The Great University Con Read online

  Table of Contents

  THE NEED FOR THIS BOOK

  PART ONE: THE SYMPTOMS CHAPTER ONE: EXPANSION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  CHAPTER TWO: ADMISSIONS: GREAT EXPECTATIONS

  CHAPTER THREE: STUDENTS: UNDER PRESSURE

  CHAPTER FOUR:LEARNING: YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN

  CHAPTER FIVE: STANDARDS: DUMBING DOWN

  PART TWO: THE CONSEQUENCES CHAPTER SIX: DEGREE FACTORIES

  CHAPTER SEVEN: GRADUATES: ‘GIZZA JOB!’

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE FINE ART OF MISMANAGEMENT

  CHAPTER NINE: ACADEMICS: RUNNING TO STAND STILL

  CHAPTER TEN: EMPLOYERS: “WHERE’S THE BEEF?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: WHAT ABOUT THE ECONOMY?

  CHAPTER TWELVE: SCHOOLS: SUPPLYING COURSE FEE FODDER?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE STUDENT LOANS FIASCO

  PART THREE: WHAT NOW? CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE COMING CRISIS

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: SORTING OUT THE MESS

  Endnotes

  THE GREAT UNIVERSITY CON

  Thirty years ago, around 770,000 people – just 15% of school leavers – attended a university or polytechnic. Now there are over 2.3 million students in Higher Education – almost half of all school leavers.

  For the last 30 years we’ve all been sold the mantra that ‘the more people go to Uni, the better off we’ll all be’.

  But is this true? Has the huge growth in the number of people going to Uni – the Great University Expansion – really been the success the politicians and universities would have us believe?

  After all, what’s the point of having a degree if one in every two people has one? Why get a degree if only a small minority of university graduates – on some courses less than one in ten – will find jobs requiring a university education, especially if many graduates leave Uni with debts of up to £60,000?

  In THE GREAT UNIVERSITY CON we expose the truth behind the massive expansion of Britain’s university sector: pressure on school leavers to get to Uni whether they are likely to benefit or not; schools feeling they have to game the system to send as many of their pupils to Uni as possible; universities lowering entrance standards to fill up their ever–increasing numbers of courses; dumbing down of university courses; falling academic standards as lecturers no longer have time to deal individually with increasing numbers of students; universities trying to avoid failing anyone, however poor their work, given that they’ve paid so much for their degrees; rising student drop–out rates; graduates with unrepayable debts which will have to be picked up by taxpayers; a massive oversupply of graduates compared to available job opportunities and a university sector that has become huge, bureaucratic and self–serving and which is too often a burden on, rather than a benefit to, the country.

  David Craig has written 9 other controversial current affairs books exposing dishonesty, incompetence, stupidity, greed and waste in government, the private sector, financial services and Britain’s charity industry. These include:

  The Great Charity Scandal

  Don’t Buy It! Tricks and traps salespeople use and how to beat them

  Greed Unlimited: How David Cameron protects the elites while squeezing the rest of us

  Pillaged: How they’re looting £413 million a day from your savings and pensions….and what to do about it

  Fleeced! How we’ve been betrayed by the politicians, bureaucrats and bankers

  The Great European Rip–Off

  Squandered: How Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money

  Plundering the Public Sector

  Rip–Off The scandalous inside story of the management consulting money machine

  Hugh Openshaw has spent 12 years working in the post–compulsory education system as a lecturer, manager and researcher. During this time, he has worked within several universities, a variety of Higher and Further Education colleges and one prison. His doctorate examined Higher Education policy.

  THE GREAT

  UNIVERSITY

  CON

  How we broke our

  universities and

  betrayed a generation

  David Craig &

  Hugh Openshaw

  Original Book Company

  Text copyright © David Craig and Hugh Openshaw

  All rights reserved

  This edition first published in 2018 by:

  The Original Book Company

  21b Knyveton Road

  Bournemouth BH1 3QQ

  ISBN–10: 1–872188–14–1

  ISBN–13: 978–1–872188–14–0

  THE NEED FOR THIS BOOK

  Thirty years ago around 770,000 people – just one in six school leavers – attended a university or polytechnic. Now there are over 2.3 million students in Higher Education – almost half of all school leavers.

  For the last 30 years we’ve all been sold the mantra that ‘the more people go to Uni, the better off we’ll all be’. Students will have a fun time, learn all sorts of useful things and then get good jobs. Our economy will be more internationally competitive. Society will benefit as these graduates pay more taxes and, being educated and responsible citizens, will be less of a burden on the NHS and social services. And universities also provide plenty of other societal benefits through their academic research and their contributions to the nation’s intellectual and cultural life. After all, everyone would probably agree that the more educated a country’s population is, the more prosperous and civilised that country will be.

