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 3.9 GPA (A+) and I barely worked at all. I can write well, I showed up to class and participated, and thanks to grade inflation at private US universities (you can’t flunk people who are paying so much to be there) that earned me A’s. Most of what I learned didn’t come from the classroom but came from my own initiative - particularly during my time studying abroad in Prague (the only worthwhile part of my time at NYU). In short, NYU was a colossal waste of money.
And when I graduated in 2003 and realised I was now massively in debt and hadn’t been prepared for any actual job, I had a severe moment of panic - and anger. And that’s why I then went to get my masters degree in journalism.
But at the same time, I know now that had I opted to spend less and go to a public school for my bachelors degree (tuition at my in-state public school UCONN is $68,000 for four years, as opposed to NYU which is $200,000, not including living costs) I probably wouldn’t be sitting here in Europe writing this right now. Public schools are ranked much lower and are unfairly looked down upon in the US. As one NYU sociology professor once explained to my class, “look around the room - those people next to you are the reason you’re here. You’re not here for an education, you’re here because you’re paying to be around other upwardly mobile people who will give you the social connections to advance your career.”
At the time I found it incredibly arrogant. In hindsight I see he was right. The people I graduated with have gone on to do some very impressive things. Not because NYU gave them a great education, but because they were rich or (in my case) motivated enough to get admitted there, and life naturally took them in that direction. It’s a self-sorting phenomenon. The rich/motivated people opt to pay $200K to go to these top 100 four-year private universities rather than going to a state school because they want to be surrounded by other rich/motivated people. Not because they think they will get a better education there - because they won’t. For undergrad, the education is irrelevant. I was told over and over “nobody will ever ask you what your Bachelors degree major was”. And it’s true. It’s graduate school where people really get serious and specialise. Unlike in Europe, you can’t even begin studying to be a doctor or a lawyer until you’ve completed a four-year bachelors degree - but what you studied during that time is totally irrelevant, as long as your GPA is OK.
In the US, you work hard in high school in order to get into the best university possible. But once you’re there, you can kick up your feet and relax. That’s the lesson that should have been drawn from the 2019 celebrity college admissions bribery scandal. Wealthy people, including some celebrities, were arrested for having paid bribes or otherwise cheated to get their children into good universities. They were exposed for the country to figuratively stone, and the focus of American indignation was on the cheating. But nobody thought to ask – if their children weren’t actually smart enough to get into these schools, why were they doing so well there? The arrests came years after the students had started university. At a European university, if you bribed your dumb child’s way into an academically rigorous school, they would fail out within a year. There would be no point. But these celebrity children were thriving. None had failed out. Why? Two words: grade inflation.
The counterargument: perpetuating a poverty cycle
The counter-argument against early identification of students who are better suited for a technical degree, and I’ve heard it a lot from UK commentators on both the left and the right over the past days, is that it is horrific to condemn a 14-year-old to a working class life. Indeed, as a teenage American I was horrified when I learned that this is how the German education system works during a homestay with a German family outside Bremen in 1996 – a story I retell in Chapter 16 of The Owned Continent about how Europeans are not taught to believe in themselves:
“‘Why is the high school divided into two halves, and why are all the women in the other half wearing headscarves?’ I asked my host family. I was genuinely curious. They were visibly uncomfortable. ‘The other half of the school is a Hauptschule,’ the mother explained. ‘Our son goes to a Gymnasium, the good school.’ Noticing the look on my face, the German student quickly added, ‘But, it’s not like Heil Hitler! The immigrant families don’t speak German at home, so the kids struggle with German in the tests and don’t do well.’ Heil Hitler was definitely not on my mind (oh those poor traumatised Germans), but I was disturbed by the fact that the family just seemed to accept this state of affairs as an unavoidable fact of life.”
