I have four kids, all of whom have recently been to university. This is despite that I knew that the jobs they were likely to end up in would likely have nothing to do with their degree subject, that they were more than capable of performing well in the workplace if given a chance aged 18, and that the student loans would be a burden they could do without.
But the system that our boomer generation has created over the last 30 years of mass higher education, involving drastically rising participation rates, meant that just like most of their peers they didn’t really have much choice about it. Unless they fancied being a builder or a plumber, then there didn’t seem much for them in the job market beyond working in retail, hospitality and so on.
All around them their teachers, parents, media, politicians, are telling them that going to university represents success. And university looks like good fun. The chance to move out away from your parents is sold as a rite of passage – and it isn’t a hard sell. It certainly looks more appealing than working full time, and crucially employers are increasingly making even the most basic trainee jobs graduate-only, so there aren’t any other options open to them anyway. So, of course, my four kids all went to university.
But then come the loans. You might have thought that as a society we would be just a little bit more careful about signing our kids up to a 40 year debt with life-sapping repayments. Haven’t we noticed that the tax that we all already pay is quite high enough without casually burdening our kids with another 9 per cent on top of that?
But this hardly puts them off at all, as it’s all on the never-never. If our generation turns a blind eye to the consequences of these loathsome student loans, then it is no wonder that 18 year olds just sign up to them en-masse without giving it a second thought. Who cares much about tax and loans when you are at school? Especially, if all the adults in the room are telling you that it’s all fine and is nothing more consequential than signing up to a phone contract.
The Treasury Select Committee have issued a report on student loans and there’s a great deal of huffing and puffing, but all it’s likely to amount to is a tweaking of the terms to un-freeze the repayment threshold and limit interest rates to CPI. It does not recommend changing the repayment rate of 9 per cent so the loans will still act just as much as a burdensome extra tax that most will have to pay for 30-40 years, and the tweaks will make hardly a jot of difference to this soul-destroying extra financial burden carried through life.
But there are two mis-selling scandals wrapped up into one. The Treasury Select Committee have only looked into the loans, but what about what the loans are used to buy in the first place? The degrees themselves. There is an enormous amount of anecdotal evidence that graduates now can’t get jobs, or the jobs they do end up in are minimum wage trainee positions that they could have easily performed with or without a degree. The careers they end up in are more often than not nothing to do with what they studied, and even if there is a connection then they really didn’t need three years of study to qualify for the job as just a few weeks targeted on-the-job training would have sufficed. And three years work experience learning from colleagues is often by far the best way to become good at a job, rather than sitting in the classroom.
So it is bad enough to be paying out the loan repayments, but it is doubly worse if the thing you bought with the loan turned out to be pointless and has also been mis-sold to you.
I have been campaigning on this issue for over two years. My analysis shows that most graduates (other than the top 20 per cent academically) earn the same as non-graduates with the same level of prior academic attainment (i.e. the GCSE and /or A-level grades when they left school). The expansion policy has proved an epic failure. The government has encouraged expansion of the sector over the last 30 years, but for most of the graduates, my analysis shows that their pay has not improved overall. The expansion policy has proved an epic failure.
In the light of this, the government needs to intervene. We should cap the number of graduates so that only the top 20 per cent academically qualify for student loans in the first place. The rest should be given opportunities to get jobs as trainees and employers should be banned from discriminating against them with graduate-only jobs.
And then some of the huge amount of money being saved on loan write-offs could be used to make going to university far cheaper for the remaining graduates, thus only burdening them with a far smaller loan to start off with that they can foresee paying off within 10-15 years; and some of the rest could be used to subsidize far more targeted on the job vocational training courses.
This would solve both the mis-selling scandals. The lame proposals of the Treasury select committee doesn’t even get close to solving one of them.
Paul Wiltshire is the founder of University Watch
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