At last, the university tanker is being turned

The consequences of the assumption that a degree is the only route to success have become unbearable

Progressive people are, rightly, keen to challenge the way that decision-makers unconsciously promote their own kind. But they have been blind to the way those decisionmakers have spent 30 years promoting just one kind of post-school education, namely the classical model of full-time, academic-generalist three-year university degrees aimed at 18-year-olds.

Mass higher education was supposed to mean higher productivity and a more tolerant, socially mobile society. Teachers favoured it and parents saw it as the route to success for their children. It was administratively simple, with universities providing courses students wanted, underpinned by a generous state loan system. But now we have reached Tony Blair’s goal of half of school leavers at university, the unintended consequences of this model have become unbearable. The Government is today announcing sanctions for poor-quality university courses, a rejigging of student finance so more will repay their loans, and a renewed focus on non-academic technical and digital courses.

The great rebalancing of post-school education and training is under way. And not a moment too soon. We need our great research universities to flourish and must continue to attract foreign students. But from underproviding higher education in the 1980s we are now oversupplying it and the consequences are economic, social and political.

The labour market is flooded with academic-generalists when their professional-managerial jobs have, with some exceptions, stopped growing. One third of graduates are not in graduate jobs 10 years after graduating while we have a chronic shortage of “missing middle” technical skills, and a recruitment crisis in care.

Employers have noticed that the signalling system that meant someone with a degree had a high level of general academic ability no longer applies. There is a switch to hiring school leavers supported by the Government’s lifetime skills guarantee and other measures. Parents, too, no longer assume that a degree is a ticket to security according to recent polls (though many young people still like the idea of three years away from home subsidised by taxpayers).

Socially, some people from disadvantaged backgrounds have risen up via university into the elite, but that happened before mass higher education, too. As recently as the late 1980s, when only 20 per cent of school leavers went to university, most professionals didn’t have degrees and completed on-the-job training combined with part-time study.

Social mobility academics say that mass higher education has, if anything, slowed mobility because universities are monopolised by the middle and upper-middle classes. And because of our mainly residential system, many of the brightest kids from declining areas leave home and never return. This graduate/non-graduate schism contributed to Brexit.

What has been called “elite overproduction” produces two sets of losers: those who didn’t go to university in the first place who see all the prizes reserved for graduates, and the bottom part of the graduate class who aren’t getting the high-status jobs they expected. Educated people tend to be more extreme and more ideological in their thinking: mass higher education plus social media equals a more intolerant political culture.

Turning the tanker will take time. Record numbers are still heading to university and government sanctions will be easy to avoid. But many of the newer universities are likely to revert to something like their old polytechnic status, offering vocational and technical courses (as they already do) on a more flexible basis, to a broader age cohort of students. I would also like to see a sharp reduction in the 40 per cent of jobs that are advertised as graduate-only, which artificially sustains many courses. There are plenty of capable people who didn’t do well at exams and who, in recent years, have found themselves squeezed out of professional careers in which they could have flourished.

Going to university was always partly a copy-cat status game. Rising pay levels for skilled trades and technical occupations are now shifting ideas of status, as is the rise of what James Kirkup has called the posh apprenticeship. When, for all but the most academically inclined, not going to university is cooler than going, rebalancing will be unstoppable.