What is university for? Is it there to enrich our lives – to round us out as human beings – or is it there, primarily, to get us better jobs? The consensus on this seems to swing rather wildly depending on precisely which group of potential students we happen to be talking about.
News that a traditional humanities subject is on the decline, for example, tends to prompt us towards the first sort of answer. University is not merely about acquiring skills for work, we say, it is about setting you up for a fuller sort of life. The humanities are spiritually and morally improving – three years spent reading and thinking are valuable in themselves.
The group commentators often seem to be thinking about here are their younger selves and their contemporaries. Here, for example, is the Telegraph’s Simon Heffer in defence of the humanities. “When I was an undergraduate, medical students had to spend a year of their first degree studying an arts subject, to broaden them out,” he writes. This was a better system. Barristers, too, should be “properly educated” by first taking a degree in a subject other than law. Journalists shouldn’t only study journalism. “It is invaluable to understand the world beyond one’s vocation.”
A degree is not just about employment, Heffer says. “This interpretation of education as utility … famously mocked by Dickens,” he says, “… has gathered stunning momentum in this century.”
But when the futures of a different set of young people are in question, the tone often becomes a shade more pragmatic. The prospect that university doors are to be widened – accepting many school leavers who otherwise wouldn’t go – seems to prompt a different sort of value calculation. Will a degree really help the future earnings of these students, we ask? Wouldn’t, say, a vocational training be a better idea, for them? (For some reason, whether or not apprentices need to be spiritually enriched is never discussed.)
Here’s Heffer again in a different article – I select him because his views are typical – bemoaning an “explosion” in university courses. “Our nurses and police were well trained before someone decided the former needed degrees and the latter would benefit from them,” he writes. “Many civil service positions could be filled by people learning on the job.”
The trouble with degrees, he says, is that they might equip you with an education surplus to your needs. “New institutions,” he writes, “with new courses … produce graduates many of whom will never find careers commensurate with what they had been led to believe were their intellectual achievements.”
Well, which is it? There’s an obvious failure of consistency here. If we want to claim that the value of a university education is to elevate human lives and nourish the soul, regardless of any job market benefit – we need to explain why everyone shouldn’t go. What is the justification of allowing only some young people to “broaden themselves out” on the taxpayer’s dime?
If, on the other hand, the purpose of university is primarily to boost your economic potential, then shouldn’t we apply this cost-benefit analysis to every prospective student, not just certain groups? A recent report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies finds, for example, that net lifetime returns for women studying languages is close to zero. If we are setting limits on who should go to university, shouldn’t we start with barring women from French degrees?
Of course, no one is suggesting that, because the unstated factor in all of this is class. Inevitably, the sorts of students to whom we tend to apply a financial – rather than spiritual – calculation when it comes to higher education tend to be those from poorer backgrounds. It is those who are the first in their family to study at university, or who are from deprived areas, who tend most often to end up studying the sorts of courses that are branded “low value” or “Mickey Mouse” by ministers. (This is true even though a recent study found English Literature among the degrees least likely to boost your income).
Was it this group of young people who were uppermost in Rishi Sunak’s mind when he attacked the “false dream of going to university” in the Telegraph last week? In the article, he vowed to crack down on degrees which did not “deliver good outcomes” (measured in terms of earning potential). He would restrict student numbers and promote vocational courses instead. But as critics have pointed out, family background is still a key influence on how much you end up earning, so this will inevitably target the kinds of courses studied by poorer students.
In the same article, Sunak claimed there needed to be a change of “mindset”. In some young people, an aspiration to go to university should be nudged and redirected towards an aspiration to do an apprenticeship. But whose mindset is the prime minister thinking of here, exactly?
A poll carried out by More in Common, a thinktank, finds that a group it dubs “Established Liberals” – which the UK director Luke Tryl says represents wealthier blue wall constituencies – are among the most likely to think too many young people go to university. But “Loyal Nationals” – the more working-class red wall voters, according to Tryl – are among the most likely to say too few are able to do so.
Is Sunak telling students and parents from disadvantaged backgrounds to think smaller? The aspiration to go to university and to send our children there is widely held. Apprenticeships are valuable things, but the highest earning jobs remain the purview of university graduates. If courses are failing to get people on the job ladder, they should be improved. But a job is not the only benefit a university education can provide. Could it be that these young people – even those from disadvantaged backgrounds – want to expand their minds too?
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
