In the Graduation Olympics, Is Britain Ready for the High Jump?

nick cowen, 16 September 2008

According to a recent OECD report, Britain has slipped down the international league table showing the graduation rates of different industrialised countries: that is, the proportion of their 25-34 year olds with degrees. Whereas eight years ago, Britain lay in fourth place, now it lies in 12th place.
How much should we care?
For broadcaster and self-styled ‘education-expert’ Mike Baker, Britain’s fall in the international rankings comes close to a national catastrophe, akin to Britain not winning any gold medals at the Olympics. On the BBC News website, he responds to the slippage by lamenting: ‘If the present [trend] … continues, countries such as the Czech and Slovak republics and Hungary will soon overtake UK graduation rates.’

Baker wants to see the government raise its current target of 50 per cent of young people entering university to 60 per cent.
Personally, I consider the government’s target of 50 per cent of young people entering university as unrealistically high, and public money spent trying to meet it as money wasted.
Baker trots out a series of hackneyed arguments in favour of Britain seeking a high participation rate in higher education that do not bear scrutiny. Here is a brief reprise of them:
‘High-level, flexible skills are the best insurance in a fast-changing job market.’
‘Among the working-age population in the UK there are 14 per cent more skilled jobs than people with university degrees.’
‘On average, UK graduates still earn more … than their peers who do not go to university… — [even after] you factor in the costs of fees and the delayed start to paid work… There is still an average financial return of 14 per cent for UK graduates.’
None of these arguments passes muster.
Sure, high-level flexible skills are the best insurance against unemployment in a fast-changing job market, but do our current cut-price, dumbed-down universities today provide them, especially at the lower end of the higher educational market?
I don’t think so. Employers complain bitterly about the illiteracy and innumeracy of graduates and often have to train them in these skills after recruiting them.
Sure, there is a current skills shortage, often leading to immigration of highly skilled workers from third world countries which can ill-afford to lose their most expensively trained work-force desert them upon graduation.
But that skills shortage exists because our universities turn out such poorly skilled graduates, not because it does not turn out enough of them.
As for the so-called earnings premium gained by graduates, there is a lot of differential masked by statistics that just give a crude average. When one of the now old so called ‘new universities’ conducted a survey of graduates enquiring as to the jobs they were now in, one of its Humanities graduates wrote back politely saying: ‘Since gaining the benefits of one of your degrees, I am now being turned down by a far superior class of employer.’
What this country needs is unquestioningly a better-skilled work-force, but the skills that it needs are the basic ones which should have been supplied at the pre-university stage of education. They are manifestly not being supplied there. Partly, this is because too much public money assigned to education has been directed towards expanding the university sector. It has been spread too thinly, generating a surplus of vacuous degrees awarded to people who have been cheated of the skills that they would have needed to benefit from a university education, assuming they had had the genuine motivation to put in the effort to gain those benefits. Instead, they have been duped into enrolling, after being sold the lie that one of these useless degrees will make them more employable.
As to countries like the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia soon having higher graduation rates than us, why on earth shouldn’t they? For a complex variety of reasons, their education systems have generally tended to be much better than Britain’s, despite operating at much lower levels of resource.
Britain’s universities are ready for the high-jump, but not in the sense Mike Baker wants. Before they can genuinely compete in the graduation Olympics in terms of real educational benefit, they will need to get a lot fitter and, for that, a lot slimmer, not encouraged to put on still more surplus weight.
The best book to expose how over-swollen our university sector has become is Alison Wolf’s Does education matter?: Myths about education and economic growth. Read it, if you need convincing as to what I have just argued.