Britain likes its universities but not its degrees

Barely a day goes by without a poll, a think tank or a columnist declaring that a degree is no longer worth it.

Graduates post screenshots of student loan balances that never seem to go down, ministers spend every August reminding school leavers that there are other options, and the phrase “Mickey Mouse degrees” never quite dies.

And yet most parents still want their children to go, and universities remain a source of local and national pride.

So what does the public actually think – and if higher education is so demonstrably valuable, why is it so relentlessly questioned?

We have plenty of polling on what the public thinks about universities, and very little rigorous research on why opinion moves.

Most of the explanations on offer – including some of ours – rest on what respondents say about their own reasons, plus a fair bit of interpretation.

So what I’ve done here is set out what the polling shows, where opinion seems to be heading, and what universities can and can’t do about it.

What we’re measuring

The UK has nothing like Gallup’s long-running American question on confidence in higher education. There’s a patchwork instead. The British Social Attitudes survey has asked about the value of a degree since 2005, Public First (now PF Global) has run sector-commissioned surveys since 2021, and More in Common, YouGov and Ipsos have added one-offs.

The wordings differ, samples shift between England and the UK as a whole, and some of the most quoted work was paid for by organisations with an obvious interest in the answers. That doesn’t make the numbers wrong, but it’s not easy to whittle up a single trend line.

Other countries go further. New Zealand has turned public acceptance into a standing measurement function, with Education New Zealand running an annual survey it explicitly calls its “social licence” research.

Opinion data also measures perception rather than damage. In Australia, seven years of data showed no significant link between international student numbers and rents in any capital city after the pandemic, yet students got the blame anyway – partly, the researchers suggest, because they don’t vote.

A measure of public acceptance can register a grievance out of proportion to the evidence, and miss documented harms to people outside the population being polled.

There’s a wider problem too – the sector’s evidence about itself tends to be aggregate, self-commissioned and invisible, while the stories that shape opinion tend to be specific, independent and vivid.

Institution versus degree

A useful way to look at the UK data is to differentiate between what people think of universities and what they think of a degree.

Goodwill towards the former largely holds. The UCL Policy Lab and More in Common report Shared institutions found 63 per cent saying universities have a positive impact against 6 per cent negative, and around three quarters of the public consistently say universities matter for research and innovation.

The degree is a different issue. The British Social Attitudes survey found the share saying a degree isn’t worth the time and money rose from 14 per cent in 2005 to 34 per cent in 2025, and 77 per cent now say a degree isn’t good value at current prices, up from 51 per cent in 2014.

As our own David Kernohan noted at the time, the share wanting fewer opportunities to go to university hit a historic high of 18 per cent, while those wanting more fell from 44 to 37 per cent.

Britain also looks bad against other countries. In the 2026 Ipsos Education Monitor, 28 per cent of Britons said degrees merit the cost, against an average of 53 per cent across 31 countries. Britain came bottom on whether a degree is very important to succeed, and was one of only two countries where the preferred advice to a young person was to go straight into work.

That scepticism cuts across parties. Around a third of Conservative, Labour and Green supporters alike say university isn’t worth the investment, so if you’re tempted to treat “low-value degrees” as a right-wing talking point I’d gently suggest you’re misreading the data.

Five years of polling

Public First’s polling is the closest thing we have to a series, and it describes a drift. The first UPP Foundation and HEPI survey in 2021, modelled on Pew’s American work, found four times as many people positive about universities as negative – but almost half were neutral.

Leave voters and Conservatives were less positive, but where American Republicans had turned hostile, British sceptics were mostly indifferent – as we said back then, the default stance was a shrug.

Three findings from that first wave have recurred ever since. Those with least contact with a university were the most negative, and a third of people had never visited one, rising to over half in the DE social group. People were far warmer about university for their own children than about participation in general.

And majorities agreed both that studying something without a clear professional link is a waste of time and that enjoying a subject is reason enough to study it.

By the 2023 wave overall support was stable, but the most negative segment had become more extreme. Work for the APPG for Universities in 2024 found the sector’s financial crisis hadn’t registered – only 32 per cent thought universities had too little money, and more people wanted universities to recruit more international students or make savings than wanted more taxpayer funding or a higher fee cap.

In late 2025, Degrees of doubt took focus groups to Reform UK voters in university towns and found them unconvinced of a degree’s value and of the sector’s local economic benefits, even where the university was a major employer.

