Should young people now think twice before going to university?

Is all that debt worth it? For years we’ve been told that going to university has several advantages. A chance to mix with an eclectic bunch of people, escape the real world for three years, with the best social life you’re ever likely to have. As well as the dull stuff. Such as actually doing some work and getting a degree. Then there’s the financial rewards. As a graduate you’ll earn X amount more than the rest of the country. Opportunities will fall into your lap. You’ll stand out from the crowd.

Except rather than standing out, graduates are now finding themselves swallowed up. Unremarkably just making up the numbers. A major study out this week revealed that the pulling power of recent graduates has been significantly dwarfed compared to previous years.  Researchers at Warwick University found the promise of better jobs and higher salaries slowly evaporating. 40% of graduates from the 2006 cohort were still in non-graduate jobs two years after leaving university, and as of November last year, took home wages 22% less than those from the class of 1999.

The fact that there are now so many people doing comparable degrees at universities of similar quality means we are now in the era of what one might call ‘the squeezed graduate.’ It is employers who are reaping the benefits, luxuriating in the fact that they can afford to be unbelievably fussy and make ever more outlandish demands from potential future workers.

This is before we even get in to the debt issue. 96% of the 17,000 tracked in this study expressed few regrets in going to university. However, compared to their peers a decade earlier, were saddled with an average debt burden of £16,000, or 60% higher than those in 1999.

The evolution of the scale of debt is something that will take more prominence with each year that passes. As someone who entered university in 1998, the first year tuition fees were introduced – an enviable £1000 a year -, even the £3,000 a year students may start to look fondly on their relatively small levels of debt when compared to those who have just started university and staring at debt levels of £27,000, when taking only tuition fees into account.

Which begs the question, if debt is exploding, salaries falling, and the job at the end of it more or less in line with what everyone else is doing: should young people now think twice before going to university? It’s a valid question which deserves serious consideration. Long gone are the days when students could roll up at university, doss around for three years, and then furiously cram study into the final term and be satisfied with a 2:1 in an arts degree at a generic university at the end of it. They’ll be like many of their peers competing for similar style jobs giving employers greater freedom.

Despite all the extra investment into higher education, with more students attending university than ever before, two crucial points need addressing. The first concerns employers. We may have more graduates but bosses remain unimpressed with what greets them. Persistent studies find British university leavers ill equipped to start work, with a majority of employers complaining at having to provide remedial training. Three out of four of the country’s top businesses believe graduate skills to be poor: ‘too many to list,’ according to one employer.  The narrow focus on academic skills and exams has led to a generation of graduates struggling to keep up, hence why many businesses have switched to recruiting foreign talent.

Secondly, whilst the hike in tuition fees to £9,000 a year generated endless debate, very little of it dealt with the quality question. What are students, or customers, to use new university-speak, going to be getting in return for this huge outlay? Will teaching, a focus for a rise in complaints, become more rigorous? In fact, before we even get into this, will the number of hours a week a student in History, for example, rise, from the six or seven, as is common at many institutions?

There’s no doubt in my mind that the nature of getting a degree, and the whole university experience, is going to look rather different ten or fifteen years from now. Lord Mandelson’s call for the two-year degree may become a reality. The cost of higher education may eventually put people off for good. Especially if work stats for graduates don’t improve. Researchers from Warwick University warn that the slide in graduate wages will be irreversible, and not merely the result of the prolonged global downturn.

Taking all of this into account, it wouldn’t be surprising if more and more school leavers bypass university and head straight into work. After all, they’ll be three years of work experience up on graduates staring at debt in excess of £30,000. The choice may soon be an obvious one.

This article was first published by Independent Voices on Friday 16th November 2012

Tuition Fees: students have the right to ask for quality and more teaching

In the furore over the trebling of university tuition fees somebody forgot about the customer, to pinch Higher Education (HE) parlance. When proposed, debates honed in, naturally enough, on the extra expense of post 18 education.

But it failed to address the quality question: what are students going to be getting in return for this additional outlay? If they are now expected to fork out up to £9,000 a year for a degree, it follows that quality and time spent with their tutors should also increase. Except, this is doubtful.

Figures out last week shed light on the effects of the first round of fee-tripling (to £3,000) and found the hike didn’t correspond with more teaching, be it in the form of lectures or tutorials.  Students received no more than 14 hours tuition a week: a paltry 12 minutes increase since the rise in 2006. Teaching actually fell. What students lacked in tuition they made up for in private study.

Being over £30,000 in debt before you even set foot in the workplace, if you can find a job that is, is an unenviable proposition. The least students can expect is some sort of return with regards to more tuition and better teaching.

It’s no longer sustainable or even equitable to rely on the tax payer to subsidise university education; students must now pay their way, contribute to the cost of getting a degree, so the arguments went.

Not once did I hear about what efforts would be made to improve the whole ‘student experience,’ to borrow another awful HE/marketing term. This is what makes last week’s findings by the Higher Education Policy Institute so dispiriting.

I recall my own days as a Politics undergraduate, straining to find the time to cope with my 8 hours a week (that’s lectures and tuition combined). I was the first cohort of fee payers (just the derisory £1,000 a year back then), and even now, struggle to comprehend what I was getting for my money.

A handful of lectures a week, delivered on PowerPoint, with attendance rapidly dropping off after the first few weeks. Seminars consisted of a room full of a dozen or so (very hungover) students and the tutor.

Spending three years as a university lecturer teaching Politics and International Relations I got to see things from the other side: never more than an hour or so a week of contact time with the same students, thus puncturing any hopes of building up much of a rapport.

The lack of face to face interaction with their tutors meant students were quickly demotivated and distracted by the plethora of other activities on offer.

I remember speaking to a senior lecturer who had been working there for over 30 years and told me that one of the problems with higher education is that it is divided between those who can, teach, and those who can’t, do research: the idealistic ones, with teaching backgrounds, there to impart knowledge and enthuse their students (me), and those who devote most of their time to research and writing books and journal articles, representing their employer outside the confines of the university, giving it kudos when studies are released and books written (the majority).

There’s no doubt that in 20 or 30 years universities will feel like very different institutions. Lord Mandelson, speaking in 2009, alluded to changes which (it wouldn’t surprise me) may be afoot in the not so distant future. Namely, the two year degree, an ever more likely scenario.

Even before higher fees become commonplace, students have become more vocal and more critical. A study commissioned last year  found many students unimpressed at the quality of teaching received, as a well as a lack of contact time and feedback.

After graduating, up to a third of undergraduates felt ill-prepared for the world of work. More than half thought the standard of teaching better at their schools.

Already steps are being taken by some universities to offset this fee rise. London Metropolitan is to offer its students six more weeks of teaching time, taking its total to 30 weeks a year. Some students are choosing to study overseas, in countries with considerably lower fees, and courses in English, such as Maastricht, in the Netherlands.

Undergraduates are also becoming (rightly) more demanding, with complaints reaching record levels, rising by 33% in a year. Rob Behrens, head of the adjudicator’s office which investigates them, said this reflected a ‘consumerist’ attitude and a heightened awareness of value for money:

"There has been a lot of policy discussion about fees in the past year [2010] and it's concentrated students' minds into thinking about the merits of what they're getting. It's encouraged them to be more like consumers - and consumers are more likely to complain.”

The days of students being passive recipients are over.

This comment piece was first published by Speaker's Chair on Monday 21 May 2012