50% of young adults going into higher education in the next century.” These were the words of Prime Minister Tony Blair at the 1999 Labour conference. It would seem that the intervening years have not dampened his conviction that more students will equate to a more productive economy. In April 2022, Blair argued that as many as 70% of young adults ought to be admitted to universities.
Yet he did not count on the reluctance of the younger generation. This week it was reported that applications to universities have fallen for the second year in a row. Whereas in 2022, 44.1% of 18-year-olds had applied through Ucas, that figure fell to 42.1% in 2023 and 41.9% this year. It looks very much as though a trend is emerging.
Of course, we might put this down to a matter of affordability. For all his enthusiasm for higher education, it was Blair who introduced tuition fees in 1998. Since then, successive governments have made the process of studying for a degree increasingly expensive, with rising tuition fees and the scrapping of maintenance grants. Whereas most students of my generation left university with a low-interest student loan, today’s students face crippling debts of tens of thousands of pounds, and many are finding it difficult to secure work.
Perhaps young people are simply waking up to the reality that a degree no longer necessarily confers a huge advantage in the job market. Or perhaps they are calculating on improved prospects if they seek work immediately on leaving school, giving themselves a three-year head start during which time they will be earning rather than accruing debt. An alternative explanation has come from Vivienne Stern, chief executive of Universities UK (UUK), who has argued that “anti-university rhetoric” from Conservative ministers has exacerbated the problem.
But is it a problem at all? There is an increasing sense that universities have lost their way, allowing activist academics and students to degrade the climate on campus from one of intellectual curiosity to ideological conformity. It is well documented that many university staff and students alike now routinely self-censor if their views are not in line with the fashionable identity-obsessed monomania of our time. Academics have been harassed and hounded out of work for failing to toe the line, and one of the Labour government’s first acts has been to scrap the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which would have ensured that universities uphold their duty to enable free debate and inquiry to flourish.
In such circumstances, those who are genuinely interested in a well-rounded education might be better off avoiding university altogether, and instead spend their time reading the best books that our civilisation has produced. There’s a lot to be said for auto-didacticism, especially when so many academics are determined to indoctrinate their charges into their narrow ways of thinking about the world.
In addition, the transformation of higher education into a consumer affair, with the student/teacher relationship now akin to that of buyer/seller, has resulted in the degradation of the purpose of education. When knowledge is seen as a commodity, and the traditional hierarchies of pedagogy are inverted, the experience of learning is inevitably enervated.
There was always a kind of snobbery inherent in the Blairite view that higher education was a necessity, or that there should be any shame in opting for a trade apprenticeship over a degree. Some young people are innately academic, others are not. Too many who are not remotely well-suited to academia have been encouraged to take paths that are unrelated to their skills and interests.
Ultimately, Blair’s aspirations were never realistic. Higher education isn’t for everyone, and with the ongoing ideological capture of our major institutions, even those who are best suited for academic pursuits might be better off looking elsewhere.
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Subscribe“It is well documented that many university staff and students alike now routinely self-censor if their views are not in line with the fashionable identity-obsessed monomania of our time.”
The correct term is ‘far-left’, or ‘facsist-left’, or ‘hard-left’. Not sure why the fascist-left is always protected by a giant wall of euphemisms? Is there some sort of legal requirement in journalism to never directly mention the existence of left wing extremism?
That’s certainly the case at Unherd…
Because the left sees themselves as the beneficiaries of wisdom and they see history as arching towards its End. So when they act authoritarian it is not fascism, because it’s benevolent and for your own good, they’re just hurrying along to the inevitable End of History – if you believe you’re heading towards Utopia everything is permissible in the goal of speeding up the journey. Leftism is mostly a political religion.
Look no further than the recent riots which were met by ANTIFA counter-protestors. They’re protesting against a bunch of rioters which is hardly anything to do with fascism in support of a government who for the last 40 years has massively eroded civil liberties, passed some of the most oppressive anti-civil liberty laws this country has ever known (and it’s a very old country) and, as we speak, is persecuting people for things they say on the internet.
It seemed to me that last week’s riots were sporadic, chaotic hooliganism. Spurred on by bigotry and beer, they were very nasty, especially the attacks on the hotels and the mosque.
The counter-protests have been well organised and largely peaceful.
Am I mad to fear more the latter group?
No. The counter-protests were far too well-organised for comfort – suspiciously so.
I’m scared of these people too; the handful of thugs on the other side, not so much.
Yes, those devilishly cunning counter-protestors didn’t attack a single person, set a single fire, or loot a single shop. Be very, very afraid!
