My speech to the Oxford Union last night.

I was invited as part of Oxford Inspires to speak as part of the debate at the Oxford Union on the state of Higher Education and Entrepreneurship. The motion was: “This house believes that entrepreneurship is hindered, not helped, by the higher education system”. As a product of the higher education system (BSc in Chemistry from University of Surrey, PhD in Structural and Computational Immunology from Birckbeck College) you may think it odd that I spoke for the proposition. However I feel strongly that student debt in the whole education system is something that will have terrible consequences on entreprenership let alone lives. The focus of many universities on lectures over tutorials, on teaching (passive for students) rather than learning (active for students) is I think disastrous. Furthermore, for me, the point of going to university was to learn but more to find myself. I fear so many students going now will be working so hard (in part-time jobs to make ends meet) and studying so hard that they’ll miss out on the life expanding parts of university that made my experience so rich. My speech (almost as delivered) is below.

I’m very sad that the points I raised about debt and the wider education system weren’t addressed by the opposition. The Russel Group and Ivy league see the world as themselves, it’s not so much pulling the ladder up as not knowing there is a ladder, that they are at the top and that people are below. They are fiddling while the rest of education begins to burn around them. I hope it’s not too late to stop the fires, but I fear the vastly profitable (currently) education system is too comfortable for many at the top to see the problem before it’s too late.

“Mister president, I would like to thank the right honourable gentleman for his points, however I feel he has not fully understood our problems with the status quo. I do still strongly feel that higher education is hinders entrepreneurs but I’m going to claim the prerogative of an invited speaker to behave like so many of the politicians who honed their craft in this hallowed space, and reframe the question to fit my world view of it. After all, that is what being an entrepreneur is in my opinion. It is about seeing a space where the world could to bend in a slightly different way to create a sustainable business and hopefully, although not always, improve the lives of many.

Oxford, Stanford, Harvard and the other places that the founders he mentioned earlier studied are exceptions to the majority of educational establishments of the world and the majority of students in higher education are not so privileged.

I think that the current state of all education, primary, secondary and higher is poorer now for generating entrepreneurs and in fact I would add that I think it can be poor for generating employees useful to businesses, working in fast paced areas or ones where creativity is required.

We’re seeing paradigms change as fast as at the start of the railway and the telephony revolutions and in both of those there was more work based education and training, apprenticeships, and far fewer degrees.

I’m not an elitist about education, merely someone who feels that we have prized getting a large number of people to hold degrees over the usefullness to them and society of attaining them.

In the early days of the Government Digital Service we pointed Francis Maude to the fact that the iPhone didn’t exist when the procurement exercises for some services about to go live had occurred. Government was commissioning digital services at the same timescale by which it procures aircraft carriers. I put it to you that curriculums and courses are constructed over glacially similar timescales, and are often inappropriate by the time they arrive, with only the sticky plasters of the “now” attached to them if students are lucky.

Current perceived wisdom is out of date the moment it is learnt and is less useful the moment after. Students would be better to learn principles, methods of critical thought and to learn how to research and create.

However this is not the current paradigm as we tend to rank and rate education only on the simplest and bluntest of measures, the most common of which are employment and salary at point of employment. We have turned education into a factory for producing employees, the only troubles with this strategy being that the jobs in general don’t exist and the ones we’ve trained people for no longer do.

In the 80s and 90s in the UK we concomitantly stigmatized blue collar jobs and evangelised the service economy with the result that both were outsourced. We reshaped further education to be democratised with the result that many more are taught at the same time with the focus on teaching rather than learning.

This focus on teaching, a passive act for students along with the advent of fees have resulted in the treatment of students as clients and customers, with the students themselves now having feelings of expectation of being provided with facts which would lead to degrees which would lead to jobs. The end goal of education is of workers rather than educated people and the increased student debt is hitting the aspirations of many to attend university simply for the experience of being there, of discovering themselves, of educating themselves.

You may think it odd that someone with 2 degrees is speaking against education.

I’m old enough and lucky enough to be of a generation who received a grant for both first and second degrees. During my first degree I learnt most during my year long industrial placement at a pharmaceutical firm, mostly about networking, self reliance, being part of a team and how to research and document work. Most entrepreneurs keep a notebook with them to sketch ideas and thoughts, for me this started in my industrial year and furthered in my research degree.

I learnt most through extracurricular activities around commercial running of entertainment in the student union in which we made a profit. This involved learning on the job about profit and loss, of contracts, insurance, contingency. For me this complete experience of university education was important, far more so than the transient facts learnt, but the current debt levels of students mean many are often far too busy working and studying to enjoy this and benefit.

Coming to debt, I fear this will impact students after they have left and when they are looking to become entrepreneurs. From Matthew’s talk yesterday he outlined two pathways through which would be entrepreneurs could build a financial cushion to begin their ventures. One was through working with an existing tech firm, the other through working with a consultancy. In both these cases the building of a cushion would be eroded through repayment of student debt which kicks in when certain wage thresholds are met. Many may be so saddled with debt they never wish to take on or be able to take on the additional debt of starting their own business. If they do, they’ll have to give up more equity earlier, leading to lower personal exits and less individual angel investing from the very people needed to fulfil that role.

I love higher education, it has given me great skills, but more importantly an environment to discover those skills for myself. We use blunt metrics as they are easy to measure and market on. To use these to drive the content and nature of degrees is reckless. In my opinion this and rising student debt will hurt entrepreneurs graduating in the years to come.”