In the latest edition (Issue 48) of the European Democrat Students magazine BullsEye, the theme is 'knowledge is power'. To that end I submitted a piece highlighting the UK's experimentation with higher education policy and making the case that European policy makers should consider it a master class in how not to do it.
You can either download the PDF here and skip to page 23, or the text is reproduced below.
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The
UK provides a master class in how not to reform higher education
When European
policy makers turn their attention to higher education, they would do well to
pay attention to what is happening to universities in the United Kingdom.
Because for the past decade or so our country has been engaged on a quite
radical experiment with higher education: a drive to get 50% of all
school-leavers to progress to university or college before getting a job.
The
justifications for this vary from person to person. For some, it was a matter
of aspiration – of allowing many more people to enhance their studies, learn
new skills and maximise their potential. For others, it was a class-motivated
attempt to break open the elite world of the universities. Still more saw it as
a way of building a new economy now that global competition had rendered
British manufacturing uncompetitive. Others simply saw it as a cynical attempt
to keep school-leavers off the unemployment figures for a few years.
This host of
competing justifications is symptomatic to why the whole thing has become such
a mess: it was started without any clear objectives. It didn’t really get much
further than “wouldn’t it be nice if more people went to university?”.
As a result,
overqualification rates in the UK are already high and are still rising. The
employment market is flooded with graduates, creating a paradox where on the
one hand a degree is essential to get a foot in the door, while on the other
hand its value is decaying as ever more graduates emerge with similar
qualifications.
The number of
graduates on the market also means that employers are now using degrees to
filter applicants for what used to be school-leavers’ jobs. This means that
these jobs are no longer open to people just out of high school and more people
are forced to go through university, just to ‘stand still’ in employment terms.
While they go
through university, these students take on the burden of tens of thousands of
pounds worth of debt from student loans and living costs. This is because the
state can no longer afford to totally subsidise students as it did when the
numbers were tiny. Tuition fees are now a part of higher education and they
will only go higher.
Perhaps worst
of all, having a degree in Britain is now seen as being superior to a
vocational or technical qualification, even when something is supposed to be a
vocation or technical trade. Perhaps the most striking example is nursing,
where the mutation of nurse training from ‘hands-on’ to academic has led to
reports that a new breed of nurse unwilling to get their hands dirty. Even
areas such as pre-school childcare are now seeing increasing calls for graduate
recruitment, as if a degree is a magical scroll that guarantees good outcomes.
Taken together,
all this has serious implications for the British economy. As the ideological
drive to expand higher education goes on, more and more young people are sucked
through the system. The debts they incur, combined with the lost income from
three to four years of work they miss out on, means that many of our young
people are left financially dependent on their parents well into what used to
be considered our adult lives.
It has also led
to increased disenchantment, as people led to expect the high-earnings and job
security of the last generation of graduates find themselves in a world where
degrees are common and competition ferocious. It is hard enough to go through
university and emerge owing the government tens of thousands of pounds, but
when it fails to land you a traditional graduate salary or job prospects the
disappointment is fiercer still.
It also leads
to a greater sense of entitlement amongst the workforce. The UK already has a
problem with native workers refusing to apply for menial or low-status jobs,
leaving them to be filled by immigrant labour which is then resented by the
very people who never applied for their jobs. This is only exacerbated once 50%
or more of British workers have some form of degree and the expectation of a
job to match.
Most
fallaciously, it is claimed that mass university education is necessary in
order to ‘equip students with skills’ for a modern economy. Given that the
British model almost totally neglects technical areas, one really has to
question quite how many History of Art degrees a modern European nation needs
to compete in the global economy.
The only way
the UK has managed so far is by having the government invent swathes of arcane
public sector jobs, with artificially high salaries and extraordinary pensions.
This is the reason the UK has such a serious deficit problem: for the last 15
years the government has been borrowing to bridge the gap between the reality
of our uncompetitive economy and the shrill entitlements of its people. Now the
money has run out, the wheels are coming off.
There are many
good reasons to invest in education beyond the age of 18, from making sure the
nation has enough engineers, to contributing to scientific breakthroughs which
advance the limits of knowledge, even to ensure a sufficient number of lawyers,
historians, and a poet or two.
But take it
from someone who lived it: “Wouldn’t it be nice?” is not one of those reasons.
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