Blair’s mass university sham should be ended, not expanded
Tony Blair’s ambition to see at least half of all British school-leavers go on to higher education took two decades to achieve.
Now university leaders have doubled down on what was always a controversial target. The government should be aiming for 70 per cent of school-leavers to enrol in tertiary education, says Universities UK (UUK).
Having announced this headline-grabbing initiative, you might overlook vice-chancellors’ rather more substantive demand: a plea for the government to restore financial stability for universities by ending attacks on international student numbers.
UUK wants ministers to reconsider (ie scrap) restrictions introduced by the last Tory government that prevent international students arriving in Britain with their entire families. In return, university leaders will make the supreme sacrifice of acknowledging “public concern about immigration”.
The funding model for Britain’s universities has created a dependence on foreign students, with their eye-watering tuition fees. So long as ministers continue to fret about unsustainable levels of immigration, that source of revenue will be at risk. Hence ex-universities minister David Willetts saying that the debate itself has become “increasingly politicised” – metropolitan code for “too many people disagreeing with us”.
His contribution to the UUK proposals includes the suggestion that student visa holders be removed from headline migration statistics, a sleight of hands that would have the effect of fooling citizens into believing that immigration was coming down, even if it was not.
The 70 per cent target which is ostensibly at the core of UUK’s proposals will generate an appropriate amount of deflection.
Blair’s original 50 per cent target has not received universal support, either from students or from industry. The massive expansion in university enrolment had to be funded somehow, and the last Labour government chose to plunge future generations of students into long-term debt.
The alternative route to employment – on-the-job vocational training – avoided such traps and provided the nation with skills it actually needed. But, despite this choice being lauded by ministers as just as attractive as a university career, it fell behind in the prestige stakes.
This was despite universities scrabbling around to invent degree courses from which even Mickey Mouse might want to disassociate himself. The higher education sector ended up marketing employment-repelling degrees for 40 grand a pop.
UUK’s intervention also inevitably makes the case for more central government funding, including the restoration of maintenance grants, even as ministers reportedly consider a major hike in tuition fees for domestic students.
Meanwhile, one in four young people leave primary school without basic literacy skills. Might the country benefit more from investment in our schools rather than from the creation of more meaningless university courses?
Such a tin-eared approach by university leaders encapsulates the absurd degree of entitlement that is still enjoyed by our elites.
There is indeed a crisis in education. That cannot be addressed by plunging even more students into debt to pay for courses of zero academic value, while sneaking ever greater numbers of immigrants into Britain at the behest of the arrogance of our universities’ leaders.