Unconditional offers give us cut-price students

One in three university leavers is in a job that doesn’t require a degree

Warning: this column contains flashing imagery, sparks of fury and thermonuclear rage.

So if you are a snowflake student, please be aware this is not, I repeat, not, a safe space. Especially if you have received an unconditional offer from a Portakabin university to do a BA in Instagram studies.

Did I say unconditional? I rather think I meant unconscionable. The proliferation of these offers has reached the point where it is making a mockery of tertiary level education and fools out of the gullible teenagers who have been lured to study at third-rate institutions by the promise of a guaranteed place.

A new report from the university admissions body, Ucas, has shown that a third of all applicants now receive unconditional offers for their chosen subjects, up from 3,000 in 2013 to almost 120,000 this year.

A process known as “conditional unconditional” offers has also been introduced, where school pupils who have been made an offer from a given university based on their predicted results can effectively upgrade to an unconditional offer by putting that particular university down as their first choice.

And so, instead of earning their places in the exam hall, a generation of teenagers is being ushered into the lecture theatre, regardless of their A-level achievements. Unconditional offers that were once, quite rightly, the preserve of the genuinely brilliant, the unconventionally creative and certifiable geniuses are now being handed out like fliers for happy hour. Our universities no longer focus on the brightest and best, but on securing bums on seats and the money they bring. This is about economic viability, not academic excellence, and is entirely altering the ethos of university education. Not least because students cushioned by unconditional offers tend to do less well in their A-levels. Why strive when opportunity has been handed on a plate?

When students are treated like valuable paying customers, is it any wonder they feel so entitled? When universities rely on student evaluations – effectively reviews – is it really a surprise that they kowtow to their politically correct diktats, their no-platforming of controversial speakers, their removal of statues?

“Student satisfaction,” gauged by the National Student Survey has become one of the important factors by which university teaching quality is measured, something that caused great controversy at the time.

Last year, Baroness Wolf, a professor at King’s College London, warned that an emphasis on student satisfaction was holding universities to ransom and making them increasingly nervous about standing up for freedom of speech. “The student satisfaction measure is fantastically dangerous,” she said. “The way to make students happy is not asking them to do any work and giving them a high grade.

“This will reduce standards and undermine quality. I just think this is totally mad and destructive of everything universities stand for.”

Incidentally I did not get an unconditional offer to study at university, although I was one of the last fortunate cohort to receive a free place, a maintenance grant and a travel allowance. But times have changed and I broadly support the idea that students should contribute towards their own higher education. I’m not sure I could have afforded the £9,000 tuition fees but the amount students now have to pay is, in some respects, a side issue.

The real damage has been done by lifting the cap on student numbers, funnelling ever more 18-year-olds – incidentally a declining demographic – into universities and leading them to fight, ever more desperately, to meet their targets. Market forces were supposed to improve universities by creating competition and allowing them to set their fees within a set limit; logic would dictate that these institutions would invest in better teaching and student facilities.

But, in reality, the fees are largely the same and the real competition lies in scrambling for students by offering everything from free ipads, discounted accommodation and, of course, dispensing with entry requirements.

It is a sorry mess but all Education Secretary Damian Hinds can say is that this trend is “disturbing”. That’s not really any sort of response, is it?

Needless to say everyone blames Tony “education, education, education” Blair, who pledged to double the number of students going to universities from 2per cent to 50per cent.

That came to pass, but so too did falling standards in primary and secondary education as grades were gerrymandered to make failure look like success. New rigour (in fact, too much but that discussion is for another day) has now been injected into the school curriculum.

Ask any employer and they will bemoan the calibre of graduate we are churning out. Last year we reported in these pages that a third of companies were unhappy with graduates’ attitude to work, blaming their lack of resilience and self-management skills. Graduates were also described as lacking cultural awareness, while 40 per cent said that new graduates lacked customer awareness.

Meanwhile, here in 2018, one in three university leavers is in a job that doesn’t require a degree. So there we have it. Our students are overqualified – a university lecturer friend admits that students have to “try very hard not to get a 2:1” – yet underskilled.

The fixation on degrees goes hand-in-hand with enduring shortage of workers in technical occupations. Who could have guessed? Apart from anyone casting an eye over Britain’s historically low productivity levels. It never ceases to amaze me that successive governments seem incapable of joined-up thinking; the whole further and higher education sector urgently needs a cross-party, coherent vision and root-and-branch reform.

Young people are the future. Their future depends on education; the right education for them and for the economy. Instead of throwing unconditional offers at them like confetti, school leavers need unbiased advice and alternative pathways to success. That 21-year-olds are emerging from three years’ higher education to moan about making lattes for a living isn’t snowflakey. It’s a national disgrace.