The UK has some of the world’s leading toll bridges. But a minority of toll bridges fail to deliver good outcomes for their drivers. Figures show that nearly three in 10 drivers have still not reached their destination within an hour of crossing a toll bridge. The government will crack down on these rip-off toll bridges, reducing the number of drivers they can carry.
If a minister made an announcement of this kind, you would wonder if they had lost their mind. But higher education policy has become so overloaded with fallacious economic and cultural reasoning over recent years that we scarcely register the full absurdity of Rishi Sunak’s announcement this week that his government would crack down on “rip-off” university degrees.
Sunak’s logic is a bleak one that would have sounded both ridiculous and nihilistic prior to the Cameron government. Students and taxpayers expect a “good return on the significant financial investment they make in higher education”, the government tells us. The problem is that some courses fail to deliver “good outcomes”, and so the government plans to cap the numbers they can recruit.
A “good outcome” means that a student has completed their studies, then gone on to a graduate-level job or postgraduate education within 15 months. When this state of affairs fails to materialise, it is apparently a direct consequence of what that individual was taught at university.
Critics have already pointed out that capping numbers on a course will act as an indicator that the course is poor, though that presumably is the whole point. Others have argued that the policy will reduce access to higher education for students from already disadvantaged backgrounds. In a class-based society such as Britain’s, the key influence over future income and employment is family background. Higher education can push back against that, but it doesn’t negate it. Universities with a good track record of widening access also inevitably risk worse “outcomes”, in Sunak’s terms.
The wider ideological problem is that, for politicians of all parties in the post-Thatcher era, the education system has carried the burden of sustaining the illusion of a classless society. Whenever inconvenient evidence arises that class does still count for a great deal, this then gets blamed on universities for not having magicked it away.
The idea that it is the function of a university to “deliver” certain labour market “outcomes” to “investors”, like some kind of glorified annuity, is such a palpably stupid one that its genesis needs some reconstruction. For several decades, economists have used the concept of “human capital” to understand how expenditure on education and training yields economic benefits. When the Blair government introduced university top-up fees of £1,000 a year in 1998 (trebled in 2006), it was partly justified on the basis that graduates do on average earn more than non-graduates, and could therefore make some additional contribution to the system that benefited them.
But beyond the realms of economic metaphor, few seriously argued that higher education was a market or that tuition was a financial investment prior to the reforms of 2010, which included the trebling of fees to £9,000 a year. Since 2010, however, England and Wales have experienced a succession of efforts to construct a competitive market in higher education, each one an effort to correct the failures of its predecessor. As this market has repeatedly failed to behave as its architects hoped, the government has been drawn into ever more futile efforts to discipline and correct it.
The first disappointment was the discovery that, given the choice of what level of fees to charge, all universities chose the maximum, meaning there was no competition on price. In the hope of injecting competition some other way, the cap limiting each university’s student numbers was lifted in 2015. This has led to massive over-recruitment by revenue-hungry universities in the upper half of the league tables, financial insecurity for those at the bottom, and negative experiences for students in either case.
In 2018, the Office for National Statistics declared that outstanding student loans could not be kept entirely off the public balance sheet, undermining much of the fiscal logic of the 2010 policy. Since then, the government has become notably more concerned about the numbers attending university, and the rate of repayment.
Along the way came the teaching excellence framework (TEF) and the Office for Students, which aimed to use powers of audit and regulation to cajole universities to pursue the goals the government believed the market ought to serve. The TEF (whose next round of results is due later this year) already assesses and scores universities in terms of completion rates and graduate employment, making Sunak’s announcement somewhat redundant.
What distinguishes the latest announcement is the precise target: not institutions, but individual courses. While we can all hazard a guess as to which kinds of courses Tory MPs would like to see eliminated (many of them have the word “studies” in the title), the key thing here is how it aligns neoliberal economics with the cultural agenda of the rightwing media.
In economic terms, the government has been ramping up efforts to scrutinise labour market “outcomes” of individual subject areas and courses. Both the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the economic author Philip Augar have been willing to lend this agenda an air of wonkish respectability by providing the government with the analysis it needs to attack the humanities with.
But it is in cultural terms that Sunak’s statement makes the most sense. Everything emanating from this moribund government is now a desperate electoral calculation – an effort to persuade a few thousand pensioners in marginal constituencies to stick with it, a provocation aimed at forcing Labour into an alliance with the “woke”. This new “crackdown” may just be another press release aimed at drawing cultural battlelines. But if it isn’t, what greater confirmation could there be that marketisation has failed than a government getting to stipulate how many students are permitted to take a given university course?
William Davies is a sociologist and political economist. His latest book is Unprecedented? How Covid-19 Revealed the Politics of Our Economy