University Challenged

The expansion of the universities (turning them into unis) has been disastrous, for, I think, three main reasons: the cost to the national economy; the financial and other costs to individual students; and the effect of the expansion on the universities themselves and, through them, on public discourse generally.

(1) The costs to the economy must immensely outweigh any benefits (But when has any definitive or even thorough cost-benefit analysis been done?)

• There are of course all those direct costs in the form of the construction and maintenance of buildings and the wages of all the employees etc. plus (I would guess) a loss in loans that aren’t repaid.
• And there’s the opportunity cost of the removal from the labour market of all those potentially productive workers.
• With all these people missing from the economy another effect has been to encourage immigration and demands for it from businesses—something that itself, apart from any other way in which it might be undesirable, has economic costs in the pressure it puts on housing and the health service etc.
• Another effect is to distort local economies all over the country, as students migrate back and forth between their homes and where they study. When so many itinerant students compete with locals for housing, it must push up prices. It has other harmful effects too. The centre of Newcastle, for instance, is blighted by a lot of large, ugly tower blocks which house students in term time and are (I suppose) mostly empty out of term.
• Another damaging long-term effect is the creation of an immense vested interest opposed to any rational reduction in the size of the so-called university system—an interest that includes not only the employees of these so-called universities but all those, including landlords, from whom the universities, their employees and students buy good and services.
• The Dearing Report of 1997 contained appendices that did tried to quantify the benefits of university education to the economy, but left the question anybody’s guess. The appendices found it impossible to say whether or not Higher Education makes people more productive and concluded that a subsidised Higher Education system is “socially wasteful”. What attempts have been made since to quantify the economic benefits of universities, I don’t know. What I think I do know is that the expansion has been the effect not of reasoning but the magic influence of cliché, words like ‘elitist’ doing the work of sticks at one end, while words like ‘investment in skills’ doing the work of carrots at the other.

(2) The more people who go to ‘university’, the less for each will be the economic benefit. The likelihood is that the cost to most of them (not just the direct costs in fees paid and the cost of maintenance but the opportunity cost of wages and promotions foregone) is much greater than any benefit.

There must be costs of other kinds for a great many students too. Having spent my own working life in higher education, I cannot believe that it suits half the population to spend three years of early adulthood studying. Both the inclination and the capacity to study—to spend one’s time between the ages of 18 and 21 reading/writing/thinking—must be unusual. If a lot of students suffer from depression and other forms of mental ill-health (or are just fed-up) it isn’t surprising. When only a few went to university there was no pressure to go unless one felt especially fitted for it; now that half the population goes, the pressure to be amongst them, fitted or not, is overwhelming.

(3) And then there is the effect on the universities themselves, on the meaning of the word education and on the distinction between it and training.

In 1960, I think about 3% went to university; when 16 times that number go, it is impossible that the institution remains the same. Although it retains the name, the ‘university’ is inevitably transformed, i.e., hollowed out. If the new, immensely bigger intake can’t cope with university work as it was, that work has to be changed to something it can cope with; standards have to drop; it is inevitable; and that they will drop more in some places than others is inevitable too. And as standards drop, of course, grades will rise. It’s the See-Saw Effect.

And, so, new, curious inequalities are created. Fifty or sixty years ago—although some universities were no doubt better than others or, if not, had more prestige—a university education was more or less the same thing and recognised to be so no matter where it was undertaken or what subjects were studied. And the monetary benefits to the students were broadly similar, no matter where or what they studied. Now, although fees and the cost of maintenance might be more or less the same everywhere, the value (both economically and as education) of the degrees awarded varies enormously. Thousands upon thousands of students (I guess) will never repay their student loans or make up for what they have lost by being out of the labour market for three years. And the value as education of a great many degrees must be even smaller than their monetary value.

It isn’t too strong a word to say that expansion has corrupted the universities, a corruption that is most plainly visible from the outside in grade inflation. (Though no doubt in other things too—like a liking for Chinese money or the news that the bill to protect free speech in the universities is to be weakened because it might lead to expensive court cases, i.e. that the government is to treat university finances as more important than the very purpose for which universities exist. If that isn’t corruption, what is?) When anything and everything that might be studied is called education, our understanding of what education is has become an uneducated one and the distinction between it and training lost, inevitably to the harm of both.

What looks like another awful consequence of the great expansion is the spread of something very like a totalitarianism of thought. Democratic states as well as undemocratic ones have their official beliefs–even what you might call their ‘ideologies’–which they not only, in various ways, press their citizens to uphold but may enforce by law–regardless of how far these officially sanctioned beliefs might differ from the private beliefs of the citizens. And the official beliefs of the modern British state—and of the political classes more generally from which those who run it are drawn—are the opposite of the privately held and officially unsanctioned beliefs of the vast majority of the citizens. Not only that, but our political classes no more base their private lives on their official beliefs than did the political classes of the Soviet Union. They might, as politicos, disbelieve in the reality of biological sex but, as men and women, at home (or, even, in the office, getting a grip of one another or looking at pornography on their phones), it is as real to them as to you or me. They might, as politicos, believe that Covid is a deadly plague making it necessary for them to shut down the economy and curtail the customary freedoms of daily life; privately and on the quiet, they are happy to party as if they themselves risked nothing worse than the common cold.

But, however inauthentic the state ideology might be it is still capable of being acted upon: encouraging us to think we are ‘gender fluid’, requiring people at work to identify themselves with slash-marked ‘pronouns’, undermining the traditional understanding of marriage by legalising the homosexual kind, ‘decolonising’ school and university curricula, policing ‘non-crime hate incidents’, permitting mass illegal immigration, promoting critical race theory, discovering everywhere individually unconscious and collectively institutional bias, ‘cancelling’ speakers in—of all places—universities, promoting ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ of every kind except of opinion …

The beliefs and behaviours that affront common-sense and common life as it has always been lived everywhere, except how it is officially supposed to be lived here and now, can scarcely be counted. They have spread, one is tempted to think, everywhere.

Except that they haven’t, as Brexit demonstrated. What Kensington and Hampstead (and no doubt Jesmond and Gosforth) assumed was incontestable, Hartlepool and Sunderland showed was not. The spread of the official ideology has been immense but is still limited, to something less than all that 50% of the population most susceptible to it, that 50% which has spent the greatest time in the state-influenced education system. Reducing that figure to (eventually, what, say?) 10%, would not only save an immense amount of money but save the universities from their presently corrupted state and restore something like sanity to public discourse. It might even stop football commentators saying things like ‘Taking the knee promotes global inclusivity.’

Duke Maskell writes a Substack newsletter Reactionary Essays, which you might like to follow here.

If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!

Please follow and like us: