How to stop our greedy universities ripping off students AND the taxpayer

BRITAIN’S universities have certainly been making the headlines of late — for all the wrong reasons. We’ve discovered that the vicechancellors who run them routinely pocket salaries of nearly half a million pounds a year, and top them up with five-figure fees charged to pension funds that are already in deficit.

We have watched a gang of far-Left academics at Oxford University trying to gag a colleague, Professor Nigel Biggar, for expressing unfashionable views about the British Empire.

As institutions of learning that depend on the generosity of the British taxpayer for their livelihoods, you might expect our universities to be frugal custodians of public money and doughty defenders of intellectual freedom.

Yet in recent months we have been subject to a grotesque parade of greed and political correctness.

Grim though they are, however, I fear that these scandals are a distraction, disguising a more fundamental flaw in our overall approach to higher education — one that is tantamount to governmentsponsored mis-selling.

Successive governments have conspired with universities to expand the number of young people going to university to take degrees.

John Major started the trend in 1992, when he allowed polytechnics to become universities.

Tony Blair took it further by adopting an explicit target that 50 per cent of people should go to university. The policy of unbridled expansion has now reached its logical conclusion.

There is no cap on student numbers: universities can charge as many people as they like up to £9,250 a year in tuition fees for a bachelor’s degree. Students can also take out loans to fund their fees and maintenance for the duration of their course (usually three years).

As a result, we now see nearly 50 per cent of school-leavers choosing to go to university.

Grotesque

That’s all very well, and many would say it’s a sign that higher education is being opened up to teenagers from all backgrounds. But no one has stopped to ask if these courses will bring students benefits that outweigh their cost.

Ministers reassure themselves that, in aggregate, graduates earn more than non-graduates, and this is clearly true.

But for many of them the advantage is slight, and not enough to justify the enormous cost of a degree.

Most undergraduates starting university this year will rack up debts of £50,000 or more. Yet the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that three- quarters of them will never earn enough over the 30 years following graduation to repay their loans in full. We need to ask ourselves why.

Recent research by Professor Alison Wolf of King’s College London, and Peter Sellen of the Education Policy Institute, has shown there is a significant rise in the number of people over- qualified for the work they’re doing.

One of the reasons is that plenty of graduates are doing jobs — and earning salaries — that simply do not reflect the huge investment they made in a degree.

This is especially true for graduates from less good universities, and those who have taken creative arts courses.

For the graduates themselves, this is obviously a disappointment — but for taxpayers it’s a disaster, because we’re the ones who are going to have to fork out for student loans which are not repaid. At this point, some might conclude that too many people are going to university and we should shrink student numbers and return to a time when most people left school and went straight into a job or an apprenticeship. But that would also be a mistake.

In the coming decades, whether we like it or not, we’ll find ourselves in a world where robots do many of the jobs currently undertaken by human beings. And that means more people will need to acquire advanced skills if they are to remain employable and financially independent.

The problem is not that too many young people are going to university. It’s that too many of them are going to the wrong

kind of university, for too long, and are doing the wrong kind of course.

Disaster

In most advanced countries, specialist institutions offer two- year technical programmes as an alternative to a bachelor’s degree. The U.S. has community colleges. Germany has technical universities. The Netherlands has polytechnics.

In all of them — and in France, Finland and many other countries — less academic school- leavers are offered a type of higher education that better suits their abilities and ambitions.

This is what we need to do in this country. Instead of presenting young people with a stark choice between doing a three-year degree or getting a job, we should create a third option.

The Government should work with employers to develop new technical diplomas that are really relevant to the modern workplace.

They should build on the new T-levels — focusing on technical skills rather than academic disciplines — that the Government is developing for 16 to 19year- olds, and reflect on specialisms such as construction, engineering, manufacturing, childcare and education.

They should be two- year courses and cost £ 4,000 to £6,000 a year. Universities with lower academic standards — many of them former polytechnics — should be offered enhanced teaching grants if they convert themselves into technical universities and specialise in teaching technical diplomas.

There should be no bar to anyone from any background pursuing technical qualifications. For example, teenagers from less well- off families should be offered maintenance grants to make up for the loss of earnings during two years of further study.

And anyone taking a technical diploma shouldn’t realistically have to take out a student loan of more than £20,000 in total.

Everyone would benefit. Less academic students would be able to gain the kind of technical qualifications employers really value, far more than a degree in media studies or the like.

They would also be able to start earning a salary a year earlier. If, later in life, they decided they’d benefit from a bachelor’s degree, they would just need to go back to university for one more year to convert their technical diploma into a full-blown BSc.

Universities would be able to expand the overall number of school- leavers going into higher education by persuading some of those who are currently put off by the cost and duration of a full degree to enrol in a cheaper two-year technical diploma course instead.

Employers would be able to draw on a better- educated workforce, with a deeper pool of the specialist technical skills they’re constantly telling us are in short supply.

They would no longer need to look abroad for the skilled craftsmen and technicians which our education system currently fails to produce in sufficient numbers.

And the taxpayer would no longer have to pick up the tab for the unpaid portion of the loans of so many students.

Boost

As we leave the European Union and seek to strike new trade deals around the world, Britain needs to get match fit.

It’s crucial that we improve our skills and increase our productivity, particularly in manufacturing, so that we can capitalise on the tremendous boost given to our exporters by the fall in the pound since the Brexit vote.

That’s why we can no longer afford a snobbish education system that tells young people a bachelor’s degree is the only route to a successful career.

We can no longer afford to let universities fill their boots with full- price tuition fees, and ignore the consequences for the taxpayer.

The Government has a responsibility to help more young people get the benefit of higher education without racking up huge debts they might never repay. This is surely the perfect way to do it.