About thirty years ago, the number of students in UK Higher Education (HE) was around 800,000 – one in every six school-leavers. Now, over 2,300,000 – almost half of UK school-leavers – move into HE. The initial impetus for this massive increase in UK student numbers came from the 1963 Murray Robbins Report, which recommended 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”. This thinking was reinforced by the 1997 Dearing Review of Higher Education. Then a further boost to universities’ expansion came from Blair’s New Labour which set a target for half of all school-leavers to attend a university or HE college. The reasoning behind the Robbins Report, the Dearing Review and the Blair government’s policy was that HE was seen as a public good that would provide a skilled workforce, opportunities through increased social mobility and a more educated, cultured, civil society.
In seeking to send about half of all school-leavers to HE, Britain was following the example of other advanced countries such as Switzerland, Norway, Australia, Japan and South Korea. In fact, the only striking exception to this policy seems to be Germany, where less than a third of school-leavers progress to university-level education and a much higher percentage move into vocational training or apprenticeships than in Britain.
However, despite a tripling in the number of university graduates since the 1980s, many UK employers have been struggling to find qualified job applicants, especially in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects, and have increasingly been forced to recruit from abroad to fill their more skilled positions. Even worse, universities themselves have had so little confidence in the quality of graduates they are producing that the number of foreign academics working in UK HE shot up from 16,700 in 1995/6 to 57,500 by 2015/16. Moreover, a massive surplus of graduates flooding onto the jobs market has made it increasingly difficult for them to find the graduate jobs they were as good as promised by the universities’ glossy marketing materials. Over one-in-ten childminders now have a degree, as do one-in-six call-centre staff and about one-in-four air cabin crew and theme-park attendants.
Given that so many other countries have adopted a similar policy of getting close to half of school-leavers into HE, the problems in the UK seem to come not so much from the policy itself, but rather from the way this policy was implemented. There are several aspects of the implementation that could cause concern. Firstly, in order to find sufficient school-leavers to fill their courses, many universities have significantly lowered their entrance requirements. Recent figures show that around 51 per cent of school-leavers were accepted into university with 3 Ds or worse at A level. There was even one university that had 97 courses available for students with just 2 Es at A level. Were these really the people the Robbins Report called “qualified by ability and attainment”?
A second issue is that much of the universities’ expansion has occurred in subjects where there is no clearly identifiable need in the jobs market. Despite a significant rise in the number of HE students, the number studying Engineering, Pure Maths, Chemistry and Architecture actually fell. But there were massive increases in the numbers studying Psychology, Social Sciences, Media Studies, Photography, Forensic Science and Creative Arts and Design. In one year, there were over 15,000 Psychology graduates and only 720 training places available. Similarly, universities were educating around 8,500 Forensic Science students in the UK and yet there are only around 2,000 people in total working in the sector. A typical Forensic Science job may have over 1,000 applicants. The situation was so bad that one police chief described Forensic Science degrees as “a savage waste of young people’s time and parents’ money”. Even in Law, a subject where a student might have a reasonable expectation of a job and a career, our universities are churning out over 17,000 Law graduates a year for only 5,400 training places.
A third concern is the apparent devaluation of the value of a degree. In the 1970s, around 33 per cent of graduates achieved a First or 2:1. By 2015, the situation had completely reversed with no fewer than 67 per cent being awarded either a First or a 2:1. When about 400,000 graduates are flooding onto the jobs market each year and 268,000 have Firsts or Upper Seconds – 84,000 Firsts and 184,000 2:1s – it becomes difficult for potential employers to distinguish between the genuinely gifted and the less able job applicants.