The ‘university for all’ rhetoric is hurting students and the taxpayer |
Decades of “university for all” rhetoric is hurting students whose degrees no longer pay off, and taxpayers who are stumping up the cost, writes John O’Connell
As A-Level results land this week, hundreds of thousands of teenagers will be weighing the next step in their lives. For decades, students have been pushed a comfortable fiction: go to university, earn more, live better. It has been the default advice of parents, teachers and ministers alike, and for a time it was broadly true. But the world has shifted. The graduate premium is fading, job markets are crowded, and not every degree now leads to a more prosperous life.
As campaigner Paul Wiltshire has discovered, the brutal truth is becoming clear: around 160,000 of last year’s 495,000 university intake will earn the same as, or less than, non-graduates. Among younger graduates aged 21–30, the average premium over non-graduates has fallen from 35 per cent in 2007 to just 21 per cent today. Across the working-age population it has dropped from 50 per cent to 36 per cent.
Too many graduates have flooded the market
The basic economics are straightforward. In the 1950s, only about three........