It’s time to cut our universities down to size

A quarter of a century ago, I wrote a book, published by Michael Joseph, with the sad title ‘The Oxbridge Conspiracy: How the Ancient Universities have Kept their Stranglehold on the Establishment’. I need hardly go on. But I will.

I was ridden out of town on a rail, pursued by the very Establishment whose ire I had provoked. I was treated like a medieval leper, forced to ring a bell if I came within 50 feet of Fleet Street’s Great and Good while pronouncing myself unclean. Penguin Books, which brought out the paperback edition, withdrew it in a matter of days after Dillons (the precursor of Waterstones) refused to stock it, resulting in a sale totalling 155.

I can laugh now – mirthlessly. But at the time I felt a bit like a pauper version of Princess Diana – “the most hunted person of the modern age”.

Fortunately, the times are changing and it is easier today to have a go not only at Oxbridge but at the entire outmoded panoply of our modern universities, from Aberystwyth to York.

Applications for university place are falling, and we should rejoice. The feeling is growing, especially among the young of school-leaving age, that spending three years in higher education is, for the most part, useless: fine if you’re planning to be a doctor, a scientist or a lawyer or a teacher – or a university lecturer – but of no particular value if you end up doing anything else.

You might enjoy your three years. You might even “grow up” while living away from home for the first time. And you might, if you’re lucky, have the most sex of your life. But at the end, as if what started out as a wedding had ended up as a funeral, there is frequently nothing to show for it other than a bill for as much as £50,000 owed to your friendly high street bank.

When everybody is somebody, then nobody is anybody: W.S. Gilbert’s comic axiom is truer today than it has ever been. In 2018, a degree in history and economics from, let us say, Scumbag University, is about as useful in getting a top-rated first job as a prison record or a reputation as a left-wing agitator. Scumbag will reject this and point to the 37 or so of its alumni who have reached the upper echelons in their chosen profession. They will not mention the other 27,000 who found work, eventually, in an office of some kind, usually in the public sector, or became management trainees at Tesco’s or Lidl.

Note, again, that I am excluding those who obtained proper academic qualifications in traditional disciplines. We need doctors and lawyers who know what they’re doing. And rocket science actually is rocket science. But for the rest of us, who end up as office workers, hotel managers, factory hands, soldiers, police officers or, for Gawd’s sake, journalists, a B.A. (Hons) in English and American literature or sociology, or video games, is little short of an irrelevance, and certainly no pointer towards the ability of the graduate in question to succeed in his, or her, future career.

There is also the issue (not nearly enough discussed) of graduates in “hard” subjects, often the sciences, who then go into jobs that have nothing to do with their degree. A friend of mine has a daughter who, with her two best friends, studied biology and chemistry at Cambridge. All three went into the City, determined to make money. Their expertise in biology and chemistry was entirely wasted. Just weeks ago, I heard a student on a Radio 4 panel show tell the presenter that he was studying (I think) physics. So what did he plan to do when he graduated? “I want to be a sports journalist,” he said.

And what do graduates in computer technology want to be? Some embark of start-ups. But far more, in my experience, want to design video games. Either that or sit in front of screens, along with thousands of others, feeding the appetites of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.

Another friend of mine has two children, aged 13 and 8. Their mother is determined that they should go to university. Their father, on the other hand, says that unless they want to pursue a vocational degree he would be just as happy if they left school at 18 and took their chances in the jobs market. He reckons that by the time their peers get to don their caps and gowns, his two will have three years of experience under their belts, plus a mortgage and no student debt. Win-win, he says. And he’s a teacher.

I should add here that none of this applies to Oxford and Cambridge, mere attendance at which more or less guarantees their graduates a place two rungs up the employment ladder from a standing start. Britain is still governed and run by Oxbridge – which explains why the UK is so much more advanced in every way than its Continental rivals! If you’ve got a degree in PPE from Oxford, or in classics from Cambridge, you’re quids-in, literally. Most of of our top politicians, civil servants, lawyers, comedians – and journalists – boast a 2:1 from one or other of the ancient pair, and thirty years on will look to the same duopoly in search of their successors.

I could go into detail here. I’m not saying that the best graduates from other universities don’t get much more of a look-in these days. But you know I’m right.

It was Tony Blair (St John’s, Oxford) who said that he wanted half of all school-leavers to go to university. David Cameron (Brasenose, Oxford) more or less said the same thing. I don’t know what Theresa May (St Hugh’s, Oxford) thinks. She seems to be a tad preoccupied with getting us out of the European Union. But she has at least acknowledged that tuition fees are too high and that there should be more room in the system for technical and vocational education away from the universities.

Exactly so. Britain needs to become more like Germany, where apprenticeships are competitive and rewarding and where a technical qualification, combined with hands-on experience, is respected by employers as well as by society in general. There has been a lot of talk about this, as if lip-service is all that is needed. Now is the time for action.

Britain doesn’t need to send half of its young people to university. Twenty-five percent, even twenty per cent would be plenty. Think of the money that would be saved and the debt that would not be created. Think of how the universities themselves would benefit. Proportionately, there would be many more students who are genuinely academic by nature, with the potential to excel in a less crowded environment, taught by faculty with more time to consider them as individuals instead of as a faceless multitude.

At the same time, those bright young people who just want to work for a living, doing things they are good at, could be trained in the necessary skills, un-hobbled by debt or the need to pretend they are something they are not. If we really want a win-win, this would be it. Britain would benefit, the universities would benefit and both academically gifted students and keen young go-getters would benefit. What’s not to like?

But let’s not talk about it. Talk is cheap, unlike a university education. Let’s do it. You know it makes sense.