Signal and Noise

The government has proposed to "crack down on rip-off university degrees". This means that courses with "poor outcomes" - measured in terms of dropouts, low ensuing employment rates and wages, and high initial costs and student debt - will have their enrollments capped. Inevitably exceptions will be made for strategically important courses, like medicine and engineering, and no one seriously expects the measure to affect the Russell Group. This is clearly about reducing access to higher education in the service of class prejudice as much as reducing costs to the Exchequer, hence the positive reception in the Tory press after years during which columnists who did Classics or PPE at Oxford have insisted that we must do away with "mickey mouse" degrees along with the divisive nonsense of critical theory. Whether this latest initiative will actually amount to much, or is simply another culture war spasm, only time will tell. But what I want to concentrate on here is not the all-too-obvious motivations of a Conservative government in its death-throes but rather the nature of the criticism that has been levelled at it. This has predominantly rested on a dichotomy of the instrumental and the cultural: the claim that the government know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The state cannot help but think of university education in instrumental terms, specifically the contribution of trained graduates to the economy, just as it necessarily thinks of healthcare in terms of maximising and reproducing the labour force. That this should put it at odds with those who adopt an aesthetic defence - that education is a good in itself - is in no way surprising, but it also does not mean that the government of the day is therefore philistine, as many of its critics have suggested. Likewise it does not mean that those advocating the civilising qualities of study are not free of snobbery and prejudice. One grimly amusing aspect of the criticism has been the emphasis on the democratic nature of higher education: that it should be available to all and that in capping courses we are discriminating against students from poorer and minority backgrounds. But higher education in the UK has never been (and probably never will be) available to all and it remains (and probably will remain) a social hierarchy in which the poor and minorities are systematically disadvantaged.

The suggestion that the government should adopt a more holistic approach, committing to increase gross national happiness rather than just gross national product, sounds nice but it runs up against this very problem: that higher education in the UK is selective and exclusive (consider the regular anxiety over "grade inflation"). The traditional justification for this was that educating a minority of the population in expert roles was a positive contribution to society as whole - more doctors, teacher, engineers etc - with the implicit understanding that progressive income taxation would recyle some of the financial rewards accruing to further education into the public treasury for general benefit, including the funding of future access for the disadvantaged. As tax solidarity has declined since the 1970s, and as the introduction of tuition fees has put a very public price on higher education (albeit misleadingly as the actual cost to the public treasury of training a BSc in Engineering is not the same as a BA in French), the emphasis has shifted increasingly to the idea of societal contribution, and that has served to turn up the volume of attacks on courses whose utility is not instrumentally obvious, like critical studies. 

The irony is that if the government were truly instrumental then it would be pushing for greater state direction of education and explicit planning of courses and numbers to feed into a larger economic plan. But the contemporary state does not do that sort of planning. Consequently, the space is inevitably filled by the market - i.e. delegated, diffuse planning in which price signals (e.g. earnings post-graduation for different courses) are meant to work their magic, even though the evidence to date, for example the way that every university promptly chose to charge the maximum in tuition fees after these were raised after 2010, is that there is no actual market. That universities become businesses and students become consumers is simply the logic of this planning absence but it doesn't mean that either behave as such: the businesses don't actually compete and the consumers don't actually decline inadequate offers and take their custom elsewhere. If a student switches from one course to another, or even to another institution, that isn't taken as a judgement on the supplier but on the consumer.

One reason why the market approach doesn't work in practice is that only a small minority of students have a clear career objective, and they are the ones least likely to respond to price signals. If you're determined to be an electrical engineer and want to study at a particular college, you're not going to prefer another university simply because it is 5% cheaper, and you're certainly not going to switch to studying Russian at that first collge because it's on special offer. Not only do many 18-year olds have no idea what career they will pursue, the uncertainty of the future means that they cannot be sure whether a particular degree will still be as relevant and financially rewarding tomorrow as it is today. Beyond the class prejudice and anti-intellectualism, a lot of the contemporary chat about "low-value courses" reflects the wider anxiety over the future impact of technology on job prospects and wages - e.g. that AI will do away with writing so studying English or journalism is a dead-end. The future is unknowable so we should not expect teenagers to be clairvoyant.

The disproportionate impact of the course cap on poor and minority students is evidence of the failure of the strategy of university expansion that commenced in the 1990s. As William Davies noted, "The wider ideological problem is that, for politicians of all parties in the post-Thatcher era, the education system has carried the burden of sustaining the illusion of a classless society". This burden was always going to be insupportable because of the insistence that the state's involvement be limited to arranging the financing while the higher education market would efficiently allocate resources. Instead of directly intervening to remove the class and racial biases in the admissions process, the state allowed the university sector to continue with discriminatory selection, which has had the effect of creating a "ghetto" of courses (and institutions - i.e. the non-Russell Group polyversities) where low regard was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The government's eventual "crackdown" was baked in from the start.

The conservative antipathy towards universities, particularly in the claims that students are intolerant and academics are pushing divisive nonsense, isn't simply the seasoning of the charge that they are "ripping off" the younger generation. It is rather part of a more thoroughgoing critique that believes universities should not only be elitist institutions but that they should inculcate a particular worldview (the Western canon of literature and art, for example). But this goes against their nominal commitment to the market. If the consumers, i.e. students, want a woke education then that is what universities should provide. Likewise, there is a conflict between the idea that universities should return to a more elitist curriculum and the attacks on the metropolitan elite who were educated in it. What conservatives actually want to do is plan further education, not only in terms of numbers per subject but in the enforcement of norms of behaviour among students: it is a demand for an authoritarian education system, not a tweak in the market. That's the signal; the hysteria over free-speech is simply the noise.

Similarly, the critics of the government are not sincere in their calls for education for all, and few of them would back a genuinely meritocratic approach in which high-status institutions take the brightest and best candidates from across the country rather than disproportionately selecting from private schools. If they really believed in a democratic approach then they would support UBI, giving everyone the choice to pursue further education or training at any point in their lifetime and with any supplier but not obliging them to pursue it in a particular way or at a particular time, unlike the Liberal Democrat's  proposed "skills wallet" and similar schemes do. Likewise a commitment to a more inclusive education system would see the admissions process flipped so that ranking by schools determined access rather than selection by universities (i.e. a "bog-standard" comprehensive in Slough would get 10 places across the Russell Group each year and so would Eton College). What the government's critics actually want to do is maintain the status quo. That's the signal; the hysteria over philistinism is simply the noise.