It was a long time before I understood the phrase “he’ll piss on you and tell you it’s raining” – really understood it, at a gut level. It took 13 years and 10 weeks, to be precise, of successive feckless Conservatives messing everything up and telling us how messed up everything is.
So, having introduced the 2012 tuition-fee regime that leaves students with a life-changing amount of debt, and demoralised and underfunded the sector so that the poverty-paid lecturers at its backbone are always on strike, the party has declared war on “rip‑off” degrees. Young people, Rishi Sunak contends, are being sold a false dream, without the prospect of a decent job at the end of it. Well, yes, Rishi, that is called “life in the UK”.
The concept of the “Mickey Mouse” degree has been long cherished on the right as a way to flag their anti-intellectualism, whereby all learning is useless unless it’s physics, while blowing a class-war dog whistle, whereby all universities except Oxbridge are front operations for the loony left. On the evidence of the past five prime ministers, we have bottomed out the usefulness of an Oxford education to the business of running a country and can mark it as zero. But, unfortunately, that doesn’t disprove the fact that students are being sold a false dream.
I got a lightning-quick lesson in that when I interviewed a young guy in Liverpool about a decade ago. It was a weekday lunchtime, back when nobody worked from home, and pre-Brexit, before the “red wall” and the “left behind” had been invented. There was a sharp sense of austerity-driven decline, but it didn’t yet have a name. Wherever you went, whatever the topic of the vox pop, the real question was: “What are you doing on this deserted high street on a Tuesday?”
This guy’s answer was completely reasonable – and a complete disaster. He had started a business studies course the year before. About halfway through his second term, he couldn’t escape the logic of what he had already learned. The value proposition made no sense: he was paying nine grand a year for lectures that he could get for free online and reading lists that, with a bit of planning and ordering, he could plough through in any library. The only concrete thing he was paying for was the socialising, which was the very thing that ate into his study time.
The employment prospects offered by a degree were opaque, given that he wanted to be an entrepreneur, a world in which the cardinal rule is “don’t waste time”. The tuition fees were only a fraction of the story; the degree was in the south-east, so his rent was crippling.
Anyway, he had dropped out and come home to his parents, only to discover what the business studies modules had not yet mentioned: that a huge part of tertiary education is the invisible value of being carried along by its slipstream. It might not carry you anywhere lucrative, but to be outside it, lumbered with that initial hit of debt, carries you nowhere. It’s the paradox of tuition fees: by monetising the process, the value attached to it became impossible to count. Degrees are sold as qualifications that will boost your earnings, but studying for one is more like a process of social stratification, to mark you out as the kind of person with that kind of degree, who will go on to that kind of life.
So yes, it is a swiz, but not because education isn’t valuable. It’s because it’s sold as something that it isn’t: a working, comprehensible equation, where you pay X pounds for Y knowledge and emerge into the world with that much knowledge to sell and a bustling market full of people who will buy it from you. By the time you realise that is not how it works, it’s too late to step off.
The best way to stop selling false dreams is to axe tuition fees and pool the risk of an unknowable future with that arcane instrument we call “general taxation”.
• This article was amended on 18 July 2023 to clarify that the writer was referring to the tuition-fee regime introduced by the coalition government in 2012.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
