Our broken university system is setting future Britain up to fail

Two news stories this week should strike terror into the hearts of anyone concerned with the British higher education system.

First, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) released figures on the impact of a university degree on earning potential, and found that sometimes it just isn’t worth it.

By the age of 29, men who studied arts subjects on average earn less than those from similar backgrounds who didn’t go to university at all – and are of course saddled with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt.

Then yesterday, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service revealed that one in three applicants received an unconditional offer in 2018, up an eye-watering 2,000 per cent since 2013.

This has sparked panic that pupils with unconditional offers won’t work as hard for their exams, and therefore attain lower grades. This not only makes the school look bad, but also affects pupils’ future potential, as poor A-level results can continue to haunt them after university.

This follows news last week that Bath Spa University (whose former vice chancellor was paid £800,000 last year) has moved to unconditional offers only. To incentivise candidates both to accept these places and to keep working, the university will pay pupils who meet their predicted grades a £750 bonus each.

That’s to say nothing of the hallowed institutions offering perks like gym memberships, discounted accommodation, and free technology to inveigle applicants to choose them.

If any of this shocks you, it shouldn’t. The higher education system is riddled with perverse financial incentives that make such behaviour inevitable.

Of course universities (particularly the newer, less highly ranked institutions) are doing everything they can to attract students. It quite literally pays the bills: every new matriculant comes with a shiny government-backed handout of £9,250 per year.

It doesn’t matter how well these students do at university or beyond, or even what you bother to teach them. In fact, arts students are much better value than scientists and engineers – more independent learning, less expensive lab equipment.

Rankings matter too, but with bribes like unconditional offers, iPads, and cash bonuses, it should be easy to tempt a hopeful 18-year-old to overlook the smallprint about their future prospects at New Hustle University.

And no, the fault does not rest with those starry-eyed teenagers being aggressively marketed to.

Which of us didn’t make some dire mistakes as adolescents? My worst was camping in the Peak District in February, but it could just as easily have been trusting a glitzy prospectus promising me three years of fun and the freedom not to stress about my exams – if I hadn’t had decent guidance.

Many school careers advisers offer nothing of the sort, and with tight budgets (not to mention how rapidly the labour market is changing), they can’t exactly be expected to.

Moreover, it is hardly the fault of pupils and parents if the message trumpeted for decades that a degree – any degree – is a passport to a successful career has become gospel.

It was true once, but times are changing. The IFS estimates that the average improvement on earnings for male graduates at the age of 29 is just six per cent.

And if women get a higher premium (26 per cent), that’s because many traditionally female-dominated jobs like nurses and teachers didn’t used to require degrees but now do, limiting options for female non-graduates.

Of course, these are averages. For the most part, a degree is still a smart career choice, but what and where matter immensely. Law, medicine, and economics have a 20 per cent return, studying at Cambridge boosts earning potential by 30 per cent, and attending a Russell Group university, even for an arts subject, is generally beneficial.

But these aren’t the places or courses scrambling to get bums on seats by offering flashy perks.

So who suffers? The indebted student saddled with a useless degree, the graduates from other universities forced to subsidise them with their loan repayments, the taxpayer when the system inevitably collapses, and businesses of tomorrow, faced with a labour cohort who have entirely the wrong skills.

The only party that faces no consequences is the university itself – until it goes bankrupt and asks for a government bailout, that is.

So if in a decade we realise that we’ve become a nation of unemployable exam-flunkers with degrees in underwater basket-weaving or budgie-spanking, at least we’ll know how we got here.