Distorted focus on academic degrees has damaged the economy and our students

In 1960, one school leaver in 50 went to university. In 2000, it was one in three. Now it’s one in two. Might that proportion be too high? After all, not everyone is suited to a university education. The 50 per cent figure is not a product of the market. It was decreed by Tony Blair, rather as Marxist governments used to decree factory production targets. To meet that target, we subsidise universities to the tune of £24billion a year.

There are a number of ways to gauge whether we have too many students. First, are graduates benefiting? A three-year degree is an expensive undertaking. Are they generally able to recoup the cost over their working lives? Second, are employers benefiting? Is there demand for more philosophy graduates, or are the vacancies for people with technical skills? Third, is the economy as a whole benefiting? Might we be taking people out of productive work at precisely the moment in their lives when they are at their most inventive? Fourth, is our culture benefiting? Is Britain’s public discourse improved by having more people with sociology degrees?

Each of those tests suggests an oversupply. Many undergraduates are being ripped off. They emerge with unmarketable skills, unable to pay back their loans. A third of them end up in non-graduate jobs.

In a thoughtful speech this week, the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, made an almost incontestable case that too many people were going to university and too few to Further Education Colleges. “Five years after completion, the average Higher Technical Apprentice earns more than the average graduate,” he told his audience. “I’d like to pause on that point just for a moment. A work-based, technical apprenticeship, lasting around two years, gives greater returns than the typical three-year bachelor’s degree.”

That should settle it. Government interventions are distorting the market in a way that harms both students and the wider economy. We need electrical engineers, people with digital skills, workers qualified in fields like 3D printing. We are instead encouraging youngsters to take three years out and run up significant costs only to emerge less employable at the end of it.

The current culture wars are largely a product of this imbalance. Wokery was born on campus. It has spilled into the wider population because of the number of underemployed graduates.

The best of our universities are world-beating. We are, on most measures, second only to the United States; higher education has been a hugely successful export industry for Britain. We should back our research institutions to the hilt.

Nor is excellence confined to the top names. If you are interested in marine biology, you may well be better off at Southampton than at one of the Russell Group universities. If product design is your thing, Northumberland is arguably the best place in the world. We need to preserve those strengths while, frankly, allowing more purposeless degrees to fall away. Universities should gear themselves towards local and regional job markets rather than feeling that they are somehow honour bound to offer lots of Masters courses.

Why, when vocational qualifications can pay better than university degrees, are we not seeing a natural pivot back to technical and workplace skills? Why do so many of the institutions that became universities in the early 1990s insist on offering degrees in humanities rather than HND and HNC qualifications in mechanical engineering, graphic design, accountancy and the like?

It comes down to snobbery. By setting university target numbers, successive governments have encouraged the idea that academic degrees are intrinsically better than more obviously serviceable skills. That now seems set to change. Not before time.