One of the least remarked-upon scandals of recent years is the mis-selling of Higher Education. Pupils are now told, from a very early age, that university should be the great goal in schooling; that there is some kind of binary distinction between those with initials after their name and the also-rans. David Willetts, the Universities Minister, remarked recently that graduates make on average £100,000 more over a lifetime — a windfall which he says his government may penalise them for in the form of a graduate tax. There is a scam going on here which the young ought to be alerted to.
This year, around 160,000 school-leavers will miss out on the university place which they sought. Some will have failed to study sufficiently hard for their A-levels, others will have fallen into the gap between the demand for places and their supply, but almost all will feel sorely disappointed. Such is the pressure and expectation (schools often judge themselves on how many sixth-formers they pack off to Freshers’ Week) that a life not spent on campus is somehow deemed a failure — a fundamental misreading of both the modern economy and the worrying diversity in quality of degree courses.
Politicians have done as much as anyone else to exacerbate this fear and uncertainty. The last government aggressively marketed its tuition fee policy by insisting that the average graduate earns £400,000 more over a lifetime than the average non-graduate — so why should they mind coughing up? And even though this official estimate has since plummeted to the figure Mr Willetts now quotes, the same argument is being peddled. Universities — old and new — now sell degrees as though they are investments with astonishingly good returns.
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