It's time Britain realised that going to university is a scam

Telegraph

12 hours ago

This week, hundreds of thousands of teenagers and their parents will experience a very anxious time as they receive their A-level results on Thursday.
For many of the kids involved, the significance of the results will be largely to do with gaining entry to university. For most of them, this is a worthwhile objective. For some, university will completely transform their lives. But not all. The evidence is accumulating that we send far too many young people to university.
It was at the Labour Party conference in 1999 that Tony Blair, the then prime minister, announced that he was setting 'a target of 50pc of young adults going into higher education in the next century '. This aim has been achieved. But why the number should be 50pc and not 40pc or 60pc has never been clear.
A key motivation behind this objective was economic. The evidence was plain that, on average, graduates earned more than non-graduates. Therefore, so the argument ran, if we turned out more graduates, we would increase average incomes. The national counterpart to this would be higher GDP.
Can you believe it? This logic was flawed right from the beginning. Just because graduates on average earn more than non-graduates, this does not mean that if you turn the marginal non-graduate into a graduate, their earnings will rise.
Rather unsurprisingly, it all depends upon what spending three years at an institution of higher education actually does to them. Do they acquire any skills that are valuable? Do they acquire habits of mind and aspects of character that will stand them in good stead in later life? In many cases they do. But again, not all. I have long thought that in some cases, university actually degrades young people. It gives them too much freedom at a time when they don't know what to do with it, blunts the work ethic and gets them into bad habits.
If we sent fewer of our young people to university, there would be other savings. There is a huge number of people employed in universities, including teaching staff, who could be released to do other jobs in the economy. Similarly, there are large numbers of buildings which could be repurposed.
A key part of the motivation behind young people wanting to go to university – and their parents wanting them to – is economic. That is to say, they wanted to enjoy the so-called graduate premium which has supposedly averaged about £10,500. But countless young people have discovered that there is no such premium for them as they find themselves doing jobs for which a degree is not a requirement and which they could have secured without having one.
But by no means is the motivation all economic. Some of it is social. If your mates are all going to university, you will naturally feel a bit odd about not going yourself. But this is a problem that would be alleviated simply by fewer people going to university. There would then be more of your mates who are not going to university.
There is also the matter of status for both teenagers and their parents. Mind you, why they think it is so desirable to do a BA in marketing as opposed to becoming a plumber or electrician is quite beyond me. Never mind the graduate premium; why don't we talk about the plumber premium?
Moreover, until recently, there has been a move in society to make a degree a requirement for employment in occupations which used to not require them. This is true of the police force and nursing. It really is extraordinary that we should potentially lose excellent recruits into these professions, or waste resources putting them through university.
It is bizarre that so many people seem to associate learning in all its guises with the necessity to spend three years, full-time, in an educational establishment from the ages of 18-21. If the purpose of attending university is to acquire skills, then in many cases, these can be acquired much better from short courses interspersed with working, or on the job in the form of an apprenticeship. Whether the role is formally called an apprenticeship or not doesn't really matter. The key point is to learn on the job and to learn from others who are accomplished at it, rather than sitting in a classroom being talked at.
This message is slowly beginning to sink in. Some professional accountancy and law firms are now offering non-graduate entrance, and they are referring to such places as 'apprenticeships'.
If the purpose of going to university is not to acquire skills but rather to enjoy learning for its own sake and to benefit from the broadening of the mind and of one's interests, then surely this can usefully be done later in life, and not necessarily by attending a university full time.
There are not many available policy changes which could bring significant benefits to the economy. But reducing the number of young people going to university is one of them. Quite apart from the waste of so many people's time and money, the accumulation of debts and the necessary write-off by the state of a great deal of debt which can never be repaid, reducing the numbers going to university would release a huge number of people for employment in the workforce. There are currently about 2.4m full-time students in higher education. A 20pc reduction in university numbers would add almost half a million people to the labour force.
Of course, going to university can be wonderful. And we have some of the best universities in the world. But not all of them are up to scratch, and not all courses add value for their students. It is high time that our leaders reflected on the fantastic waste of money and resources that following Tony Blair's dream has brought us. For many young people, their life prospects would be brighter if they didn't go to university.