I wonder if anyone here would argue that we should be scared of the pro-Israel demonstrators, because they’re less aggressive than the pro-Palestinian ones.
Your points seem unarguable, don’t understand the downvotes
Is it becoz I iz Welsh?
Ah, that must be it!
They don’t like being found out.
Seems entirely reasonable to fear both but for different reasons. Too lengthy to go into here, but one short term set of reasons about violence and hatred, and the other, longer term corruption of freedom and concern for the common good, by a deep commitment to generating ideological catastrophe and total change if at all possible.
Well said.
Probably because you’ve just made up the term so that you can deploy the sting of the word “fascist”!. It’s completely inaccurate. The two systems of belief, albeit sharing intolerance towards others, have entirely different roots
Meanwhile, the number of vacancies within the trades keeps growing. Those are jobs that will largely be immune to AI, robotics, and other non-human interventions, but they can also cause one to sweat or get dirt on their hands and we can’t have that. Instead, at least in the US, we have thousands of people graduating every year with the functional equivalent of a home mortgage to repay but with far lower payments, meaning they’re not likely to ever pay it back.
Listening to the complaints from acquaintances whose kids are trying to get into law,acccountancy,banking etc it would appear anecdotally that there are no easy routes any more outside of blatant nepotism.The professions are waking up to the fact that a lot of the functions can be automated or undertaken by lower qualified staff-a friend who is very senior in the finance function of one of the “magnificent 7” tech behemoths has told me they haven’t recruited any graduates into the finance function for years.Its a diminishing demand and will splinter into a small number of super top end staff and a rump of lower grade with automated input.
All in all-not a great prospect for our indebted graduate class.
Even if Labour manages to get house building moving (that’s somewhat uncertain to say the least), there aren’t enough construction workers to actually build them. Unless of course we import more immigrant labour, who will also need somewhere to live.
Anyone looking for useful education in the humanities: I recommend reading the works of Father Seraphim Rose.
Learned more from him than I did from any university.
Whilst i wouldn’t necessarily agree with your choice of reading, i can certainly endorse the view that AD puts forward:
This is in spite of going to university, where i spent much of the time (and since) reading on matters across a much wider spectrum than the narrow focus of the course i was on.
Just as a matter of interest, could you indicate what it is about your suggested source that would make it worth pursuing? Thanks.
Rose offers a critique of the Western intellectual tradition going back 1000 years, explaining why all the stages of philosophical development have their roots in ancient heresies and the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. From that, we get Protestantism, atheism, and ultimately the transhumanism we see today.
Sounds interesting, i’ll have a read.
Prior to doing so, i strongly suspect i’m going to disagree with the thesis that “atheism” stems from the source you mention, since the earliest developments of homo sapiens wouldn’t have included religious belief until a certain level of consciousness was achieved. In that sense, atheism was extant then, so perhaps what’s now referred to as atheism is something different, or perhaps we understand it differently. I think sometimes that’s where our disagreements stem from; and perhaps a better term for the pre-existing state would be non-theism.
Human beings are intrinsically religious. Witness your zealous religion of opposition to religion.
Therefore humanity was religious from the very outset, as prehistory confirms.
It absolutely does not, except in the sense of recorded history. The earliest cave art was largely animalistic i.e. about those things which favoured survival. From there, advancing consciousness required “explanations” for why we’re here.
Your version, or understanding of prehistory, is rather narrow.
Why did Neolithic cavemen bury their dead, unless they had some belief in an afterlife?
That’s an odd equation. Odd also that you seem to understand the mind of Neolithic man.
Most importantly they buried their dead with (valuable) grave goods such as tools, weapons, food. This implies a view of an afterlife. Does not, however, shed much light on the other question: atheism. (There might be an afterlife, without gods.)
Initially the animals at Lascaux were construed as an instance of hunting magic — until it was realized (from bones surviving in scrap heaps) that some but not all of the animals depicted were food sources. It looks like they may just have been doing art for art’s sake — animals being good to think, not just to eat.
You could argue that most humans are spiritual by nature, but it needed agriculture and big towns to make organised religion possible.
Indeed, and arguably the concept of one overall God was a sublimated version of the deep-rooted primate instinct of submission to the boss of the tribe. Perhaps this was once tribes grew too large, or mixed with others, for any one human leader to be able to hold society together solely by the force of his personality and physical strength.
Steven Mithen in “The Language Puzzle” estimates ‘religion’ as arising about 100,000 years ago, coincident/due to the flowering of language: “by 100,000 years ago, night time flames were supporting a linguistic workout for the use of metaphor and abstract words as talk of the mundane was replaced by that about the world of spirits and daemons.”
