Does Labour know the point of going to university?

It’s not difficult to pick holes in Education Secretary Gillian Keegan’s plan, publicised over the weekend, to deal with so-called ‘rip off’ university courses. True, there is a serious problem. Too many students are being inveigled into signing up for degrees with low entry requirements, little intellectual stimulation, a high drop-out rate and not a great deal deal of vocational usefulness at the end of it all. Something clearly must be done about this grievous waste of both young people’s time and also a great deal of just-about-managing taxpayers’ money.

The trouble with the government’s answer is that it shows a miserable myopia about the point of higher education. The government’s advice to students is essentially to shop around aggressively, coupled with a limit on admissions to courses that the Office for Students thinks carry no adequate earnings premium.

The idea that the state should turn up its nose at courses because they do not substantially boost earning power is philistine and unattractive (think theology, fine art, or for that matter mediaeval history).