When Anthony Kluk set off for Leeds University to read physics with two As and
two Bs in his pocket he thought it was going to be the first day of the rest
of his life: a bright new start in a brave new world. It didn’t quite work
out like that.
“Once I got to university I found myself repeating the material I had studied
for the last two years. I was forced to spend hours in the laboratory doing
what can only be described as watching paint dry. It was so tedious that
going back to halls and doing homework was the last thing on my mind.
“And since Leeds was filled with alcohol-fuelled distractions, as well as my
complete lack of motivation, I started every day with a hangover. I decided
to cut my losses and start my career.” One year into his course he dropped
out. Two years on he is happily employed as a corporate banker.
Similar self-doubt has also crept into the cloistered quads of Oxbridge. By
the end of her first year reading English Lucy Tobin found herself sitting
on the manicured lawns of Lady Margaret Hall on the banks of the Cherwell
and wondering why. A year earlier the main thing on her mind had been not
Alfred Lord Tennyson but Tanya from Footballers’ Wives, as she did a gap
year on a tabloid newspaper.
“The allure of Oxford swung my decision towards academia, but there are still
times when I’m sitting in a crowded lecture theatre and wonder if I did the
right thing swapping a salary for Malory.”
None of this is what Tony Blair wants to hear with his vision of a country
where half the population is university-educated.
At first glance the need for a degree is a no-brainer. Professions allow entry
only to graduates, and many companies insist on recruits with a degree — or
even two. Yet employers also insist that a degree alone is not an accurate
measure of employability; indeed 40% of them believe the qualification has
become devalued. Some of the most important skills — numeracy, literacy and
communication — are supposed to be instilled in school but are still lacking
in many students emerging from university.
So does a degree really mean anything any more? At £3,000 a year in most cases
is it worth the mock-vellum it is inscribed on? Increasingly students and
their parents (who usually have to stump up for the fees) don’t think so.
THE number of students starting university in the current academic year fell
by 3.6% from 2005, although because the figures were up on 2004 it is not
yet clear if it represents the beginning of a downward trend. What is
certain is that it reflects the leap in tuition fees from just over £1,000 a
year to £3,000. And with the top universities now lobbying for fees to rise
even higher, possibly doubling to £6,000, those who are taking up what was
once seen as a prestigious privilege are beginning to see it as a risky
business proposition.
Eytan Austin, 20, saw his experience in those terms before pulling out of what
he calls a “poor quality” course at Thames Valley University. “I enrolled in
events management, but I quickly realised I would be better off learning
independently,” he said.
“There was a day and a half of lessons per week, but they were teaching us how
to be employees when I want to be an entrepreneur. I’m sure it was helpful
for some people; but for me the course fees were not worth it. Now I’m in
the real world I’m learning from my mistakes rather than sitting through
lectures. Since dropping out I’ve got no regrets at all. I’m just really
happy with life.”
Drop-out rates, particularly among the “new universities”, mostly former
polytechnics, are disturbingly high and rising. London South Bank and East
London universities as well as Bolton University all have projected drop-out
rates of more than 27%.
It is not just those who drop out who are challenging the value-added nature
of a university education. Those who are eager to stick it through are
wondering if they are getting their money’s worth.
When Bristol University cut teaching time in history for third-year
undergraduates from six hours a week to two last year, it triggered protests
from both the students and their parents. Etan Smallman, 20, a history
student, reckoned he was being short-changed. “We expect better services for
more money, not reduced ones,” he said.
One Bristol undergraduate told the university’s student newspaper: “I thought
I was paying to be educated by leading academics, not for a library
membership and a reading list.”
There is evidence now of a student revolt that has more in common with a
consumer watchdog campaign than the campus politics of the 1960s. A maverick
website called www.williseemytutor.com rates universities on
student-to-tutor ratios and produces some damning comments. Several
universities are rated by their own students as “rubbish” or
“shocking”. The academic departments concerned are talking about legal action.
But so are some students and parents. Jack Rabinowicz, an education lawyer
whose daughter is a student at a northern university, complains that the
number of seminars and tutorials seems to be decreasing drastically.
Rabinowicz would like to see legally binding contracts spelling out what
students are entitled to in return for their fees.
“Some students have one-sided contracts with the obligations on the student
not to break university rules,” he said. “What is needed is a contract that
the university has an obligation not to employ crap lecturers. I had a land
law lecturer who was usually drunk. These people still exist.” Rabinowicz
suggests that “mass actions for compensation — a hundred students getting
together and claiming the return of £1,000 each — could be worthwhile”. THE
question is how much of this growing malaise is due to the government’s 50%
target for pupils in higher education and how much is the result of a school
system that does not teach students how to cope before they are herded into
university.
“Now that kids are more force-fed at school and less educated to work
independently, they need tutor-time,” said Alex Farquarson, who has one
child studying in London and another at Sheffield. “I get cross when my
daughter comes home and says she is sick of trying to work out what an essay
question means while her tutor reads a book somewhere.”
