Why a record number of university places might not be a good thing

A-Level results are announced today, and with it the happy news that a record number of university places have been offered. About 42 per cent of 18-year-olds in England will go to university, but we’re still some way behind the world’s leader, South Korea, where two-thirds of young people achieve a degree. And how’s that going?

Seongho Lee, a professor of education at Chung-Ang University, criticizes what he calls ‘college education inflation’. Not all students are suited for college, he says, and across institutions, their experience can be inconsistent. ‘It’s not higher education anymore,’ he says. ‘It’s just an extension of high school.’ And sub-par institutions leave graduates ill-prepared for the job market. In recent years, the unemployment rate for new graduates in Korea has topped 30 per cent.

Korea is not alone; in the West it has been increasingly obvious for some time that there is no economic demand for such large numbers of university places, as this depressing piece in May pointed out:

‘The majority of jobs being created today do not require degree-level qualifications.