@ChrisMayLA6 @jwi

I think there are a lot of related issues that mean that this can’t be addressed in isolation.

Dismantling the polytechnics removed the best vocational qualifications. The best route into aerospace engineering, for example, used to be through a poly, but when they became a university they had to restructure the course to make it an accredited degree and that destroyed a lot of its value. There were several other subjects where a high-quality course at a poly was a better route in than a university degree.

This has meant that universities have had to take up that rôle as a path to employment. This, in turn, has led to jobs requiring ‘a degree’ but as a box-ticking exercise rather than anything that the job needs or as anything that gives the student either personal enrichment or transferable skills.

I saw some of the worst outcomes of this first hand when I was at Swansea. The Vice Chancellor shut down the Chemistry department because he wanted to get more students into the Media Studies department. The Chemistry department was rated 5 in the previous RAE, the Media Studies department was rated 1. There are some great Media Studies courses, which lead directly to careers in journalism (Cardiff used to have one, no idea if that’s still true. Again, this used to be something the polys did better), but the Swansea one was a waste of everyone’s time.

So there’s a massive push towards academic qualifications as entry to jobs, which means lots of people taking on loans to do degrees in which they have no interest, giving them a piece of paper that prevents them from being deselected but no knowledge or skills that they will actually use in the future. That’s enormously wasteful but also something that can’t be addressed by any intervention solely in the university sector.

There’s also the social aspect. I viewed my student loan as a poorly administered graduate tax: I took the loan and then, if I earned enough, I would pay more tax. But that’s a very middle-class attitude to debt. There are stark differences in how people view this kind of debt and working class people are far more likely to view any form of debt as a negative. So student loans end up skewing the demographics of university attendance away from working class people, at the same time as increasing the number of graduates is advertised as a tool for improving social mobility. That can be addressed by moving to a graduate tax.

I am increasingly convinced that universities fall far short of meeting their requirements both as centres of research excellence and as educational institutions, but fixing either or both of those requires some significant reforms (and defenestration of most university senior administrators).