Alison Wolf, professor of public sector management at King’s College London
and a respected authority on tertiary education, agrees that universities
are accepting people who haven’t been prepared well enough at school.
“There is an issue here about whether our system encourages universities to
accept people on courses who can’t cope with them,” she said. “Universities
are under tremendous pressure to fill places if they don’t want their
business model to go down the plughole.”
She disagrees with the target of 50% of young people going to university and
challenges the idea that it is necessitated by “the supposed skills needs of
the workforce”.
“I think the market should find its own level,” she said. “Graduates are
coming out and getting jobs that do not need graduate level skills. I am
really opposed to the idea that the government should decide how many people
should go to university.”
Wolf’s own son read classics at Oxford but is now “an extremely poor”
self-employed musician. “If and when he gives up being a self-employed
musician will he be better off with a degree? I don’t know.” The American
sociologist Charles Murray argues that only people with an IQ of 115 or
better, which he puts at 15% of the population, are equipped to do well at
university. According to Murray a good university education should teach
“advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the
intellectual capacity of most people”. Struggling students, he suggests, are
like someone “athletically unqualified” trying to cope with top-level sport.
Murray suggests the other problem is social pressure: middle class kids go to
university because it is what their parents want rather than what society
needs. “Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good
carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason — the list goes on
and on — is difficult . . . ”
This is a lesson that the influx of skilled eastern European craftsmen is
rapidly teaching us in Britain. Yet the old class-driven attitudes prevail
and can lead to traumatic mistakes.
Philip Kitcher liked his job as a senior nurse earning £28,000 a year, but he
thought he might improve himself by training as a lawyer to become a nurse
advocate. With no A-levels, he applied as a mature student to six
universities.
Three accepted him. He chose the University of Greenwich, which in 2001
offered him a place on its LLB course over the phone, saying his nursing
qualification was the equivalent of two A-levels. A year later, he felt
badly misled, having lost his place through an external exam.
“I am £15,000 in debt, have no job and have just failed my first year exams,”
he said at the time. “My confidence has been knocked sideways. So has that
of many of the people on the course. The university is being cagey about
just how many failed the exams, because some people are now doing resits,
but last year one-in-three first years [30%] didn't go on to the second year.
“Since I now know that at the end of the second and third years there are
further failures, I feel angry. I was never told that there was such a low
probability of actually getting the qualification I need. And I don't think
any of the other students who failed were told either.
“If I had been told that the failure rate was so high and the chances of
success so questionable I would have thought very hard before turning my
life upside down. It is a big con. I feel that I have been duped. Every year
Greenwich takes lots of [law] students who will fail. It takes their money
and they run up huge debts.”
Kitcher said that some tutors were unacceptably rude. “When I asked how we did
in our last piece of coursework, one tutor said, ‘You were all crap’. I
said, ‘Could you be more specific?’ and the answer was, ‘No, wait for your
marks’.” Since leaving Greenwich, he has gained a vocational degree in
emergency nursing and is now back doing what he likes best. Greenwich said
it was reviewing the curriculum and support offered to law students.
Readers of Tom Sharpe (sadly not yet on the compulsory list for undergraduates
studying English) might hear echoes of “Wilt” syndrome, the brutal apathy
acquired by his hapless polytechnic lecturer required to give poetry lessons
to “plumbers II and gasfitters III”.
There is a growing dysfunction between the teachers and the taught that
reflects flaws in the structure of the higher education system. A prime
reason for reduced teaching time is the requirement, set by government, for
universities to produce more research. This, rather than time spent on
teaching, significantly determines a university’s state funding. When it
comes to a university’s income from students, the prime requirement is
quantity.
At the same time the conveyor belt is fed by the fact that a degree is
increasingly a basic essential for young people looking for almost any sort
of job. According to Bah-ram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education
Policy Institute, “there is not a career left you do not need a degree for.
I don’t know about chiropody or massage but physiotherapy you need a degree
for, likewise nursing”.
Paradoxically, it is these new degrees that have the most obvious value as
proof of a skill. If a “degree” is another name for a vocational diploma, we
don’t want to be messed around by unqualified physiotherapists or masseurs.
Do such skills have to be taught in a “university”, however? Traditionally
they were learnt through apprenticeships and day-release courses at
technical colleges. They still are in Germany, France and Switzerland, where
the proportions of young people at university are between 30% and 40%,
according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
And then there are the unskilled degrees, which equip students for nothing in
particular except passing the first barrier in getting some sort of job. As
Murray puts it, a university degree today, particularly in the arts, is
simply “a screening device for employers”. Without one, your application is
simply binned.
The second screening device is quality. Since the rebranding of polytechnics
in 1992, employers put stock not only on how good a degree is but on the
subject and the university at which it was earned.
Under those circumstances it might be reasonable to expect higher student
satisfaction and better job prospects from the members of the Russell Group,
the 20-strong self-appointed “premier league” of British universities. Yet
they are keen to call themselves “research-in-tensive” — which, as the
Bristol experience has shown, does not automatically result in the best
teaching.
