You said it, Geoff: university is an expensive waste of time
Three decades after I left university, I can’t remember much of what I studied. The books I do remember reading have not come in handy since. At no point in my working life have I needed an in-depth knowledge of Terry Eagleton’s guide to literary theory. Yet, until a few years ago, if you had asked me the question in the title of Geoff Norcott’s BBC Two documentary,
Is University Really Worth It?,
I would have said a resounding yes.
University taught me independence. I learned to delve deeply into a subject, and to manage my own time. And it allowed me to have three years of fun before knuckling down to a lifetime of responsibilities.
Crucially, I also did this in an age of student grants and cheap accommodation. But now? Tuition fees are more than £9,000 a year. The average student rent has gone up by nearly 15 per cent in the last two years. So many people now take degrees – thanks to the New Labour ideal – that some of them aren’t worth the paper on which they’re written. According to one statistic cited here, 69 per cent of graduates think their time at university wasn’t worth it.
Norcott, a comedian and author, was once a teacher who bought into Tony Blair’s mantra and encouraged his
pupils into higher education. For this documentary, he met up with some of them and heard uncomfortable truths about how they had felt pushed into following the university path. Travelling the country to meet today’s cohort, Norcott met a medical student struggling on a food budget of £10 per week, and a Sheffield University society that meets to feed the ducks – a way of socialising without spending money on booze. Norcott approached everyone with interest rather than mockery. The BBC should use him a lot more: what could have been a dry subject was approached in an entertaining and accessible way. He is funny without trying too hard, and serious without being po-faced.
Elsewhere, Norcott met a politician talking up the benefits of universities for the local economy, a company of young plumbers who are doing well for themselves (no need for a degree there) and an AI robot that could in a few years’ time be doing the jobs that undergraduates hope to get. There was a bit too much going on here for a one-hour documentary, but it was difficult to argue with Norcott’s conclusions: that the cost of university has gone up while the value has gone down, and that teenagers need to think through the pros and cons more clearly than the older generations ever did.
The story told in Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax
(Channel 4) is utterly mad. When two children claimed that they were being sexually abused by a satanic cult at their local church and involving staff and parents at their school – including outlandish details of drinking blood and dancing with the skulls of dead babies – police swiftly concluded that the account was false. The children were taken into care, and said that they had been coached by their mother’s boyfriend into making the allegations.
That should have been the end of it: a sad episode in the lives of one unhappy family. Instead, the children’s mother, Ella Draper, and her boyfriend, Abraham Christie, took the allegations online and they went viral.
Conspiracy theorists from across the world became convinced that the parents at this London primary school were satanic paedophiles. One creep with a Youtube channel, Rupert Quaintance, flew from his home in the US to stand outside the gates of the school, having previously announced that he was going to extract blood samples from the children to ascertain if they were being drugged.
The story was told through the testimony of four mothers, with their words lip-synched by actors. At first, this felt odd, particularly as one of them staged welcoming the filmmaker into her “home”. It also begged the question of where the fathers were, something that was never raised.
The mothers fought back, collecting almost 750,000 examples of digital harassment and pushing for prosecutions (where the police were in this, I have no idea). The film-makers spoke to two of the conspiracy theorists: Quaintance, who was jailed for harassment; and unqualified “legal adviser” Sabine Mcneill, who was sentenced to nine years for stalking.
There is a wider issue here: the alarming willingness to believe in conspiracy theories, and the speed with which lies can spread online. As one mother says: “What does it say about us as a society that truth doesn’t seem to matter? I find that really terrifying.”
Is University Really Worth It? ★★★★ Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax ★★★★