‘We must crack down on low-value university degrees.” Who claimed that and when? It might have been Rishi Sunak last October. Or Sunak last July. Or Sunak the previous August. Or Nadhim Zahawi five months earlier. Or Michelle Donelan in November 2020. Or Gavin Williamson in May 2020. Or Damian Hinds the previous year. Or Sam Gyimah in 2018. Or Jo Johnson in 2017. Or even Labour’s Margaret Hodge more than 20 years ago.
This time, it was Sunak on the election trail last week. “There are university degrees that are letting young people down,” he told reporters. Around one in five students “would have been financially better off” not going to college and “one in three graduates are in non-graduate jobs”. Sunak promised to scrap “rip-off degrees”, replacing them with 100,000 apprenticeships.
It is an argument that has been reheated so often that it has all but curdled. Yet politicians keep regurgitating it, seeing it as tapping into perceived popular hostility towards the “university-educated liberal elite”.
What, though, is a “low-value” degree? Few politicians who rail about “rip-off courses” or “Mickey Mouse degrees” are willing to specify which ones they want to cull. Clearly, some courses are better than others. But defining the value of a course – to whom and for what purpose – is not an easy task.
For many policymakers (and not just in this government), the worth of a degree is measured primarily by metrics such as the proportion of students who fail to complete their course and the number who land high-skilled, well-paid jobs. Humanities courses or media studies are often seen as being of low value because their economic reward is small as compared with Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses, whether in terms of economic development or personal recompense.
Ironically, though, the highest dropout rates at universities are in computer sciences, business and administrative studies, and engineering and technology. The lowest, apart from medicine, dentistry and veterinary science, are in languages and historical and philosophical studies. Stereotypes and reality don’t necessarily coincide.
When it comes to apprenticeships, again the data conflicts with the narrative. For a government that so extols apprenticeships, it is striking that the numbers becoming apprentices have fallen from 509,400 in 2015/16 to 337,100 in 2022/23, a fall particularly pronounced among the young. Almost half of all apprenticeship starts are now for over-25s, a proportion that has risen in recent years.
Just 54% of apprentices successfully completed their training and assessment in 2022/23, nearly half dropping out because of the poor quality of their training. As a report from the thinktank EDSK observed: “If A-level or university students were dropping out in such large numbers or reporting similar complaints, it would be a national scandal”.
The report noted also that one in five apprentices and more than a quarter of those on entry-level apprenticeships received “no on-the-job training at all from their employer”. Apprentices “are often treated as ‘workers rather than learners’”, forced into “low-skill, low-level positions while being paid far less than the national minimum wage”. “Many current ‘apprenticeships’ have nothing to do with real occupations,” the report concluded, “with some employers choosing instead to invent fake job titles to access apprenticeship funding.” One might call these “Mickey Mouse” apprenticeships, though they draw no ministerial ire nor elicit headlines in the Telegraph or Daily Mail.
Apprenticeships are hugely important, providing a valuable pathway for millions, and should receive proper government attention. Instead, politicians choose to whip up a moral panic about poor-quality university courses while largely ignoring the lack of quality in many apprenticeships.
Also often ignored is the impact of class on student experiences and outcomes. A study last year by London South Bank University’s Antony Moss showed that students who had been eligible for free school meals (FSM), a proxy for poverty, are less likely to complete their degree, achieve a good grade or get into a graduate-level job or further study. Improving the quality of courses barely challenged such inequality.
In 2017, the government introduced the teaching excellence framework, a grading system that awards universities gold, silver and bronze ratings based on statistics about “the student experience and student outcomes”. Moss found that “gold-rated providers recruit significantly fewer FSM students”. He found also that whether a course received gold, silver or bronze accreditation made little difference to the inequality of outcome. A “cynical interpretation” of the results, Moss concluded, is that universities “seeking to secure the highest recognition for teaching excellence should focus on recruiting as few students from disadvantaged backgrounds as possible”.
The background to all this is the colonisation of policymaking by a more instrumental view of education as valuable primarily because of its economic benefits, whether personal and national. It is a perspective that has turned universities into businesses, students into consumers and knowledge into a commodity. The notion of learning as being a good in itself, as a means of elevating the quality of our lives, is now derided as hopelessly naive, or at least as something that should be the preserve of elite students.
The instrumental view of education is often presented as a means of advancing working-class students by training them for the job market. In reality, what it does is tell them to study whatever best fits them for their station in life. As the Observer’s Martha Gill observed last year, many politicians and commentators value university education as a means “to elevate human lives and nourish the soul, regardless of any job market benefit” – but only for a certain class of people. “The sorts of students to whom we tend to apply a financial – rather than spiritual – calculation when it comes to higher education,” she wrote, “tend to be those from poorer backgrounds.”
For the affluent, education is about enriching the soul. For working-class students, it is viewed primarily as a route to the job market. They are seen as the kind of people who benefit from more “vocational” learning. As education analyst Jim Dickinson, associate editor of the higher education platform WONKHE, observes: “When we say “low-value” courses, isn’t there a danger that we really mean ‘low-value students’?”
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
