Another Fine Mess the Government Has Got Us All Into

Civitas, 12 May 2009

For some years now, it has been the declared ambition of the present government to increase the participation rate of young people at university to 50 per cent. Whether it was a wise ambition is questionable, seeing how incapable of achievement it has always been without seriously diluting A-level and final honours standards. However, because of it, young people have been staying on at school in unprecedented numbers with a view to securing a university place. Now, suddenly, just when they have been doing exactly what the government has long been encouraging them to, it has cruelly pulled the rug from under their feet by capping university places.

UCAS has seen university applications increase by as much as 8 per cent this year. Many youngsters are likely to be severely disappointed and left feeling deeply chiselled when they find themselves unable to secure a place with grades that would in other years have seen them secure one.

Mind you, it may be no bad thing that so many young people will be disappointed now rather than in three years time, when, after graduating having accumulated a large mill-stone of debt around their ankles, they find there are no graduate-level jobs for them and the entire operation has been a gigantic waste of time.

That many such of these would-be graduates most likely would have found themselves in  such a predicament, had their university applications been successful, is but one depressing inference that may be drawn from  a report published last week by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES).

In the words of  a report on the item on the BBC News website, UKCES found that: ‘there are now too few jobs for UK graduates, and the gap between the supply of high-level workers and the jobs for them is growing.’ This short-fall cannot be attributed to the current recession, since the report used figures for 2006 figures, long before it was even on the horizon.

In light of those findings, one wonders just why the government was so keen to increase the university participation rate to 50 per cent. It seems to have been an unwise folly, even could that target have been reached without the dumbing-down of standards, and even if the recession had not made it necessary for the government to raise the expectations of so many young people and then so callously and mercilessly frustrate them.

If there is one lesson to emerge from all this folly, it seems to me to be this. Education, especially higher education, should never have become sold to young people as primarily just a meal-ticket which it has for decades now. It should always have been allowed to retain its higher purpose, rather than, as in the case of university education, made into a matter of hire-purchase.