Academics in linguistics consistently underestimate, sometimes to an obviously ludicrous extent, when language worthy of the name first appeared.
The hyoid bone in the throat, which allows controlled speech and is absent from non-human primates, evolved at least 500,000 years ago in Homo Erectus, who, via Homo Heidelbergensis, was the common ancestor of Homo Sapiens (us) and the Neanderthals.
So there is every chance that rudimentary languages were spoken well over 500,000 years ago, even if they may have lacked some modern refinements and semantics.
500K years is a very long time ago to call a primate ‘human’. Is there evidence of graphic art, or burial of dead at that early date.
Which text?
On Nihilism is a good place to start.
I studied economics to postgrad level but didn’t begin to understand it until I started a business, at which point I realised the degrees had been a huge waste of time and money.
University is a valuable institution for STEM and some very talented students of the arts, but it’s unnecessary and wasteful for most people now we have the Internet.
My daughter is a very talented artist and illustrator who spent three years at one of our premier art focused universities (Falmouth.) Dhe spent the whole of the time there being forced to change her style (the style which had gained her an unconditional offer from every university she applied to) to the current “in vogue” style.
She left with a huge debt, a totally wasted three years and had to rediscover her own artistic identity.
My own daughter is also a talented artist but thankfully decided to pursue it through A – levels purely as a hobby and she was free to find her own style. Had she chosen it at degree level I’ve no doubt she would have had much the same experience as your daughter.
Instead she has chosen a Zoology degree (at Penryn, just up the road from Falmouth) and she is gaining enormous benefit from the course.
That, and similar areas of study are exactly the ones that are enhanced by university education but there are so many that aren’t.
It simple isn’t worth it for everyone in every vocational area and it certainly isn’t the unfailing golden path that Blair proposed.
Quelle coincidence! My daughter lives in Penryn.
My daughter spent part of her second year in Penryn (a cottage just up from an excellent pub) before moving to student accommodation in “Maritime” overlooking the harbour.
I have slightly removed family who live there.
Pasties from the local Asda are legendary.
My daughter had the option of art or STEM. Did Level 3 BTECH in art at college concurrently with a foundation degree (possibly the most intensive course you can imagine in terms of both practical and academic study – I’m a STEM graduate and never had to put that level of work and study in either at college or Uni.) Also had sufficient STEM A levels to pursue her other potential options which were medicine and actuarial science. My advice was to pursue the latter but ultimately it was her decision. Frankly Falmouth lied to her.
Well said!
I thought Tony Blair played a blinder. Not only did he reduce the numbers of unemployed school leavers but he also got them to (eventually) pay for it themselves.
Except he didn’t (get them to repay it).
At least half the mountain of student debt piling up will never be repaid by the former students. Many simply won’t earn enough to ever repay it. Others will arrange things so they never report sufficient earnings. Some will simply emigrate – why not just leave if the government’s giving you a huge financial incentive to walk away from a debt of £50-100K ?
And don’t forget that this was also a huge job creation program for university staff (sorry, that should be “university” in many cases). I dread to think how much damage the low quality, ill thought out, second/third rate output of this new generation of academics has done to Britain. As much through their “research” as through whta they are teaching.
What we actually need in higher education is quality and not quantity. Instead, we’re starving parts of the economy of labour for no good reason.
In most cases it is not the quality of the staff but the cynical domination by management who will stop at nothing to get the fee income for their institutions, so they persecute staff who stand up for intellectual standards. This is a worldwide phenomenon, I can give you examples from high and low status institutions and from USA, UK and Europe.
PS A positive development is the introduction of degree apprenticeships, mainly led by those much maligned universities who are former polytechnics.
I think his blinder was getting his son Ewan a £200m fortune in the Multiverse apprenticeship company. Listen to Bliar …. he will ALWAYS extol the virtues of apprenticeships even now. Keeping it in the family ….
The sheer student numbers and the accepted cultural and political weight of the modern Anglo university has allowed them to underpin this realignment of political contestation between liberal and conservative blocs- 2 decades old I would say now.
There has been a particular political construction of the modern university where two other factors are key: the relationship between the student market and liberal or left-wing media (the centrality of Guardian newspaper culture) and the positioning of the student as a high-paying fee client who must be served.
“In April 2022, Blair argued that as many as 70% of young adults ought to be admitted to universities.”
By definition, 50% of the population is of below average intelligence. So apparently the great and good see a future for the dumb and dullard in the world of higher learning. Probably Blair is making a tacit admission that the universities are now merely madrassas for regime ideology.
