“Shit Your Dead Nan Used To Wang On About”¹
Spot the Man desperately trying to hang on to the core support
After the utterly trouble free and hugely well received policy launch of National Service over the weekend, Sunak decided to drop his latest policy turd this morning, promising to “replace ‘low-quality’ university degrees with apprenticeships”.
Is there anyone left now not thinking he’s trying to prop up his core vote in the walking dead, “never did me any harm” segment of the electorate? No: me neither.
For a start, what is he even defining as a “low quality” degree anyway? A man who went from Winchester to Oxford to do the historical equivalent of posh-boy finishing school for the chinless is probably not in a position to be lambasting others for a choice of degree when his is essentially jazzed up General Studies.
Defining the value of a degree is difficult, because it's all quite personal to the person doing it. Even in the wider social sense, it’s not straightforward to measure value in the way that Captain Spreadsheet, who so enjoys cosplaying in his half-mast trousers, oversize boots and hi-vis, would find agreeable. But here’s an article that tries to crunch some of the numbers in the way Sunak seems to think he’d like. Here’s a clue: ironically, he might not find this comfortable reading.
I completed my (bachelors) degree just over thirty years ago, and the landscape was less complex then. There are now even more subjects, and more specialisations within them too. The niches that people find themselves in now might not even appear to have an immediate return, but ten years or more down the line, who can even tell? The “value” of a degree is not just monetary, or even strictly economic, and it’s not always immediate. But when you look at the way Sunak presents it all, it seems to be about, “future earning potential”, and “job progression”. There are plenty of jobs where these things don’t really figure high in people’s minds, other than having enough to broadly pay the bills and not have to worry about making ends meet; they’re more interested in doing useful, and interesting things.
The sad part is that buried deep in there is an idea that isn’t entirely terrible. Apprenticeships are no bad thing as a route to professional status, and would be even better if they were valued in our society more than they are. But they aren’t. Why is that? Is it because significant parts of the government front bench (and in Parliament generally) went to the same schools, and the same universities to do the same degrees, and join the same dull societies, to go out and do the same jobs, before settling on the political career? The sense of that route being superior, and others subordinate to it, is deeply internalised in that mindset. Like the National Service idea: can you see Sunak’s two daughters doing an apprenticeship if the time came? Ask yourself why you came up with the answer you did.
University education offers more than just the subject specifics. Some of the good things that emerge, like softer transferrable skills, and critical thinking, are things much less prevalent in the way apprenticeships are being sold. Apprenticeships are designed to teach skills. The prime motivator is to teach how, but not necessarily why. The people who come out the other side will have skills, but are they going to be spending any time questioning the systems they are trained to work within? They are programmes designed for the “little people” to do the jobs that keep society running, but who won’t stop to ask if it should run that way at all. That part will the be the job of their (so-called) betters.
Because the cost of a degree is getting ramped up, the luxury of a nice degree in the arts and humanities, where you can sit around in a seminar group² and argue the toss about how the world should be is increasingly being sealed off from more people. All you have to do is look at the financial pressures on a poorly funded HE sector, with closures and cutbacks going on in departments all over the UK. I contrast this with my youth, where I was actually paid to do a degree (via a grant), like many of my contemporaries, paired with government block funding of tuition. The vast majority of us didn’t take the piss. We worked, took our studies seriously³, then finished, and understood that if we were fortunate, we’d get reasonably decently paid jobs, which then meant we could do radical things like afford to buy/rent a place to live, and still have a little more left to do some actual living. We would be able to repay what it had cost via the tax we’d be liable for, as well as paying forward for the next generation to do what we had. I did that part gladly, but that part of the social contract got ripped up, good and proper. The Deering push towards 50% in HE was kind of arbitrary, but it came from a place of wanting a happier, more skilled, more reasoned populace. But it also spooked governments who realised this paying for it isn’t cheap, so they decided to shift the balance from social good to framing an education as a “personal investment”, especially after 2010.
It has also placed too much store on a University sector being asked to move into a vocational space, after the 1992 reforms that reshaped the polytechnics as “new” universities. And the one thing a university isn’t (in spite of what some employers seem to believe), is a training provider. If employers want to train people, train them. Universities will provide people with the readiness and capacity to be trained at high level: that’s their part of the deal.
Lots of this situation feels a bit like an echo of the lie behind the post-war arrangement of grammar, technical, and secondary schools all being equal branches, before the comprehensive system put an end to what was not really equivalence at all. In the end though, the one thing we do know in our current system, though no one wants to say it out loud, is that not all universities are the same. To go back to what I said earlier: look at the government front bench.
What do we have now, after the tuition fee increases in the early part of the century, then the following decade’s removal of student caps, and the evisceration of government funding? Well, it’s not pretty. You have a sector that’s been browbeaten by the constant mantra that universites are all about “employment prospects”, and not about producing better citizens. The funding situation is bad even for those at the top end of the Russell Group, and much worse for the other parts of the sector. It gets worse for institutions with significant numbers of international students⁴. For years, successive governments have tinkered with education and training systems, and where we find ourselves now is in a much worse place. Sunak’s annoucement is designed to be a superficial bone to throw to his shrinking base, but any considered analysis suggests that he doesn’t have any real motivation to improve anything, or maintain the health of either University education, or apprenticeships.
Update: (2024–05–29 16:30) — added a link to a good WonkHE article that digs into the numbers a bit deeper.
¹A reference to this:
² It’s slightly facetious, but in all sincerity doing that stuff is no bad thing. Why shouldn’t you be asking why the world has to be a certain way if you’re in your teens, and or early twenties, and why shouldn’t those voices include kids from all parts of society, not just the well-heeled and comfortable? God, you may even disagree with each other about things!
³ And yes, had some fun as well.
⁴ We’ve seen, in the last few days, stories about Nigerian students in particular, where there has been a major currency devaluation, resulting in some students facing removal from courses and refusal to graduate because of resulting financial hardship.
