Is university still worth it? It’s a question that’s been asked more and more recently, often with a deeply sceptical response.
But if you believe the public, parents and graduates we should avoid jumping to overly doomy conclusions, while recognising there is real concern about the value for money of degrees and the lack of viable alternatives.
Nine out of ten
Graduates are particularly positive about their experience. In our new study, eight in 10 say their degree was worth it for the overall benefits, and nine in 10 say they’d go again if they had their time over.
It’s true that four in 10 say they’d have done a different course in hindsight, and this appears to be largely driven by a sense that the course they chose wasn’t as useful for getting a job as those who’d do the same course. This probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise given how young most students are when they have to make this choice, though there’s certainly more universities can do to prevent buyer’s remorse.
Parents remain positive too, with only one in five parents of secondary school children actively disagreeing that it’s important for their own child to go to university.
And the public overall haven’t had enough of unis – just 14 per cent say opportunities to attend should be reduced. There’s even some remorse from those who weren’t buyers, with three in 10 non-graduates saying they wish they’d gone.
But there are also clear tensions in the study, firstly around perceived value.
Defining value
Three in 10 think a university education just isn’t worth the time and money – up from two in 10 six years ago – and people are more likely to disagree than agree that degrees are still good value for money compared to a decade ago.
This is based on some knowledge, as the public are pretty accurate on how much debt a student typically runs up: the average guess is £35,000, when the reality is £45,000.
At a time of very real financial pressure on universities, with risks of institutions failing, it illustrates how limited the government’s options could be in raising fees by a significant amount. When asked who should pay for any increase in places, only 18 per cent pick out students, with taxation picked by 58 per cent.
However, it’s worth noting the, perhaps surprising, finding that only one in five graduates who started their course under the £9,000 fee system say the debt has negatively impacted their lives, with the majority of this group – 69 per cent – saying it has not.
The reality of repayment
This reflects an observation made by David Willetts, the universities minister who introduced higher fees, at a recent Policy Institute event – that when his fellow parliamentarians complain to him about the unfairness of the current system, he asks them how many actual graduates come to their surgeries and complain about their repayments and the answer is “virtually none”.
Willetts was less keen on the idea of charging different tuition fees for different courses, on the grounds that it’s so hard to find consensus on the criteria you use to do it – but there’s clearly a need to think of new ways of sharing the cost burden and there appears to be some openness to this approach among the public.
When people are provided with context about how some courses costs much more to deliver than others, and how teaching and research quality can vary, nearly half feel undergraduate degrees shouldn’t all charge the same, regardless of the subject, with the cost of course delivery the most popular basis for differentiating fees.
The second key message is that while universities remain more highly valued than the rhetoric often suggests, they are not enough to meet all needs: three-quarters of the public say apprenticeships should be increased – which fits with the Labour government’s focus on a more comprehensive post-16 skills strategy.
Tertiary thinking
The real and consistently elusive prize here would be proper structural change that integrates HE, FE and vocational options. Making that shift is a huge challenge, as underscored by a new collection of essays we’re publishing this week edited by Alison Wolf, a member of the Augar review of post-18 education.
She highlights that while the governments of the four UK nations all believe a truly tertiary education system is key to boosting the economy and creating opportunity, plans to establish one are still more rhetoric than reality.
The new education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has emphasised a Labour government will not denigrate universities and will make sure they are recognised as a public good, not treated as a political battleground.
Our research suggests it’s an approach that will suit public opinion: our statistical analysis of what’s most related to positive views of universities is the big picture outcomes of whether they help the UK globally, nationally and locally – while “culture war” debates over free speech and “wokeness” have barely cut through.
Universities for their own part need to recognise they’re not enough on their own to meet the needs of country and engage in how they can support a stronger tertiary sector – but they should do that with greater confidence that their value and role in society is better recognised than many in the sector might think.