Bliar is a madman. But an eloquent one. And sadly the people are taken in by eloquence, even when it masks such lunacy as 50%=70% of children going to ‘university’ (should that read ‘college’?), flinging open our borders to mass immigration and starting a war in the Middle East that has destroyed the balance of power in that region and led directly to the dominance of Iran and the increasing severity of conflicts involving Israel.
Ian, I would agree with Denis Stone. Blair is a very foolish immature boy. Anything he says is with the intention of Blairing. I have no idea how he got so far in life. even Wendy speaks ill of him now.
Pity the NGOs
There is an increasing sense that universities have lost their way, allowing activist academics and students to degrade the climate on campus from one of intellectual curiosity to ideological conformity.
You can say that again. My son’s tutor refused to speak to him after he, my son, pointed out that Franco had won the Spanish Civil War.
Ha ha, you’re having us on.
Please, say it’s not true.
I was the first person in my family to go to university and was proud to be there. I was also proud for years to have been at one of the best universities in the world.
Now, though, I tell all young people to look at apprenticeships rather than uni. Why get yourself into debt just for the privilege of being indoctrinated in utter harmful nonsense for three years?
Academia has been eating itself for the last few years – the worst being over the covid years – and it deserves a good kicking. I look forward to seeing a number of universities fall in the next decade. Maybe then the rot will stop and academics will open their eyes to the harm they have done and change their ways. I hope so.
Nojo King
Higher Education is not for everyone unless the standards are lowered sufficiently so as to accommodate the increased cohorts.
It’s good news, something to celebrate. And I say that as a university lecturer working at an institution that’s seen falling student numbers over the last few years and is making redundancies. Far too many young people go to university simply because their friends are going/they’ve nothing better to do/their parents have harassed them into applying. I prefer to teach people who want to be there, are committed to learning and who see the value in a degree (and that may be for work reasons but it might also be just because they like learning – for the sheer joy of exploring a discipline, immersing yourself in its theories and concepts and debating with others. People who love learning are a joy to teach and make my job worthwhile. Those that don’t want to be there, or shouldn’t be there, are usually a PITA, moan a great deal, make excuses for not completing work and, eventually, drop out).
Add this one to the ever-lengthening list of things Tony Blair f****d up.
Which is why Keir Starmer scares me, clearly taking him for a role model.
I have a relative who is working on tenure in a humanities department. This person is conservative, a Trump supporter. When this person was interviewing, multiple anti-Trump comments were freely given, and this person said nothing. Now this person possibly will get tenure. This person has noted that this person’s political views will need to be held completely unstated until this person gets full professor status, which may take 10 years.
Speech of all conservatives is completely suppressed in universities today.
The drop is only a small one. Perhaps it can be explained by an increasing proportion of the nation’s 18 year olds belonging to certain communities that have no interest in the Blairite vision of a multicultural society educated in Western ways.
It’s not just the ‘activist academics’ who have fostered the university crisis. Academics genereally have been cowed into silence and compliance by a vicious cancel culture – and good ones, like Katherine Stock, have been hounded [cleansed] out of their institutions for having daring to challenge the Woking Class orthodoxies. This crisis has been incubated for decades, assisted by John Major’s cancellation of the excellent former polytechnics and ultimately consolidated by Blair’s mad commitment.
Universities no longer teach students HOW to think; they tell students WHAT to think. University degrees are deteriorating in their standards and relevance right across the subject spectrum. Medical students in many medical schools (including the USA and 3rd World institutions) are for example, told to prioritise ‘people of colour’ before White patients to atone for ‘white supremacy’ and the sins of colonialism of the past. Who would trust a doctor with a degree predicated upon such racist principles?
I took a degree in British university, which has a reputation for left-wing activism. This was very recent (graduating in 2021), when I was a _very_ mature student. In my experience, the lecturers leave their political opinions at the lecture-room door. They teach in a way that I felt was completely unbiased. In tutorials, there were no opinions which were off-limits (apart from one occasion, when the lecturer was a young post-grad). Moreover, at no time did I feel that I had to toe anyone’s party line. My essays, which at times offered unfashionable viewpoints, were marked fairly.
There is a professionalism to teaching in a university, and the lecturers with whom I came into contact were all professionals. I suspect my experience was much more typical than any of the instances listed by Chipoko.
That is interesting David. Do your peers consider you left or right wing, or mainly centrist?
