No, Rishi Sunak, ‘rip-off’ degree courses aren’t the problem – failed education policy is
William Davies/The Guardian:
The UK has some of the world’s leading toll bridges. But a minority of toll bridges fail to deliver good outcomes for their drivers. Figures show that nearly three in 10 drivers have still not reached their destination within an hour of crossing a toll bridge. The government will crack down on these rip-off toll bridges, reducing the number of drivers they can carry.
If a minister made an announcement of this kind, you would wonder if they had lost their mind. But higher education policy has become so overloaded with fallacious economic and cultural reasoning over recent years that we scarcely register the full absurdity of Rishi Sunak’s announcement this week that his government would crack down on “rip-off” university degrees.Sunak’s logic is a bleak one that would have sounded both ridiculous and nihilistic prior to the Cameron government. Students and taxpayers expect a “good return on the significant financial investment they make in higher education”, the government tells us. The problem is that some courses fail to deliver “good outcomes”, and so the government plans to cap the numbers they can recruit.
A “good outcome” means that a student has completed their studies, then gone on to a graduate-level job or postgraduate education within 15 months. When this state of affairs fails to materialise, it is apparently a direct consequence of what that individual was taught at university.Critics have already pointed out that capping numbers on a course will act as an indicator that the course is poor, though that presumably is the whole point. Others have argued that the policy will reduce access to higher education for students from already disadvantaged backgrounds. In a class-based society such as Britain’s, the key influence over future income and employment is family background. Higher education can push back against that, but it doesn’t negate it. Universities with a good track record of widening access also inevitably risk worse “outcomes”, in Sunak’s terms.
The wider ideological problem is that, for politicians of all parties in the post-Thatcher era, the education system has carried the burden of sustaining the illusion of a classless society. Whenever inconvenient evidence arises that class does still count for a great deal, this then gets blamed on universities for not having magicked it away.
The idea that it is the function of a university to “deliver” certain labour market “outcomes” to “investors”, like some kind of glorified annuity, is such a palpably stupid one that its genesis needs some reconstruction. For several decades, economists have used the concept of “human capital” to understand how expenditure on education and training yields economic benefits. When the Blair government introduced university top-up fees of £1,000 a year in 1998 (trebled in 2006), it was partly justified on the basis that graduates do on average earn more than non-graduates, and could therefore make some additional contribution to the system that benefited them.