And you thought that crackdowns on rip-off degrees were dead
Jim is an Associate Editor (SUs) at Wonkhe
Tags
Today at a speech to the Centre for Policy Studies, Robert Jenrick announced plans to withhold student loans for the worst-performing courses to free up funding for apprenticeships and vocational training.
Jenrick’s plan would see 130,000 fewer students go to university:
One in five graduates ends up financially worse off than if they’d never gone to university at all. One in five – that is a moral scandal and a massive public policy failure. Young people are being sold a better future, and then they’re being left out of pocket for worthless slips of paper…
…We’re sending people to university who would benefit far more from building practical skills. It’s time to end Blair’s failed experiment with higher education, close down failed institutions and replace them with apprenticeship hubs for young and old alike, giving people the real chance of the better life that they deserve…
…If we were to withhold student loans from the worst performing 10% of courses for graduate outcomes, we would have 130,000 fewer students going to university. With this funding, we could fund the biggest expansion in apprenticeships and vocational skills programs in more than a generation.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Rishi Sunak announced an almost identical plan as part of the manifesto his party lost the election on back in May.
Gotta play to the base, I suppose. It’s the national political equivalent of those SU officer manifestos that promise £1 a pint – only this man is running to be the leader of His Majesty’s Official Opposition.
It’s also familiar because when I had an idle five minutes back in May, I counted about 30 failed crackdowns on rip-off/low-value/Mickey Mouse degrees during the last parliament.
I reflected on the Sunak plan back in May on the site. What I didn’t do was look at the dodgy maths that underpinned it.
At the time, the Conservatives claimed that culling ten per cent of courses would generate savings of £910m in 29/30.
As a proxy for closing the poorest performing courses, of which the precise courses were to be a matter for the Office for Students (OfS), the savings were based on 13 per cent of the student cohort.
That was a surprise, given that these are loans – especially given that IFS reckons the total long-run government cost (discounted, RPI real) is just £3.8bn a cohort.
A deeper dive into the CCHQ press release reveals the problem. It said that IFS said that 40 per cent of graduates were forecast not to repay their loan in full.
That was true for those on Plan 2.
But in May, the Conservatives somehow forgot that their own reforms to the student loan system in 2022 and 2023 (holding down the repayment threshold and extending the loan term to 40 years) mean that IfS now estimates that 82 per cent will pay off their loan in full.
And it now appears that Jenrick himself has made the same mistake too.
Even if it was as possible to spot the “low value” courses that Jenrick thinks it is, his sums almost certainly don’t add up.
I need not repeat the “low value” courses arguments here – the problems with LEO data, the assumption that good graduates need to move out of poorer areas an anathema to other agendas, the lack of recognition that universities already deliver a wedge of technical education, DfE data that demonstrates the need for degrees (albeit not necessarily in the subjects and locations they are now), the differences in earnings trajectories for women or arts graduates, the failure to address Augar’s “don’t level down, invest in the other 50 per cent” argument, etc etc.
What’s that you say? What’s to stop all 130,000 students in a “demand led” system picking another university? Well quite.
What I would suggest is that one area of “rip-off” degrees that could save everyone some money is one where huge profits are being made by private owners out of franchised pile it high, deliver it cheap business and health courses.
The sort where former Secretaries of State emerge as paid advisors. The sort the last government encouraged.
The ‘one in five better off with no uni’ stat is based on research from 2020 which surely needs to be updated now and to be put into the context, too, of wage stagnation (which has become much more significant post 2020) and disproportionate pay for men and women (and the degrees they tend to study)… Also this whole farrago equates the impact and benefit of a degree as purely financial which is surely only part of the point of study even in the eyes of Tories.
The other point here is that it’s a question of consumer choice if something is a ripoff surely. For instance the £16 pair of “conservative socks” available on the Tory party website sounds like a total ripoff to me, but I assume the people buying them think differently. Funny how this works isn’t it. But I guess Tories tend to think that young people are idiots ripe to be ripped off, whereas their own voters and members are very clever and would in no way be e.g. prone to being sold things that are obvious lies, like the benefits of brexit or the merits of the liz truss budget.
There’s a lot of percentages here and they are not tied together very well. I think it worth estimating what the sum might become under the changed conditions – even if only to articulate the paucity of the potential saving. I appreciate this does not take into account other factors that make the whole idea suspect. As you’ve looked at the detail it would be good to have a view – I’ve given a starting calculation for your correction.
Is it fair to say that if the 40% not paying off the full amount has declined to 18% then the potential sum projected to be saved falls by nearly half i.e. c £450m
Or is your point that the potential saving on the £3.8bn is lower still? 18% of £3.8bn is £684m so if the part payment is 50% then the saving would, I think, be £342m.
Still sounds like quite a lot of money – enough to pay off the University of York’s in year shortfall 16 times would be one way to look at it.
Good job these weirdos will be nowhere near power for a long time to come.
Why the worst performing 10% of courses? Why not 20% if 20% of graduates are worse off? 10% in which year? This year? Why not then next year as well? OR – just a thought – why not just cap the number of students you are prepared to pay for and let the market decide. It’s not like they don’t already have the power to restrict the budget, they don’t need to apply an arbitary judgement to the “quality” of courses based on one metric. I would anticipate that even in the 10% worst performing courses a large percentage of graduates find graduate-level employment, I hear that some classics graduates even go on to become Prime Minister without any seeming evidence of having acquired transferable skills at university.