Warning over ‘threadbare’ degrees
UNIVERSITIES are running “threadbare” courses in a rush to put “bums on seats”, the higher education minister has warned.
Sam Gyimah said that while students should be encouraged to “follow their passions” when deciding which university course to study, they needed to be aware that the choice would lead to huge variability in their potential future income.
Institutions must concentrate on providing high-quality degrees that offered students value for money and good earning potential, rather than expanding “cheap” courses, he said.
Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), which used data from 650,000 former university students, showed a gulf in earning potential five years after graduation.
The IFS analysis, which was commissioned by the Department for Education, showed that women who studied the bottom 100 courses had earnings up to 64 per cent less – around £17,000 – than for the average degree, after graduation. Meanwhile for men, the figure was 67 per cent below average, meaning they earned £21,000 less than some of their peers.
Speaking at the Higher Education Policy Institute conference in London yesterday, Mr Gyimah said universities must “take the responsibility to police themselves” and to “think carefully” about expanding low-quality courses. He told delegates that it was important that would-be students knew what they were “getting into” and what the choices were when making decisions about higher education.
Five years after graduation, men and women who studied at Russell Group universities earned more than 40 per cent and 35 per cent more, respectively, than those who attended the average post-1992 institutions.
In his speech, Mr Gyimah said the findings “demonstrate that studying the same subject at a different institution can yield a very different earnings premium”. He said universities had to be “open and transparent” to allow people to “make the right choices”. “And it’s not whether or not you offer creative arts, it’s whether or not you offer creative arts that is truly competitive, so you are not putting on courses that are cheap to offer, threadbare and not as competitive as they could be.”
Alistair Jarvis, the chief executive of Universities UK, defended university degrees as an “excellent investment”.
“On average, graduates continue to earn £10,000 per year more than the average non-graduate and are more likely to be in employment,” he said.
“When looking at graduate salaries, it is important also to take into account the regional differences and socioeconomic inequalities that exist in society, that a university degree cannot fully address.”