  But is this true? Has the huge growth in the number of people going to Uni – the Great University Expansion – really been the success the politicians and universities would have us believe? What’s the point of having a degree if one in every two people has one? Why get a degree if only a small minority of university graduates – on some courses less than one in ten – will find jobs requiring a university education, especially if many graduates leave Uni with debts of up to £60,000?

  A degree is now the second most expensive thing most graduates will buy in their lives. But is it worth buying if it ends up costing much more than it returns? And does society benefit from the Great Uni Expansion if taxpayers have to pick up the bill for billions of pounds each year for student loans that will never be repaid?

  Normally, these are the types of questions that academic researchers in universities would excel at answering. However, these are not questions that anybody working (or, at least, wanting to continue working) in a university is thinking about, let alone answering. This is quite understandable. It is, after all, both rude and impolitic to bite the hand that feeds.

  There are plenty of reference guides to support students’ university applications, numerous campus novels describing life within fictional universities and a huge body of academic texts about universities, written by academics for academics (and generally lacking page–turning narratives). But, despite the massive costs of the Great Uni Expansion for students, their parents and all taxpayers, nobody has dared question why and how we have so massively and rapidly grown our Higher Education system and what effect this has had on students, their families, academics, the economy and society.

  In THE GREAT UNIVERSITY CON we expose the truth behind the massive expansion of Britain’s university sector – pressure on school leavers to get to Uni whether they are likely to benefit or not; schools feeling they have to game the system to send as many of their pupils to Uni as possible; universities lowering entrance standards to fill up their ever–increasing numbers of courses; dumbing down of university courses; falling academic standards as lecturers no longer have time to deal individually with increasing numb
ers of students; universities trying all sorts of tricks to avoid failing anyone, however poor their work, given that they’ve paid so much for their degrees; rising student drop–out rates; graduates with unrepayable debts which will have to be picked up by taxpayers; a massive oversupply of graduates compared to available job opportunities and a university sector that has become huge, bureaucratic and self–serving and which is too often a burden on, rather than a benefit to, the country.

  We’ve been sold the myth that with universities more is always better. But we’ve been fooled and now it’s time to expose the truth about the Great University Con.

  PART ONE: THE SYMPTOMS

  CHAPTER ONE: EXPANSION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  “The Millennium generation of UK children may have the most educationally ambitious mothers ever. No less than 97% of them want their children to go on to university.”1 Institute of Education, 2010

  “...the number of recent graduates in non–graduate jobs has risen from 37% in 2001 to 47% in 2013.”2

  Over the last 30 years our Higher Education system has tripled in size. This has required a massive additional investment of money and time – billions of pounds from British taxpayers and millions of years from British students. As a result, universities now affect nearly every adult in Britain, whether as students, parents, employers, graduates or taxpayers.

  This Great Expansion has been driven by two beliefs. Firstly, that Higher Education provides a range of social, cultural and economic benefits to us, either as individuals or as part of society. Secondly, that the more time and money we invest in our universities, the greater these social, cultural and economic benefits will be. And so we’ve ended up uncritically pouring ever greater levels of resource into universities in the expectation of ever–increasing benefits. Any attempt at analysing the actual, rather than the claimed, value of university expansion faces opposition from a complicit vested–interests triangle of graduates, government and universities. Each group has a deep–rooted financial and emotional investment in the perceived success of an expanded Higher Education system. As a result, few within these groups will even entertain the possibility of any negative consequences arising from expansion.

  These well–entrenched vested interests are stopping us from realising that our universities are not delivering the range of benefits that we expect. They are preventing us from seeing that this relentless expansion has also contributed to a series of negative social and economic by–products. Moreover, they are prohibiting us from identifying the lasting damage that we are doing to our universities and their worldwide reputation.

  The wilful blindness towards the potentially harmful consequences of the Great Uni Expansion is similar to the hysteria seen in stock–market and housing bubbles. It also has unfortunate parallels with the problems created by subprime mortgages. Despite warnings from a series of authoritative sources, most notably Professor Alison Wolf in her book Does Education Matter?, nobody who benefits from this ever–expanding Higher Education bubble in the short term (universities, student unions, academics or politicians) wants it to be criticised. Against this backdrop, it is difficult to have a serious and unbiased debate about the very institutions – our universities – whose core purpose should be serious and unbiased debate. Maintaining this level of ignorance has required a colossal amount of fudge, spin and self–deception amongst the bubble’s beneficiaries. This delusion cannot be sustained indefinitely, however.

