Conservatives have a poor quality higher education policy

Cast your mind back a year and a half ago to the election campaign, and you might recall then Secretary of State Gillian Keegan promising to close “poor” higher education courses and pump the savings into thousands of new high-quality apprenticeships.

I’m not saying that the idea didn’t move the dial at all, but the fact the policy didn’t even make it as far as the manifesto suggests that such tough language didn’t turn out to be a big vote winner. Funny how “we want to make it harder for your children to go to university” plays on the doorstep

Well, the Conservative Party is at it again, and this time Kemi Badenoch herself is the one offering to:

shut down these rip-off courses and use the money to double the apprenticeship budget. Giving thousands more young people the chance of a proper start in life. Just like I got.

“Just like I got”. If you are au fait with the Kemiverse, you’ll know that our hero has two degrees: a MEng in software engineering from the University of Sussex, and a law degree from Birkbeck. She admits this in the speech, but also – mysteriously – claims to have done an apprenticeship (it was actually a “year in industry”, run by the Engineering Development Trust) that taught her “how to fix a broken computer”. If your 90s Apple Macintosh develops a fault, call Badenoch: “I can remember how to fix a broken computer”, she boasts (she has an NVQ).

Anyway, the 2024 Keegan version of this policy promised to displace 13 per cent of the undergraduate population (we made that an astonishing 265,500). Today’s announcement, measured against that, represents something of a climbdown – approximately 100,000 places would be lost.

The reductions would be achieved by applying number controls by subject area, with places progressively reduced in subjects that offer the greatest losses for taxpayers and students – based on costings and presumptions based on the 2020 lifetime returns work by the Institute for Fiscal Studies that found around 30 per cent of men and women have negative financial returns from higher education study.

Which again is odd, because that study found that “eighty percent of those who attended university earned more than they would have done otherwise over a lifetime” and that “people who have studied in higher education will earn on average 20 per cent more over their working life than those who did not.”

Under the proposed Conservative policy, “places within each subject area will be allocated on the basis of quality and graduate outcomes, as happened before previous controls were abolished”. Which is not how the system worked before David Willetts abolished number controls, but never mind. So you could imagine a set number of places per broad subject area (there are mentions of stuff like creative arts, languages, and sports science so I guess CAH level 1) allocated based on something like the current B3 (continuation, completion, progression) measures. You’ll be glad to hear this plan would be phased in progressively, to “allow universities time to adapt”.

None less than HEPI’s Nick Hillman describes it as:

an inane policy and an inane press release.

The savings, which the Conservative party has decided amount to around £3bn (based on loan repayments written off from these 100,000 students on poor-quality courses), would be used to double the apprenticeship budget which currently stands at £3bn. But the remaining savings (what is £3bn minus £3bn anyone?) will go into high-cost specialist subject areas.

Apparently the areas of higher education to get this extra funding are the provision where Labour has cut funding – so based on the last grant letter to OfS it will be spent on media studies, journalism, publishing, and information services. The government used those cuts to increase spending on the lab based (price group B) high cost subjects. It is truly great to see the Conservative party sticking up for media studies, especially given Gavin Williamson’s previous comments on the matter.

It need hardly be said, but this is a policy that not only will never be implemented (we are four years out from a change of government, and Kemi Badenoch is very much an Iain Duncan Smith for our times) but will probably only ever be mentioned again in Labour attack ads.

But it is worth noting and worth recording. A line in the sand, to remind ourselves that we will never truly be free of the urge of politicians to scrap Blair’s 50 per cent participation target. And that outside of Kemi Badenoch’s very online bubble, higher education policies have very little salience.