What’s the point of a university education? It is an old question, and it highlights a divide on the right. Broadly, economic liberals argue it prepares talented individuals for their professional life, and boosts national growth via research and innovation. Cultural conservatives conversely argue it is for the transmission of ‘civilisation’ – giving bright young thing the chance to enjoy the best that has been thought and done. The reality is a mixture, even if in practice it becomes three years of nightclubs, kebabs, and cocking about.
I considered it often at university. Not out of neurotic self-reflection, but because one of my favourite topics of study was the history of Victorian universities. It was in the nineteenth century that England gained its first crop of universities that weren’t Oxford and Cambridge, and where great reformers and politicians like Jeremy Bentham, William Gladstone, and Benjamin Jowett debated what universities should teach, who should attend, and why.
Today, we lack leaders and thinkers of their stature. But we also have over 160 higher education institutions, where our Victorian forebears could count theirs on two hands. It 1872, Oxford taught only six degrees. Now it teaches over 50 for undergraduates alone – and, as British universities go, that number is unremarkable. Between 1855 and 1865, only one in 77,000 attended university. In 2020, we saw 50.2 percent of 17-20-year-olds attended – the first time that number has passed half. The nature of our university ecosystem has thus changed enormously. Yet out two potential next Prime Ministers are still debating some of the fundamentals.
Liz Truss has pledged to give all students who receive three A*s at A-Level an automatic Oxbridge interview. She is also apparently considering moving the start of the university year from September to January. Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak has suggested teenagers should study core subjects like Maths and English beyond GCSE, and wants to create a ‘Russell Group’ of technical colleges to create a prestigious alternative to university education. He also wants to continue this government’s attempts to curb low value degrees.
Both policies have flaws. Sam Freedman, a former senior advisor on schools at the Department of Education, has claimed the Foreign Secretary’s proposals have “all the hallmarks of a classic Truss idea: bafflingly obtuse, poorly thought through, and impossible to implement.” Her focus on top A-Level pupils and university timetables prioritises a tiny minority and unnecessary shifts at a time when our school system is dealing with Covid’s legacy, a shortage of teachers, and a widening gap between the best and worst performing pupils.
Sunak’s policy does imitate other countries in Europe and Asia, where students study Maths until the age of 18. Encouraging more students to go into vocational and technical courses has also been a long-standing ambition of successive Education Secretaries, and continuing to pressure universities to remove courses that are failing to deliver is welcome. But his plan to open 75 new free schools, whilst “carving out” more time for teachers’ development and encouraging a huge uptake in using educational technology, sound rather expensive. He was the Chancellor who only stumped up £3 billion of the £15 billion Sir Kevan Collins, Boris Johnson’s former education catch-up tsar, called for, and that was before we were heading for a recession.
Most importantly, both candidates’ proposals fail to address the four fundamental problems I believe exist with Britain’s current university set up. Like both Truss and Sunak, I am an Oxford graduate with an over-inflated sense of my own importance. But I claim a right to pronounce on these matters by the fact I graduated from the punting, pints, and pratting about far more recently than they did.
The first is that we have too many universities teaching too much of the wrong things. When the Major government abolished polytechnics, they damaged the vital concept of vocational education. New universities either replicated courses taught elsewhere to a higher standard or created new courses of little value. Instead of providing a pathway for the non-academic to gain a trade or skill, they now left many learning poor quality courses taught by poor quality academics that did not make them more employable or worldly wise. Neither of the purposes of a university education are being fulfilled for too many.
This leads onto the second problem: too many students wracking up too much debt doing degrees that are rewarding in neither an intellectual or monetary sense. New Labour’s push to get fifty percent of school leavers to university combined with their introduction of tuition fees to finance them has meant a generation leaving university into an over-stuffed graduate market with fifty thousands pounds of debt. The idea of university as a great engine of social mobility has been lost.
A graduate premium never materializes for many outside of Oxbridge. Most will never pay back their loans, and they could have been better off doing an apprenticeship. There is a reason why Tony Blair’s son now makes millions getting school leavers not to fulfil his father’s dream.
Thirdly, as Will Tanner pointed out for us last week, despite us having 18 universities in the global top 100 for academia, we have only 5 in the top 100 for innovation. We file fewer patents as a share of GDP than most of our competitors and have seen the ratio of patents to Research and Development spend decline consistently for the last two decades. Our research base is focused towards academics, rather than application. Unsurprisingly, as Tanner highlighted, we are the only major scientific economy that spent less, on average, on R&D during the 2010s than it did during the 1990s. If we want to compete in the twenty-first century, this must change.
Finally, there is, for the want of a better phrase, the campus culture wars. Having been the token Tory on a fair few student papers, and having had friends pushed out of societies and events over free speech issues, I saw first-hand that parts of our universities are becoming increasingly hostile to free debate.
Moreover, humanities courses – in the dwindling number of institutions where they can still be found – are being hampered by a cancel culture that seeks to deny today’s students access to the finest works of their forebears. First they came for Homer, etc etc. We cannot go back to the bad old days of the Test and Corporation Acts, but where one has to sign up to Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race rather than the Thirty-Nine Articles to get in.
All of these problems are the consequences of governmental failures. Poor policies have produced a society with far too many students with too much debt, too little culture, and a lot of justified anger. This has been compounded by an inability of nominally Conservative administrations to pay attention to the cultural warning lights that are dragging a generation of students to the left. To reverse this will require levels of time, effort, and cash that neither Truss nor Sunak will be able to deliver during a recession, 15 percent inflation, and looming wars on both sides of the globe.
But we can at least imagine what a Conservative university dream-world would look like. Far fewer universities, and far more technical colleges – or revived polytechnics. A far smaller number of students either subsidized to pursue purely academic subjects or likely to get graduate jobs that will pay off the debt they have incurred. Research and Development spending levels and a pro-research culture that allows the country which produced Newton, Darwin, and Hooke to produce the breakthroughs of the twenty-first century. A campus climate conducive to free discussion, and where young Tories don’t feel like lepers.
A pipe dream? Well, I didn’t spend three years amongst those dreaming spires for nothing. I also didn’t get three A*s at A-Level. So if Truss had her way, I might not have been there at all. Then again, as I’m sure she’d agree, there are some merits to a bit more competition – especially if it helps weed out poor ideas before they are made into policy.