  Many graduates now see minimal or even negative returns from their degrees. These graduates come disproportionately from poorer and disadvantaged backgrounds. They have been encouraged to spend money that they didn’t have in pursuit of graduate careers that many will never achieve. Politicians, universities and the media have been complicit in this mis–selling and this social injustice. Unfortunately, it is not just these graduates who suffer from the effects of the Great University Expansion. Many families make significant financial sacrifices to ensure that their children can attend university. They do this because parents and students are made to feel that there is no alternative to university – that it’s ‘Uni or bust’.

  Despite the intense public interest in universities, public debate about Higher Education is normally restricted to a limited number of questions about university funding: who is to pay, how much will they pay and is this fair? These are valid questions. But they miss an opportunity for a much wider public debate, questioning not only the issue of funding, but also the assumption that every university degree is worth paying for and that university on this scale really is a benefit to our country. Such a debate could start by asking: why is there no escape from universities in modern Britain? When did “Uni” become a de facto national service? Is this ongoing expansion really a benefit or simply a collective failure of imagination on the part of successive generations of mostly university–educated politicians, civil servants, media commentators and vice chancellors? More importantly, we need to raise basic questions such as: just how much benefit does our university sector provide and to whom? Has the policy of expansion done harm and, if so, to whom? Finally, if our universities are not delivering what we need them to, then how do we rectify this situation?

  What does expansion look like?

  There are over 160 different universities and Higher Education colleges in the UK today, many with multiple campuses spread out over thirty miles or more. This means that nearly every city and town in the UK now has its own Higher Education institution. Given the size and complexity of our Higher Education system, it is quite difficult to describe it in detail. But it is possible to get a sense of its scale through these four headlines:

  1. By 2018 the UK Higher Education system had a total of 2.32 million students

  This is equivalent to the combined populations of Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham and Derby. This figure includes more than 438,000 international students.3 The majority of these students live away from home, creating a huge transitory population, all moving house annually. This level of population movement is broadly comparable with the mobilization and demobilization of troops over the two world wars, only with more abandoned shopping trolleys and looted traffic cones.

  Every year around 47% of the UK’s 18–21 year–olds enrol at a UK university or college. In 1980/81 the UK Higher Education system (universities, colleges and polytechnics) had a total of 827,000 students including 52,600 international students.4 In 30 years we have roughly tripled the size of the UK Higher Education system (Figure 1).

  Figure 1 - Total UK student numbers 1980-20165

  Over the same period, we have increased the number of international students eight–fold from 52,600 to over 438,000.

  2. UK universities employ around 400,000 people directly.6

  The university workforce is equivalent to the population of a large city such as Bristol. This figure only includes people directly employed by universities. Students and employees combined total nearly 3 million people, or roughly 5% of the UK’s population. Universities don’t just employ academics and librarians now. It would be impossible to compile a full list but, to provide an indication of the range of jobs available within universities, they include caterers, cleaners, ICT support staff, administrative staff, printers, photographers, marketing staff, PR staff, gardeners, bartenders, drivers and electricians. If you can think of a job, then the chances are that UK universities employ a significant number of them.

  3. A degree is now the second most expensive item that most people will buy.

  Under the current loans systems, it is estimated that students could owe an average of up to £60,000 upon graduation.7 This figure includes student loans for tuition fees and maintenance, an overdraft and, for many, credit card debts and additional loans. It does not, however, take into account the impact of compound interest (at an almost usurious government–set interest rate) on this debt.

  4. Our Higher Education system is ranked sec
ond in the world

  Higher Education is something that the UK is particularly good at. The prestige of our universities is one of the reasons that they can attract overseas students in such large numbers. The UK is currently the second most popular destination for students studying abroad. Our universities are ranked second only to the US in terms of their overall performance. UK universities produce a huge quantity of quality research in terms of journals, academic papers and books, second only to the US. Our oldest universities, Oxford and Cambridge, are iconic institutions and enjoy a special status at home and abroad educating countless domestic and international scientific, literary and sporting stars. At their best, our universities contribute enormously to society and help to define our national identity: they represent something to be proud of and something worth protecting.

  Why did we expand?

  The case for an expanded system of Higher Education has been an accepted part of UK political wisdom for over fifty years. Its roots lie in the Murray Robbins report of 1963, commissioned in part because grammar schools and the baby boom were producing too many qualified applicants for too few university places. At the report’s heart was the Robbins Principle, which stated that:

  “Courses of Higher Education should be available to all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so.”8

  Prior to the Robbins Report, university entrance had been guided by the principle of creating a national elite, with a limited number of places available to the brightest and the best school leavers. The adoption of the Robbins Principle by successive governments has ensured that the supply of university places since 1963 has broadly kept pace with the demand from students “qualified by ability and attainment”. The letter, but not the spirit, of this principle has been followed throughout the Great Uni Expansion.