And you thought that crackdowns on rip-off degrees were dead

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.