"30 Minutes" Dumbed Down Degrees broadcasts on Channel4, May 15th 6pm
Students are piling up large debts on the promise of future riches: today the average student leaves university £10,300 in hock. Soon, with the introduction of higher fees, they’ll be graduating at least £15,000 in the red.
But many employers think the degrees they’re getting are not worth the paper they’re written on. And the latest research shows that there simply won’t be enough graduate jobs to go around and that as many as a third of students may not be able to pay of their debts until well into their 30s.
So are the government’s dreams of a booming "knowledge based" economy mere fantasies - and could they be a nightmare for the students themselves?
The government has set a target of getting 50 per cent of 18-30’s into higher education by 2010. The figure is close to 44 per cent today, and already the system is showing signs of strain as academics, employers, and students themselves complain of tumbling standards.
In 1991/2 there were 900,000 students. Today there are 1.6 million. Yet the number of people aged 18-30 has dropped by around a fifth over the last 20 years. So as the universities expanded, the pool of talent has shrunk. But their funding depends simply on the numbers of students they teach. Each student brings a college an average of £5,000 a year in fees and government funding. If a course isn’t able to attract enough students, it will lose its funding – it will effectively go bust.
Bob Brecher, a reader in philosophy from Brighton University, is among the few academics prepared to admit in public what most are saying in private. Colleges have made their courses easier in order to hang on to students who aren’t capable of surviving a traditional course. “What’s on offer is sub-O’Level,” he says.
The rot has spread into world-class colleges competing for students in a market place dominated by league tables. Sir Richard Sykes, Rector of Imperial College, warns that there is a “tendency, even here, to give more firsts simply because it pushes you up the league table”.
A "30 Minutes" survey reveals that startling numbers of employers agree. 70% believe that degrees have declined as a measure of ability over the past ten years, and now only a minority believe that having a degree gives a potential employee an edge.
Research by academics Phil Brown at Cardiff University and Anthony Hesketh at Lancaster University further undermines the idea that all the newly created graduates will simply walk into well-paid jobs. They find no evidence that Britain is - or will ever be - a “knowledge-based economy”. In fact there are only about 72,000 jobs a year needing graduates to do them, and Britain is already producing some 400,000 graduates a year.
Ed Rice has a BSC and an MSC in maritime science. Today he’s at Chichester College learning carpentry. “Carpentry is opening more doors than university,” he says. He’s already working restoring a neighbour’s house.
“It is quite simply a big con. The government and the universities have got their numbers badly wrong. Many, many, graduates will never earn enough to pay off their loans – and that is a disaster for them and one for the universities themselves,” says professor Brown.
"30 Minutes" Dumbed Down Degrees broadcasts on Channel4, May 15th 6pm
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