And Public First’s student loans polling in March 2026 found 65 per cent rating the total debt burden unfair, with the public split, as I argued at the time, between those who see the system as a loan and those who see it as a tax.

Over time the series shows opinion moving from broad neutrality toward conditional support, with a hostile minority hardening at the edge.

What the public judges

On our Making sense of higher education – public value and public perception module, PF Global’s Annie Bell had a simple explanation for all of that.

However you poll or run a focus group, the public ends up judging universities almost entirely through the career value to individual home students – ask about research, civic activity or global reputation, and people just bring it back to whether going leads to a decent job.

They also judge it personally. In focus groups, culture war stories and vice chancellor pay barely get a mention, and what people reach for first is someone they know – a neighbour’s niece who went to university and couldn’t find work. If, as the IFS estimates, around a quarter of graduates don’t see a financial return, most people will know one.

Her explanation for why the wider value of higher education has stopped registering is all about money. UUK and London Economics reckon graduates now cover 84 per cent of the cost of a degree, up from 52 per cent in 2012–13. If the individual pays for almost everything, and the case for asking them to was higher earnings, it’s no wonder earnings became the measure.

She also notes that people often aren’t blaming universities themselves. They’re worried that too many young people are being nudged onto a route that won’t pay off, which is a verdict on the system, and now one of the Prime Minister’s most oft-used (and repeated by loyal MPs) “lines”.

Who the sceptics are

Doubt about the degree may be cross-party, but views of the institution split – first along education, then along party. Shared institutions found 81 per cent of graduates saying universities are good for the country, against 55 per cent of non-graduates, and almost half of non-graduates saying universities look after the interests of the rich and powerful.

Only 45 per cent of Reform supporters thought universities good for the country, against 67 per cent of the wider public, and UCL’s Steve O’Neil has charted how the political centre of gravity has been shifting towards those sceptics.

Graduates aren’t reliable allies either. Polling finds 63 per cent backing dropping the target for half of young people to go to university, with majorities in every voter group and support rising to 75 per cent among graduates.

Yet people overwhelmingly want their own children and grandchildren to go, including 70 per cent of 2024 Reform voters. Basically, those most proud of their own degrees are the most likely to want to restrict everyone else’s.

The American warning

The US is a good place to look for where this might end up. When Gallup first asked about confidence in higher education in 2015, 57 per cent of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot”. By this summer it was 38 per cent, after a brief recovery in 2025.

The long-run fall is steepest among Republicans, but this year’s drop came almost entirely from Democrats, down from 61 to 50 per cent after a year of very public conflict between universities and the Trump administration. Americans with only a bachelor’s degree are now about as sceptical as those with none.

Among the unconvinced, the reasons cluster around perceived political agendas, cost and failure to prepare students for work. Research is the exception – it’s the one area where a majority still rates higher education well.

One account of the partisan collapse is Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins’ Polarized by degrees, which argues that American politics has realigned around education itself. There, universities became one of the realignment’s most visible symbols without having caused it.

But there’s evidence that institutions made things worse. In a preregistered experiment, Floyd Jiuyun Zhang found that Nature’s 2020 endorsement of Joe Biden reduced Trump supporters’ trust in the journal while barely moving anyone’s view of the candidates.

And in April, Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education identified “soaring” tuition fees, opaque admissions and cultures of ideological conformity as drivers of decline, with its president accepting that Yale must take responsibility for its part.

The UK picture is different. In the US both the institution and the degree have lost standing, and the loss is heavily partisan.

Here the institution keeps its goodwill while faith in the degree has fallen across parties – More in Common’s Luke Tryl has described the British public’s concerns as mostly about the value of a degree. The risk is that Reform-leaning non-graduates fuse value scepticism with institutional hostility, as Republicans did after 2015.

Trow saw it coming

None of this would have surprised Martin Trow. His 1973 framework divided systems into elite – up to 15 per cent participation – mass, at 15 to 50 per cent, and universal, above 50 per cent. In an elite system higher education is a privilege, in a mass system it becomes a right, and in a universal system it becomes an obligation, with not going treated as a weakness.

The participation thresholds are the bit everyone remembers, but his framework ran across eleven dimensions, as the table below – paraphrased from the 1973 paper and his 2006 reflections – sets out.