This is how most Americans react when they learn about adolescents being sorted into different levels of secondary education in Europe. Something about it seems inherently unfair or even creepy, because we don’t do this in the US and everyone in a given town or postcode goes to the same public high school. Of course, we ignore the fact that since town property taxes pay for schools, rich towns have good schools and poor towns have bad schools. The argument against the adolescent sorting is that children from a poor family or an immigrant family (in my German homestay school’s case, this was people of Turkish origin) are more likely to be sent toward technical high schools than a rich white family. Lewis Goodall made this point on The Newsagents podcast on Tuesday:
“The expansion of higher education…has been a vehicle for extraordinary social mobility for literally millions over the generation, young people who got jobs and moved into professions and accessed social and political and economic worlds that would have been completely unavailable to them without higher education.”
“This is not something that Americans talk about, [they don’t say] ‘we’ve got too many people going to college’. No, it is considered something that is desirable for as many people as possible.”
His point was that Britain should be more like America in this respect. I’m sympathetic to this concern that early sorting just perpetuates existing socio-economic divisions, even if they’re pretending to give everyone an equal opportunity, because I can see the effects in continental Europe. Racialised minorities and working class people are majorly underrepresented at European universities, I think even more than at American universities.
Both systems are living with an artifice here. In the US, they pretend all social classes are being given equal opportunity by having all students attend the same public high school regardless of their interests or aptitudes – ignoring the fact that a smart student in a rich town therefor has a major advantage over a smart student in a poor town because the poor kid can’t go to the rich town’s public school. This was actually the subject of a Connecticut Supreme Court decision in the 1990s when I was growing up that mandated busing kids between the different towns’ schools to stop the zip code disadvantages. It didn’t work because the rich (white) towns resisted so fiercely.
In Europe, they pretend all social classes are being given equal opportunity by sorting them by academic aptitude and interest at an early age and letting them choose the high school they go to – ignoring the fact that an adolescent from a poor background, who possible doesn’t speak the main language as their mother tongue at home, is more likely to feel pressure to choose the technical school option. Yes, you give the students a choice (kind of, because they also need to pass a test to get into the good school), but you ignore the class and race dynamics which will influence that choice. And that’s classically European, especially in countries like Belgium and France where it’s illegal to even ask people their race on a census. It isn’t just education where European systems are designed to pretend racial disparities don’t exist.
Stop pushing kids to go to university
So in the end, even though these types of objections were my first instinct when I encountered European education 30 years ago, I do not find these arguments convincing today. This is based on my own American educational experience, my own student debt, and my own observations of European systems. The main problem with the US and UK systems as they’ve developed is that they pressure students to go to university who are not interested in continued academic learning. That’s certainly not worth the taxpayers’ money, nor is it worth the students’ own money.
Like in continental Europe, university should be available and completely publicly-funded for those that want to attend and whose career plans warrant it. But for those who don’t, we should not stigmatise or disencourage vocational training. As Burnham noted, a hard hat can be a ticket to major success in life. Especially these days when AI is replacing so many of the jobs that liberal arts degrees theoretically prepare you for.
And let’s just look at the results. After decades of a policy which sent as many people as possible to hour-year liberal arts degrees, half of American voters voted for Donald Trump. How can anyone say that the American higher education policy is one that should be emulated, when we can see the results? You’d be hard-pressed to say this has produced a smart citizenry. And don’t even get me started on the leftist uni-speak coming out of graduates of these liberal arts universities these days (on this I must admit I have some sympathy with complaints from the right). These American college campuses have lost touch with reality largely because they don’t have enough actual studying work to do. All these American leftists calling for free university education like in Europe – I’d like to see how they feel about redoing their college experience if there was no time for strumming the guitar on the quad and they actually had to spend almost all their time studying.
It is a good thing that Prime Minister Burnham is ditching this ridiculous American educational emulation and saying no, people should take pride in skilled vocational work and we should encourage them when they have an interest in it. I just hope some day politicians in the US can wake up to the harm that this is causing. Because Goodall is right, up to this point nobody in the US is willing to talk about the real reasons tuition has exploded and bachelors graduates can’t find jobs. It is still “considered something that is desirable for as many people as possible,” despite all evidence to the contrary.