A generation has been sold a university fraud

To say that more people should go to university sounds an admirable proposition. As we become a more “knowledge-based” society, it is good for more citizens to become knowledgeable. So in 1999, when Tony Blair said, “today I set a target of 50 per cent of young adults going into higher education in the 21st century”, his audience cheered.

But the assumption behind such an increase (the figure in the Sixties was five per cent) is that the thing called a university will be equally good as you drive up the numbers. The linked assumption is that a university degree will retain its value.

What if that does not happen? Today a rather shocking report has been produced by the Economic Affairs Committee of the House of Lords. It is called Treating Students Fairly, and it proves that we are not treating them fairly at all.

The situation became particularly acute after the raising of tuition fees by the Coalition in 2012. Now that universities depended overwhelmingly on these fees (rather than direct government grant), they wanted to cram in as many undergraduates as possible in order to earn more. Educational quality duly suffered.

Schools are rated by Ofsted in terms of how many pupils they can get into university. So they have connived at this unmerited expansion and put pressure on their students to take the university route. They rarely guide them through the maze of vocational education and apprenticeships.

Part-time education has collapsed, threatening the end, for example, of the Open University. The world of apprenticeships has become mired in confusion, chasing a preposterous target of three million, invented to look good in the Conservative manifesto of 2015, with its talk of “aspiration for all”.

There are nearly 500 different standards of apprenticeships, and nearly 300 of them will take two more years to complete. Many “apprenticeships” are just rebadgings of other forms of employment in order to attract the government subsidy. An astonishing figure in the Lords report is that 40 per cent of those classified as being on apprenticeships do not know that they are apprentices at all.

As for the value of degrees, the report says that 26 per cent of university students graduated with first-class degrees in 2016-17, compared with 18 per cent in 2012-13. No one believes that this proves educational standards truly rose so fast. This is grade inflation. The consequent disappointment, when you do not get the job and income which you have been led to expect, is great. A generation has been sold the appearance of educational advancement, not the reality. And “sold” is the right word. For the first time since mass university education began, students are paying really substantial sums for the privilege. Paying is a fine principle, but obviously it is undermined if the educational quality falls while the bill rises.

The Lords report digs into two striking facts about student loans – that their interest rate is so high (6.3 per cent from this autumn) and that it is chargeable as soon as study begins. This was done by the Treasury, it concludes, to “flatter” the deficit. The large sums from the interest payments are treated as income in year, thus pushing the deficit down. The total cost of the loan scheme, however – chiefly the write-down of the loans not repaid – is knocked 30 years down the road to the term of the loan. The Lords Committee eventually extracted from Sam Gyimah, the relevant minister, the admission that the amount of debt in nominal terms for which taxpayers will be liable by 2049-50 will be £1.212 trillion, or, to spell it out in frightening numerals, £1,212,000,000,000. That is well over half this country’s entire current annual GDP.

I should add that this committee includes two former chancellors of the exchequer, one former cabinet secretary and one former boss of the Treasury, so these are not the conclusions of lordly amateurs or hostile partisans. They are quite shocked by their own findings.

In the circumstances, I would say that “flattering the deficit” is quite a restrained way of describing what the chancellor of the day – one George Osborne – was up to. History will be less flattering.

It is not a new thing, thank goodness, that people of different faiths serve under British colours. It is what you would expect of a country which has served all over the world for more than 200 years. The Gurkhas are only the most famous example.

Sikhs were particularly in demand in the ranks of the British Indian army because they were considered a “martial race”. At the outbreak of the First World War, 20 per cent of the Indian Army was Sikh, though Sikhs made up only one per cent of the Indian population.

So it was cheering to see such a proud recruit as the Sikh Guardsman Charanpreet Singh Lall take part in Trooping the Colour on Saturday. Interviewed beforehand, he said all the right things about encouraging others to follow him and join up.

Guardsman Lall also looked very smart. But one should not pretend that his turban amid all those bearskins looked right on the parade. As the word “uniform” suggests, the whole point of such a show is uniformity. Uniformity was lost. What’s the answer? Perhaps an entire line of Sikh Guardsmen, all in turbans, at the front, or the back of the others.