‘We must crack down on low-value university degrees.” Who claimed that and when? It might have been Rishi Sunak last October. Or Sunak last July. Or Sunak the previous August. Or Nadhim Zahawi five months earlier. Or Michelle Donelan in November 2020. Or Gavin Williamson in May 2020. Or Damian Hinds the previous year. Or Sam Gyimah in 2018. Or Jo Johnson in 2017. Or even Labour’s Margaret Hodge more than 20 years ago.

This time, it was Sunak on the election trail last week. “There are university degrees that are letting young people down,” he told reporters. Around one in five students “would have been financially better off” not going to college and “one in three graduates are in non-graduate jobs”. Sunak promised to scrap “rip-off degrees”, replacing them with 100,000 apprenticeships.

It is an argument that has been reheated so often that it has all but curdled. Yet politicians keep regurgitating it, seeing it as tapping into perceived popular hostility towards the “university-educated liberal elite”.

What, though, is a “low-value” degree? Few politicians who rail about “rip-off courses” or “Mickey Mouse degrees” are willing to specify which ones they want to cull. Clearly, some courses are better than others. But defining the value of a course – to whom and for what purpose – is not an easy task.

For many policymakers (and not just in this government), the worth of a degree is measured primarily by metrics such as the proportion of students who fail to complete their course and the number who land high-skilled, well-paid jobs. Humanities courses or........

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