Sam Freedman’s recent article in The Observer is worth a read....
https://observer.co.uk/news/columnists/article/why-saving-universities-is-far-more-than-academic
He basically argues that UK universities have started to lose their way because too many students are being steered into doing expensive degrees that they simply don't need.
Things have got messed up because of marketisation and a twisted meritocratic ideal - during the Blair years the government was convinced pushing more people into university would mean more upward mobility - their aim back in the 2000s was to have 50% of the population going to university and the means to make this affordable was marketisation.
But 20 years on and this has clearly failed.
Universities around the country are struggling financially. Some are talking about layoffs, closing departments, or even facing full-blown deficits. Freedman says this isn’t just some bad luck or short-term hiccup—it’s baked into how the system works, which is to chase growth, no matter what.
Student numbers became the key metric for universities....
More courses, more recruitment drives, more aggressive marketing—anything to keep growing.
Freedman says this push started to erode quality and led lots of young people into degrees that don’t actually help them much long-term.
Meanwhile, vocational education got sidelined. Britain built this strange pecking order where academic degrees were seen as top tier, and technical training got left behind.
But that doesn’t make much sense when employers are desperate for engineers, technicians, healthcare workers, and skilled trades.
Maybe not entirely ironically as the price of a degree gets relatively cheaper with inflation, due to the tuition fee, gap, so there is credential inflation....
When loads of people have degrees, employers begin to require them for jobs that never needed one before. Suddenly, a degree isn’t an indication of ability, it's a base level filter.
At the same time, graduates leave university with heavy debt, and they're heading into a world where housing costs a fortune, wages aren’t going up, and even professional jobs feel insecure.
University is absolutely worthwhile for some students. Medicine, engineering, law, and STEM subjects usually deliver strong results.
But humanities degrees...? Who needs one of those to get a job...?!?
If universities rely on endless growth and charging overseas students whatever they can to survive, that's not going to last.
And the big problem for universities is that more and more people are asking more and more often whether a degree is simply worth the time and money it takes to get one!?!
