Burnham is right: less people should go to university
The American obsession with sending everyone toward liberal arts drove up the costs of degrees while degrading their value. Britain has been unwisely following the same road.
New UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced a major break with decades-old British higher education policy this week when he announced an end to the country’s preference for university over vocational training. It’s a policy that was established by Tony Blair three decades ago when he set the target of sending at least half of high school graduates to university - emulating a long-standing policy in the United States.
“From today, Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap,” Burnham said in a social media video announcing the change, holding both. Having seen what the universal four-year-degree expectation has done to US higher education, where bachelors degrees cost $200,000 and yet are increasingly worthless, I completely agree with him. When I moved to the UK in 2006 and saw that Tony' Blair’s target was taking the UK in the same direction, I was horrified. Why would anyone want to emulate the farcical situation of US higher education?
Under the new policy, the UK will follow the same kind of early sorting process used in continental Europe (which I wrote about in my book The Owned Continent, see excerpt below). From age 14, students will be assessed and asked which educational route they want to pursue - technical or academic.
Burnham hails from the left, the same as my own political origins, and it is difficult for people like us to make this argument. The people arguing against sending more people to university, in both the US and UK, have tended to be from the right. After all, why would you be against more people going to school? Well the problem is, school isn’t free. And as I’ll outline below, you cannot have a policy of free university education while setting a target for half your population to attend. There is no way for the state to pay for that. So what you end up doing is making people pay huge sums to university who aren’t academically inclined and don’t want to be there, but feel social pressure to do it. You see new private universities of dubious academic robustness pop up all over the place to satisfy the new demand. Bachelors degree programs become continued secondary school, and when half of people have one, the value of the degree is obviously lessened. Bachelors degrees are now required even for the most basic jobs.
University used to be free in all of the UK, but because of Tony Blair’s new policy tuition fees in England were introduced three decades ago (first £3,000 then raised to £9,000). In most continental European countries (and still in Scotland) university is free or comes with only small administrative costs.
People on the left in the US love to praise this European free university system, but they never seem to understand that this is because far fewer people in continental Europe go to university. And when they go, they don’t waste time strumming the guitar on the quad and wait till their junior year to decide on a major. In Europe you go to university for something very specific, and it’s difficult to switch from that track mid-process. You study only that subject, it’s not continued secondary school where you study all subjects like in the US. Europeans are shocked when I tell them that people in the US can start university undeclared without yet choosing what they want to study. Unlike in the US, the ‘college years’ in Europe aren’t a time for partying and self-discovery. It’s time for serious work. Because while in America you’re free to waste your own money on a BS degree, in Europe you can’t waste the taxpayers’ money.
The American university Ponzi scheme
I did both my undergrad and graduate education in the US before moving to Europe, so I know of what I speak. The descriptions from my European friends of their time at university bears little resemblance to my own. Here most people go to a university within commuting distance of their family home. They are unlikely to live in dorms (whereas in the US it’s often a requirement). It’s not about the ‘experience’, it’s about the education. My European friends describe four years of intensive study. My American friends describe four years of intensive drinking. But all of us American private university graduates are part of the same Ponzi scheme. Nobody wants to talk about how easy American higher education has become because it would devalue something that we paid a lot of money for.
I went to New York University, the 25th best school in the country on the US News & World Report ranking, and it was honestly a joke. I graduated with a