The Conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott described one of the boons of student life as the opportunity “to look for some meaning in the things that have greatly moved mankind”. Higher education, he wrote, should be an interval during which the undergraduate will have “learned something to help him lead a more significant life”.
On that basis, one suspects that Oakeshott would have given short shrift to the dispiriting assumptions underlying Rishi Sunak’s proposed new crackdown on “low-value degrees” – a status to be defined principally by reference to earnings after graduation. Endorsing language that is gratuitously insulting to academics, Mr Sunak has pledged to cap numbers on what his government describes as “rip-off” university degrees that don’t lead to a well-paid, highly skilled job. This is a dismally narrow and instrumental view of higher education. It casually disregards the myriad benefits that a degree course can offer a young person, beyond a job at the end of it. From an enhanced capacity to think critically, to the widening of social horizons and the pleasures of independent study, attending university offers far more than a mere route to the workplace.
But Mr Sunak’s reductionist rhetoric is also disingenuous. For all the performative sympathy for graduates stuck on low incomes, his government is primarily concerned with reducing Whitehall’s liability for the student debt that has to be written off as a consequence. To that end, the government has already changed the income thresholds at which graduates are required to start paying off loans. The threat to cap – and even close – courses is another move designed to limit Treasury exposure to the failing fees-based model of higher education.
Adequate quality control is a must at every university. But the consequences of these plans would be deeply unfair and inegalitarian. The proposed caps would be likely to have next to no effect on Oxbridge and the Russell Group universities, whose prestigious brands and demographic intake ensure more students go on to better-paid jobs. The endangered “rip-off” courses will turn out to be overwhelmingly in less glamorous institutions and poorer regions, disproportionately attended by less well-off and minority ethnic students. This is socially regressive policymaking.
Just as insidiously, the government’s crude definition of value will pile pressure on departments specialising in the creative arts, which have borne the brunt of funding cuts in recent years. At the weekend, in an excoriating critique of the government’s approach, a former architect of the marketised higher education model condemned the “dismal ranking of academic subjects based on ‘economic return’ and endless cuts to arts and humanities”. As well as underestimating the public good delivered by creative graduates, wrote Polly Mackenzie, a director of policy in the 2010-15 coalition government, “such bean-counting is antithetical to the creative, innovative economy the government is striving for”.
Quite. It might be added that it is the government’s job, rather than that of lecturers on campuses, to create a labour market that can provide good-quality, well-paid jobs for graduates. Mr Sunak has suggested that this assault on “low-value” degrees will be accompanied by a new focus on apprenticeships. No one who has witnessed the abject efforts of previous Conservative governments in this area will hold their breath. In the meantime, Mr Sunak should take some time out to read Oakeshott’s The Idea of a University.