Once upon a time, elections used to be all about kissing babies. But for parents of teenagers, this one has felt more like a smack in the teeth. Last weekend, our children were threatened with compulsory national service, for no obvious reason beyond keeping nostalgic pensioners happy. Now, just in the middle of their GCSE revision, Rishi Sunak is threatening to scrap one in eight degree places.
“You don’t have to go to university to succeed in life,” tweeted the prime minister, who to be fair is currently proving that you can go to lots of universities – he has a degree from Oxford and a master’s from Stanford – and still see your career end in failure. The money saved by slashing 130,000 supposedly “Mickey Mouse” places would, he promised, fund 100,000 apprenticeships. Though given the enduring failure to get these off the ground over the past decade, it would be unwise to bin the Ucas form just yet. Meanwhile, the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, called the apprenticeship she did at 16 her “golden ticket” but failed to mention her subsequent degree in business studies, followed by a master’s.
Doubtless all this tests well with the roughly one in 10 voters threatening to back Reform, around whom this defensive Conservative campaign now revolves: mostly older non-graduates inclined to see students as woke layabouts. It’s wrong to stereotype all baby boomers as selfish, when so many people care deeply about their own grandchildren and other people’s, but a campaign centred on punishing the young to please a specific and grumpy subset of older voters will do nothing to ease generational tensions.
So far, the Tories have earmarked at least £4.5bn in a week for just two policies: that much-derided national service, plus shielding pensioners from the tax implications of the triple lock pushing up pensions. Having failed to generate the economic growth that would pay for all this, apparently now it’s time to claw some money back by dashing a few teenage hopes.
Ministers insist they are targeting only so-called “rip-off” degrees with high dropout rates and low future earning potential, arguing that one in five are no better off financially for going to university. Obviously, there’s more to education than can be captured in a PAYE slip.
This country needs creative people to enrich our cultural lives, even if a fine art degree is never going to make you rich, and the value of a degree is less in what was studied than how. The intellectual curiosity, analytic skills and creative thinking gained from a good degree course may, if anything, command a premium once AI takes over easily systemised and predictable tasks. But all that aside, the idea that universities are full of kids dabbling in Taylor Swift studies is – if it was ever true – risibly outdated.
Cash-starved universities have been slashing more esoteric courses, from the performing arts to medieval languages, for months now precisely because of falling generation Z demand. Kids who face a lifetime of student debt are playing it safer, which is why business and management are up and English literature down; fashion or fine art are becoming luxury choices for rich kids. And while there undoubtedly are some poor courses taught by poor lecturers offering dubious value for money, Sunak’s criteria of high dropout rates and low earnings seem tools too crude to identify them.
Universities have been a rare example of levelling up actually working, with Ucas applications from disadvantaged students up by 30% in 10 years. But lower-income students tend to favour studying near home because it’s cheaper, which often restricts them to institutions that don’t attract Oxbridge salary premiums; they’re also more likely to be juggling essays around paid work or (for mature students) childcare, leaving them at higher risk of dropping out. It’s worrying, of course, that 8% of students now fail to complete their courses. But for apprenticeships, the drop-out rate is nearer one in two.
If degrees don’t pay as they once did, meanwhile, that may have something to do with a flatlining economy. US college fees are ruinously high but the rewards are correspondingly so, with the average graduate starting salary this year projected to hit $68,516 (£53,700). In Britain, average graduate starting salaries were between £24,000 and £27,000 in 2020-21, the last year for which official Higher Education Statistics Agency figures are available. The broader picture is of a nation seemingly in decline, but with the blow still cushioned for those with a degree; graduates still earn on average just over £11,000 more than non-grads.
If they were confident apprenticeships offered just as good a deal, many families would jump at them, but what’s on offer looks patchy and unconvincing. Apprenticeship starts for 19- to 24-year-olds have nearly halved since 2017, when a new training levy was slapped on employers, with companies complaining that government-approved schemes are too difficult to set up. Meanwhile, apprentices are dropping out because they can’t live on the £6.40 an hour they’re paid. It’s not snobbery that puts families off apprenticeships, but reality.
Electorally, the Tories can probably afford to alienate 18-year-olds who mostly weren’t going to vote for them anyway. But what they seem to have forgotten is that students have parents, who do reliably vote and are furious at the idea of their children carrying the can for everything that has gone wrong over the past 14 years. Our teenagers didn’t break it, but somehow they’re being expected to fix it. Who, exactly, is ripping off whom?
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