Many academics, perhaps particularly those at Oxford and Cambridge and other
top-flight universities, regard general degree-level teaching even to bright
undergraduates as “a bore”. Nurturing the young is far less important to
their own careers than publications on South African tort law or Renaissance
theatre techniques. This is a world in which John Reid’s epithet “not fit
for purpose” comes to mind. WHAT about the value of a university education
in assuring future personal prosperity? The government would like us to
believe that a degree buys a higher salary. Yes, this is valid as a rule of
thumb, but it depends on whose thumb.
As Wolf points out, the degrees with a high return are the quantitative ones:
“Maths, physics, chemistry, the hard sciences, law, medicine. They earn you
money . . . An arts degree is not the thing to do if you want to make a
fortune.”
According to the government’s 2003 white paper, The Future of Higher
Education, a degree can bring an additional 50% to 64% in salary. Even
today, however, 41% of members of the Institute of Directors do not have a
university degree. Furthermore, the government’s determination to push more
young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into the best universities does
not always pay off. The Council for Industry and Higher Education has found
that graduates from poorer backgrounds go on to earn less than graduates
from professional families with identical qualifications — by as much as 16%
in the case of Oxbridge graduates.
Increasingly, large numbers of graduates emerging even from the Russell Group
universities are finding themselves just one of the crowd and are drifting
before they sort out what they can do for a living.
Hannah Fletcher signed up for a degree in Chinese at Cambridge but dropped out
because her course “bore little relevance to the real world”. Part of her
disillusion set in with seeing the finals-year girl in the next room spend
months dressed in grubby tracksuit pants eating pasta in her room, swotting
away and winning a first — only to end up burnt out and taking a job as a
cleaner while she waited for decent offers.
Fletcher has seen “one bright, articulate graduate after another wave their
devalued degree in front of indifferent employers”. Of her contemporaries,
“one friend is working in a cider factory. Another has gone to teach English
in Japan on a second gap year, while a third, with nothing better to do, has
gone to visit her”. The most steady job any of them has is as an NHS
administrator, taken to pay off debts.
So was it all a waste of time, effort and money? Wolf thinks it is still
rational to go to university as “having a degree still pushes you up the
potential shortlist for jobs”. She added: “In a society where lots of people
have got degrees it is likely to go on being rational.”
The tipping point will be when so many people are going to university that
“just having a degree does not earn you very much. Then the question will be
— is it worth it? Will I be just as likely to do well getting three years’
work experience?” THE old idea of university education was to broaden the
mind and to build independence and character; but it was also absolutely and
unashamedly elitist. Evelyn Waugh defined this dream in Brideshead
Revisited: “The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in
which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the
nation while they are growing up.”
Students continue to find university rewarding and fun, a place for social and
sexual adventure. But the dream was over long before Waugh wrote it. The
real truth was glimpsed decades ago in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Malcolm
Brad-bury’s The History Man, both the products of bitter experience.
Universities today are driven by government targets, employers’ requirements,
high fees and financially pressed students looking for a return on
investment.
The Blairite concept of educational democratisation has turned the ivory
towers into degree factories, turning out a product that has lost its niche
status in a flooded market. Ironic when a factory was what the gifted young
once went to university to escape.
Additional reporting: Lucy Tobin
THE DEGREE FOR REALISTS
What’s a degree worth?
The government estimates that graduates earn £400,000 more over their careers
than non-graduates. But last year a survey from Swansea University put the
graduate premium much lower. It found that men with a degree can expect to
see their lifetime earnings increased by £141,539 compared with those with
just A-levels; for women the bonus is £157,982.
Will I be shortchanged on teaching?
While medical and dentistry students can expect more than 20 hours of teaching
a week, that falls to just eight hours of classes for historians and nine
for language students, according to an independent study.
What about getting a job?
Among the worst universities for jobs are Greenwich in London, where more than
one in 10 graduates is unemployed six months after graduating, Bedfordshire
(better known under its old name Luton) and Wolverhampton. Among the 10
topping the graduate employment charts are King’s College and City
University, both in London. At both, graduate unemployment is less than 4%.
And if I want to make money?
The lesson here is: think maths and science, not the arts. The degrees
commanding the highest salaries are medicine (including veterinary
medicine), dentistry, engineering and economics; those with the lowest
salaries include fine art, architecture, archeology, media studies and
drama. Graduates of Imperial College London, the London School of Economics
and Cambridge earn the most; those of Swansea, Lancaster and Lincoln are
among the lowest paid. The average starting salary for graduates is £17,029
(2004).
Where am I most likely to drop out?
As many as one in three students drops out of courses at some British
universities. Those with the worst projected drop-out rates include Bolton,
where 35% of students fail to finish their degrees, London South Bank
(27.6%) and East London (27.1%). By contrast hardly anyone fails to finish
degrees at elite universities such as Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol, where
the drop-out rate is less than 2%.
