Kemi Badenoch has pledged to end “rip-off” degrees if her party wins power again, with university courses that lead to low earnings after graduation set to be in the firing line.
The Conservative leader will use her speech in Manchester on Wednesday to announce that she will funnel the savings from cutting low-performing degrees into doubling funding for apprenticeships.
The i Paper understands that the party wants to focus its efforts on weak job prospects and limited earning potential, with subjects such as the performing arts, English, design, sociology, anthropology, media and psychology among those under review.
Internal party analysis suggests graduates from these areas typically earn the least after leaving university.
Badenoch will use her conference speech to argue that the current system leaves both students and taxpayers worse off.
‘Taxpayers writing off £7bn in loans’
She is expected to say the reforms will “protect the interests of taxpayers and students” by capping funded courses that “consistently lead to poor graduate outcomes”.
She will say: “Every year thousands of young people go off to university… but leave with crippling loans and no real prospects. Nearly one in three graduates see no economic return, and every year taxpayers are writing off over £7bn in unpaid student loans.
“Wasted money, wasted talent… a rigged system propping up low-quality courses, while people can’t get high-quality apprenticeships that lead to real jobs.”
Under the plans, universities would face controls on student numbers in specific subject areas, with places allocated according to graduate outcomes and course quality.
The Conservatives say this would save more than £3bn a year in written-off student loan losses and reduce the number of annual university places by around 100,000. This will lead to savings that will pay for the doubling of apprenticeship funding.
A 2020 analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies showed that around 30 per cent of both men and women see “negative total returns” from going to university, and one in five would be financially better off if they skipped higher education.
Many graduates, the think tank noted, earn so little that they never repay their student loans, with taxpayers covering more than £7bn in unpaid debt every year.
Degrees ‘don’t get young people a job’
Shadow education secretary Laura Trott said too many young people were encouraged into doing degrees that did not deliver returns (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Wire)The Conservatives also highlighted comments from economist Roger Bootle, who, writing for the right -wing Policy Exchange think tank, said that while graduates on average earn more than non-graduates, “this does not mean that if you turn the marginal non-graduate into a graduate, their earnings will rise”.
He continued: “I have long thought that in some cases, university actually degrades young people. It gives them too much freedom at a time when they don’t know what to do with it, blunts the work ethic and gets them into bad habits.”
Speaking at a Spectator fringe event, shadow education secretary Laura Trott said too many young people were encouraged into doing degrees that did not deliver returns. “For a number of young people, they will go to university, they will do a course which they will pay thousands and thousands and thousands for, and they don’t get them in the job afterwards,” she said.
“[They’re] trapped in debt, and they have no ability to pay it back… This is not a good outcome for those individuals, and it’s not a good outcome for the taxpayer.”
Trott added that the party wanted to redirect students towards apprenticeships, which she described as “really positive things” that “attach people to the workforce”.
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Prime Minister Keir Starmer also used his leadership conference speech to announce an expansion of apprenticeships, claiming he wanted to see two-thirds of young people in the UK go to university or study a technical qualification after leaving school.
Speaking at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, he said the target set by his predecessor Tony Blair in 1999 to “get 50 per cent of kids to uni” was no longer “right for our times”.
Instead, he said the Government wanted the majority of young people to be going on to university, further education, or a “gold standard apprenticeship” by the age of 25.
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