Everyone needs educating in the fight over university degrees

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The UK’s two biggest political parties are having a fierce row about university courses. Unusually, they are both right.

Rishi Sunak is correct in saying that some courses offer students poor value for money and leave them with prospects that are no better than if had they not taken the courses at all. But his Labour critics are right, too, to say that Sunak’s plans to tackle the problem amount to little more than an attack on aspiration.

That said, much of the discussion around this latest higher education row also sticks in the craw. After the prime minister announced that he would “crack down” on “rip-off courses” that did not boost the earnings of their graduates, any number of successful (or, at least, solvent) artists and authors took to Twitter and the airwaves to talk about how little they earned after completing their degrees, arguing that the value of a university degree is worth so much more than money. This is certainly true if you studied art history or music. But it stretches credulity if you are studying accountancy and finance. Yet the outcomes between different accountancy and finance courses, even at superficially similar universities, vary wildly.

It’s true, too, that restricting the number of student places is, in practice, something that will most sharply limit the prospects of the poorest students when it comes to attending university, and that only a relatively small proportion of courses fail to meet the Office for Students’ quality benchmarks. Out of around 2.86mn students in the UK, only about 11,000 are registered at universities or colleges that do not meet the 60 per cent threshold for “positive outcomes”. But anyone who cares about social mobility or fighting poverty should be angry that those 11,000 students are more likely to be disadvantaged than the majority on good courses.

The trouble is that Sunak’s plans to fix the problem manage to be both inadequate and pointlessly destructive. His proposal to limit the number of courses is akin to suggesting that the way to deal with a school that gets a bad Ofsted report is to close the school. He is proposing nothing that would meaningfully raise standards, and it is a little rich for him to suggest that people in “low-value” courses would be better off accessing services he has himself helped to cut and undernourish.

In many ways, it feels as if his response is more about putting a positive gloss on the various crises facing British universities. Painting universities that go bust as part of a crackdown on low-quality courses is a way to make it seem as if what is happening is part of a plan, rather than simply more chaos.

But the Labour response in turn recalls some of that party’s worst impulses, where some of its politicians act as though it is grossly offensive to suggest there even is such a thing as a bad school.

What might Sunak do instead? Part of the solution is to give prospective students much better information about what they are actually applying to. In the US, such students have a huge amount of data about the quality of subjects and courses available to them.

In the UK, applicants may have a good idea about the standing of universities as a whole. But they have little in the way of clear guidance about the quality of individual courses. To take the accountancy example: some British universities, including ones that require relatively low grades to enrol in, or those without much cultural cachet, do turn out qualified and successful accountants. But a prospective student has no real chance of being able to work out which course will do that and which won’t.

Another problem is the tuition fee system in England and Wales. The life-long loan entitlement planned by the government for 2025 ought to provide further education and retraining with the reliable revenue and prestige that it has long lacked. But at present, if you pick the wrong course, receive inadequate teaching or are otherwise let down, you are left holding the bag for your unpaid tuition fees, and face sharp limitations on your ability to start again at another institution.

Another way to improve outcomes would be to free the university sector from the red tape and extra costs created by the UK’s immigration system, in which overseas students — who help to cross-subsidise costs for domestic students — and lecturers from abroad face a series of hurdles and extra costs, such as the NHS surcharge, if they want to come to the UK to study or teach. As it stands, British universities are instead prioritising overseas students simply to keep their bottom lines intact.

In short, in higher education, almost everything that we know would drive up standards doesn’t exist. Given that, what’s really surprising is just how many good courses there are.

It is true that we ask universities to do a lot more than schools. The average British university isn’t just a place that teaches students: it is an economic anchor for the community, a research centre, a site of collaboration between industry and local government, and much else besides.

But neither the Conservatives nor the Labour party seem to have really resolved in their minds what they think a “good university” should focus on. For some, it just means the one they went to. For others, it means the local institution in their constituency. But as long as politicians remain confused about what they actually want from universities, they will either reach for solutions like the prime minister’s, which won’t work, or pretend, like Labour, that there is no problem at all.

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