England has a peculiar relationship with educational reform. Every generation or so, a big idea takes hold, like comprehensive schools, marketisation, mass expansion, and is implemented with enormous confidence and minimal forethought about what might go wrong. The unintended consequences pile up quietly for a decade or two until the next big idea arrives to fix them, generating its own fresh set of problems in turn.
A new report from centre right think tank Policy Exchange, Tarnished Towers: Fixing England’s Broken Higher Education System, claims the bill for universities is being lumped on the very students the system claims to serve. That matters here in Northern Ireland too, where around one in five of our university students cross the water to study on English campuses, many of them destined to carry the consequences of a broken system back home.
The average English graduate now needs to earn £66,000 a year just to cover the interest on their student loan. In a country where median full-time earnings sit at just over £39,000, the majority of graduates will watch their debt grow, not shrink, for years after leaving university. The report claims that in over a quarter of subject areas, including Sociology, Creative Arts and Performing Arts, more than a quarter of graduates are earning below the National Living Wage five years after graduating.
One in three people now believe university simply isn’t worth the time and money, up from one in seven in 2005.
However, below the repayment threshold, student loan repayments don’t kick in at all, and crucially the debt does not appear on your credit report or affect your credit score. For lower earners, it is in that sense not real debt in any conventional sense. Yet for those earning above the threshold, there is a sting in the tail: while your credit rating remains untouched, mortgage lenders run their own affordability assessments and deduct student loan repayments from your disposable income — quietly reducing what they will lend you.
The debt may be invisible to a credit agency, but it is not invisible to the bank deciding the size of your mortgage.
The report traces the crisis to two policy choices that between them dominated higher education for thirty years regardless of which party was in government. The first was expansion — Tony Blair’s 1999 pledge to send 50% of young people to university set in motion dramatic growth that culminated in the removal of all caps on university places in 2015. Standards suffered accordingly. Grade inflation is openly acknowledged across the sector: the proportion of First Class degrees has risen sharply.
The second was marketisation, which treats students as consumers would drive competition on quality. In practice it drove competition on league table rankings and luxury accommodation, neither of which relates to directly to learning. Meanwhile in Europe, German, Danish and Norwegian students pay nothing. Germany also has a class vocational training systems, producing skilled workers without loading youngsters with debt. England went a different way, and the results are now visible.
The prescriptions are radical and bold: a 30% reduction in university places over five years targeting high drop-out and low-earnings providers; a ban on franchised degrees; tuition fees frozen for five years while the government teaching grant increases; student loan interest rates stripped of their real-terms uplift; and a cap on First Class degrees at 15% of awards.
Three issues that would almost certainly affect Northern Ireland.
First, if England contracts its university sector by 30%, Northern Irish students competing for places on English campuses face a straightforward squeeze.
Second, Northern Irish students who study in England take on the same £50,000-plus debt as their English peers but return to a labour market with lower average wages, would repay less and carry the debt longer. The report’s proposed reforms were designed with English graduate salaries in mind. A one-size-fits-all student finance system may fundamentally disadvantage graduates who come home to lower-wage regional economies.
Third, the report’s answer to university contraction is a thriving apprenticeship and further education sector. But is that alternative infrastructure actually in place here? If not, contraction may simply mean fewer opportunities altogether.
The problems this report identifies are real. The mismatch between graduate numbers and graduate jobs is real. But a swingeing 30% cut in university places is the same pattern of thinking that created the mess in the first place: a grand, confident intervention applied at scale, with the unintended consequences to be discovered later.
England has been reforming its education system energetically and continuously for decades, and the results speak for themselves. The lesson from thirty years of English higher education policy is not that the last big idea was wrong and this one is right. It is that big ideas imposed on complex systems without serious forethought tend to fail.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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