I’ve been studying an Arts and Humanities degree with the Open University. Similarly, I’ve not experienced any bias among the teaching staff, but my fellow students show a very clear bias towards Leftist views, especially on the current Palestine/Israel conflict. When I mentioned in a tutorial that the counter-culture and utopianism of the 1960s included the Jewish Kibbutzim movement in Israel there was shock horror!
I think it would have been relevant to state what degree course you took. If it were Maths, Economics or Engineering I’d find nothing surprising in what you said. If it were Anthropology, American Studies or Gender Studies I would be surprised.
That’s encouraging to hear.
I couldn’t disagree more. I attended the same institution as you perhaps 2 decades ago. With some notable exceptions,I was hounded and often bullied for holding views which were not hyper- critical of imperialism – indeed I was often pilloried for being ” neo imperialist” when all I did was defend dead white men of the 19th century Indian Civil services; ” bourgeois” social reformers and for defending the post 1947 Westphalian nation state of India. I had selected SOAS over Oxbridge for Liberal arts, thinking it would continue the glorious traditions of Kenneth Balhachett and AL Basham..but was sorely disillusioned.
In retrospect I think the fall of Communism and the East Bloc in the 1990s re- ified the campus Marxist academia with zest and in fact made it more monochromatic in its post modernist, identitarian colours while eroding the gentler and old fashioned Leftism of a Michael Howard or even an EH Carr.
I found remarkable affinity for the similar hard Left campus I had left in my Marxist ruled hometown in India.
Till today one considers the best part of one’s student life in the UK to have been the lovely libraries of the old ULU..as far as scholastic life was concerned.
We may have been at SOAS together, or at very close times. I was there from 1988 to 1990, and it was the worst experience of my life. I spent six months after my graduation practically in the foetal position, recovering, and then took my life in quite a different direction, aware that my ambition for an academic career had been blasted. In other words, my experience is exactly like yours.
Glad you are honest about it! I was there 1998-2000. An overall distressing experience…I returned once for a lecture some years ago and found a worsening of stances…hard Left, unbridled identitarian politics with scant respect for dissenting views.
A uni degree is still very useful if you steer clear of humanities and social sciences – STEM subjects can lead to good careers. Get a BSc rather than a BA and your student loan might be debt worth taking on.
Unhappily, some of us don’t take subjects with the idea of getting rich on them. Some of us take subjects they like, and hope that if they are lucky enough, they may earn a living doing what they love. And it may surprise you, but some of us love humanities subjects.
I also love humanities subjects, but you don’t need a full-on degree to engage with them.
I don’t really understand this; less people are attending university because of activist academics. There are jobs you cannot get without a specific degree. All you have to do is digest the lectures, do your research, sit the tests. Maybe, for example, people don’t want to be teacher anymore, so they forgo university for something else.
So, less people going to university in what field? Just presenting a total number as evidence of something doesn’t help. I’d like know what subjects the numbers have dropped off in, or shifted around.
Anyway, the drop in figures looks infinitesimal.
As ever, Blair was following the US into mass higher education and the results have been the same, a devaluing of credentials as university education becomes the norm, and accumulation of more debt on postgraduate study to give CVs an edge, but ultimately the same effect with Ph.D’s working in non-graduate required jobs. The universities are desperate for a diminishing number of foreign students and the higher fees they bring, and when this dries up expect mass closures and amalgamations. A wrong path to have taken, and a long period of repentance for many, another case of unanticipated consequences from government policy incompetence.
I have two BA’s, an MA and a PhD, and (although my 30 year old has just finished her MA and my 28 year old is finally doing his BA), there is absolutely no way I would want my kids to go to university now if they were 6th formers.
James Lindsey, a PhD mathematician, who was involved in sokal² later went down a rabbit hole of trying to find a paper trail from traditional marxism to wokeism.
He was deterred from the path of righteousness (mathematics) after being so disturbed by a peer reviewed paper on “feminist glaciology” that he spent three days in a dark room.
I can’t swear to the veracity of the story but to any of us with a scientific education, political ideas intruding is most upsetting.
It would have been hard to imagine a policy more damaging to Britain’s long term prospects than Blair’s.
…until Net Zero came along.
These two, had they been invented by Xi Jinping himself, couldn’t be bettered by anybody wanting to destroy Britain.
To this narrative should be added the issue of qualification inflation.
Many roles now require degree status when previous access was possible through day release whilst working.
One area that springs immediately to mind is Nursing.
The more people have a degree, the less each degree on average is worth. It is very simple economics which an economically illiterate Blair ignored.
I said this twenty years ago, adding that the British universities were going through a period of excessive expansion for which they would inevitably pay. Such views were not well received.