Are too many people going to university?

 By David Ellis

Four words that can unsettle me: ‘We need to talk’ and ‘No, everything is fine’. Last week, though, ‘Student admissions cap abolished’ did it. 

George Osborne announced universities would be free to expand as they wish, with no ‘arbitrary cap’ – his words – on admissions. Next year initiates the change, with 30,000 more places made available, which is expected to boost university applications and undergraduate numbers. 

All of which is … good news? Bad news? Inconsequential? I wonder: are there too many students at university? This year, I say no: last week I wrote graduates are better off than their non-graduate counterparts. The majority have higher rates of employment, work in higher-skill jobs and earn more over a lifetime. For the moment, the system works to their favour. Will this stay the same? Will too many people go to university from 2014/15? Can a university be ‘full’? 

By extension, it must be asked whether our Government is justified in spending money to boost student numbers, and whether this is the most purposeful use of funding. It occurs to me that it might be wiser to up university quality, rather than student quantity. 

Often, universities are referred to as ‘engines of economic growth.’ A leaden phrase this may be, but it’s true: higher education generates £59 billion for the economy, contributing £3.4 billion through services to business alone. 

Presently, higher education makes more for the economy than either the pharmaceuticals industry or the agricultural sector. Should universities expand, these figures would likely rise. 

Increasing student numbers would increase university turnover – in fact, considering they make £1,400 on average per bed filled, it would benefit institutions outside of lecture theatres, too. 

Financing an undergraduate degree earns the treasury £94,000 per student and if the number of undergraduates were to drop by 30,000 – the same figure the Autumn Statement hopes to increase applicants by – our economy stands to lose £6.6 billion over the next forty years. 

These points display the headline figures which argue that expanding universities and upping undergraduate numbers is assuredly a good thing for the wider financial good. 

Those who think the purpose of education is to shore-up our national economy should smile smugly to themselves and stop reading now. 

Quaint as it may be, though, I happen to think education should educate and aid personal economy. By these measures, it is difficult to argue that the infinite expansion of universities is reasonable. 

The job market for any contemporary twentysomething is barbarous (indeed, 47 per cent of recent graduates are in non-graduate roles) and one of the foremost benefits of a degree is that many employers distinguish between applicants who have a degree, and those who don’t. 

This is, of course, a numbers game: as more people graduate, a degree ceases to become such a distinguishing feature on an application. Hence it’s plausible that more undergraduates will morph into master's students, which means we will have year-groups joining the workforce later, or that master's degrees will eventually do little to singularise a CV. 

Most likely, it will mean the choice of course and institution becomes ever more vital. This is no bad thing, except it may lead to plummeting standards as competing universities try to prove themselves better than each other (‘We have more 2:1s than them!’: the HE equivalent of ‘My Dad is bigger than your Dad’). 

There is plenty of scepticism over standards already, some of which may be vindicated – the rise of firsts per year, from 9 per cent a decade ago to 15.5 per cent now, is a kind of endorsement of standards that no one wants. 

Then comes the problems of resources. Contact hours and quality of education are frequently lambasted. Adding more students would surely do little to improve the situation. More undergraduates would naturally mean an increase in resources, but student housing isn’t built overnight and new staff aren’t found and trained in a day. The removal of the cap may be too much, too soon. 

The real problem with the Government encouraging more students and lifting the cap for all, is that it won’t be the best universities who capitalise on the increased pool of students available. 

As is well known, the best institutions have been able to recruit many of the best students for a while now. Some have expanded, like Manchester, while others continue to value their exclusivity, like Oxford and Cambridge. 

The idea behind Osborne’s statement is to tempt those who perform less well into university, which I suspect is backed by the naive idea that university is a social engineering tool which can take those who performed poorly at school and bring them up to top graduate-scheme level, which is idealistic and untrue. 

It’s perhaps sentimental to say so, but I am firmly in favour of any measure which gives everyone an equal opportunity. This is why I cannot see how removing the cap and needlessly pushing more sixth formers into underperforming universities is a good idea: it will further the already extensive divide between the best and worst performing institutions. 

The high-end will continue onwards, slowly becoming more exclusive in order to wrestle some value from the overexposed undergraduate degree, while those who let in more students will be perceived as having low standards and their reputation will carry little weight. Will new classes of degrees emerge? 

The inevitable question is why the Government is pushing for higher university attendance, and how it intends to sustain such a measure. Perhaps the Government intends to bolster applications to make up for the now-annual wobble that occurs owing to the increased tuition fees. Or is this simply a vainglorious international race we’re in? 

Is an increased number of students meant to excuse the fact that the UK spends almost the least on Higher Education in Europe, as a percentage of our GDP? We may wish to stand alongside our international counterparts – but surely the standard of graduate is of more importance than the number of them? 

This proposed expansion of student numbers is a short-sighted financially motivated strategy, which is for immediate economic advantage rather than long-term improvements to our workforce and to individuals. 

The most obvious duplicity here is that, if the number of degrees become so great that the degree itself has less impact on employability, then the degree becomes less economically valuable. 

It should also not be forgotten that the move is funded by the idiocy of a deal which sold student loan debts worth £890 million for just £160 million. It was a grotesque move which changed a previous loan agreement, in effect raising a previous generation's tuition fees. It is also entirely unsustainable: we cannot fund future students by selling loans which themselves were funded by debts. 

So will universities be too full? Yes, if the Government manages to persuade the population that a degree, whatever degree, is still worth it. More applicants and more undergraduates makes for a bleak situation: either competition for universities declines, as more people apply to the university most likely to accept them, or – more likely – competition for those at the top increases and those who fail to make the grade go to second-rate institutions.