The Conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott described one of the boons of student life as the opportunity “to look for some meaning in the things that have greatly moved mankind”. Higher education, he wrote, should be an interval during which the undergraduate will have “learned something to help him lead a more significant life”.
On that basis, one suspects that Oakeshott would have given short shrift to the dispiriting assumptions underlying Rishi Sunak’s proposed new crackdown on “low-value degrees” – a status to be defined principally by reference to earnings after graduation. Endorsing language that is gratuitously insulting to academics, Mr Sunak has pledged to cap numbers on what his government describes as “rip-off” university degrees that don’t lead to a well-paid, highly skilled job. This is a dismally narrow and instrumental view of higher education. It casually disregards the myriad benefits that a degree course can offer a young person, beyond a job at the end of it. From an enhanced capacity to think critically, to the widening of social horizons and the pleasures of independent study, attending university offers far more than a mere route to the workplace.
